We’re still in the season of light, aren’t we? Yesterday, the church calendar said Epiphany Three, so it’s still the time of bright revelations, callings and all those earliest journeying days of the church. Callings shining like light and wise men and fishers of men and all that.
But the rooms in my house are dark. These are candle evenings and even afternoons. The days haven’t really begun to lengthen yet. Not noticeably anyway. The skies overhead are grey and threatening.
Yesterday morning, our church had a distinct evening hue about it. We have clear windows in our sanctuary and on a bright day the place simply glows. But not so yesterday. A reminder that January isn’t always easy for all its New Year’s verve and ambition.
Though I must say that January’s low light has its advantages, too. It’s because of the light that I’ve got a date this Friday. The Spouse and I (and Plum, who will be perfectly napping in the stroller, of course) will drop the kids off at school and then make our way to the art gallery to see an exhibit of Turner’s watercolours. The collection was given to the gallery by collector Henry Vaughan with the condition that these paintings should be on display, free of charge, each January when the light is at its lowest so that the delicate colours might be preserved. So, each January for the past century the gallery has complied and the public has enjoyed. This week, it’s our turn. Praise be for gloom and grey.
In a way, it was fitting that the light was strange yesterday in church. It fit with the lesson from Acts – the story of Saul on the road to Damascus. The story of that bright light, calling out his name, and the days of darkness that followed. It’s such a long passage to read aloud, but it felt good to speak the words in church. Sometimes, when I’m reading aloud, something new stands out for me and grabs my attention. Yesterday, it was the disciple Ananias’ reaction. He heard Christ calling him to approach Saul, and he needed to talk it through first. Saul was the feared enemy of Christ’s newborn church. To visit him would most certainly lead to arrest, likely to torture and death. Yet Christ was calling Ananias to go right to Saul. So, after some discussion, he went. Not only did he go, but when he got to the house where Saul was staying, he called Saul brother. A beautiful clear greeting, so filled with grace and courage. I wanted to read it out twice. It felt to me that just as scales fell from Saul’s eyes in that moment of meeting, Ananias, too, found a new way to see clearly.
I wonder if it felt like that at the time. Or maybe it was only afterwards that the moment’s grace and brightness was clear. Here’s a Wendell Berry poem from his 1999 Sabbaths collection that speaks so clearly about the strangeness of light and sight.
We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.
Praise be, too, for poets who strain to look and then work to shape into words all that they see.
