Yesterday's gray skies and my grumpy mood did not do much for my awareness of moments of light.It took until late evening, when John and I took cups of tea downstairs and settled in front of the tv to watch a bit of the documentary Winged Migration. If you aren't familiar with the bird's eye view and the amazing scenes in this film, you can get a taste of it at the Winged Migration website. I'm amazed at the photography (How did they do that? How long do you think they waited for that scene?); I'm amazed at the abilities of birds to travel incredible distances; I'm amazed at the variety and beauty of the landscapes they fly over. Where were these geese headed, flying over my house last Wednesday? Given the cornfields around here, they probably weren't going far -- but they could. And what a different perspective they have, flying at that height. I'm reminded of the spring that our family drove north to Edmonton, right during spring migration. As we passed through the fields of Saskatchewan, there were two Canada geese in every puddle, and gaggles of geese in every pond.
I'm only a rudimentary birder, but I think we were seeing snow geese as well -- rivers and deltas of birds in flight, and whole convocations of birds on the ground. Amazing. As we traveled, we were listening to A Circle is Cast, by the singing group Libana. This recording includes the song A River of Birds, so that now that song and the sight of birds in migration are irrevocably linked for me. (If you're interested in Libana's music, here's the link.)
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_ Yesterday our Gestalt Pastoral Care training group gathered again at Pathways Retreat Center, which was lovingly decorated for Advent. Our times together are a mixture of presentations and practice, as we take turns learning how to minister to each other and being the one doing Gestalt work.
This means that in a given session, most of us are participating as witnesses, learning as we watch, sometimes having a role to play or a response to make, and praying for those actively working. During one session yesterday, I was one of the witnesses and the song that Adam Tice wrote for Assembly, Will You Hold me in the Light, kept going through my head. Or more accurately, two phrases – the title and “Hold me in the light of God.” I kept hearing them sing in my head, inviting me to hold the one who was doing the work that session in the light of God. “Holding someone in the Light” is the way I often visualize intercessory prayer, and I usually think of the light of God as illuminating and healing, cradling the person I am praying for. During this time of prayer, I had a sense of the light of God as healing, yes, but that sometimes the healing comes through the burning away of dross. The light of God can be painful in its healing and illuminating. I kept thinking of the fire of roses in George Mac Donald’s The Princess and Curdie. In this fairy tale by the Scotch pastor and writer who influenced C.S.Lewis, Curdie encounters the princess’ great-great-great-ever-so-many-great-grandmother, a mysterious lady who lives in a garret at the top of the tallest tower, spins moonlight into thread, watches over the kingdom, and appears sometimes as an old crone and at others as a beautiful woman. As we learn to know her, it becomes clear that mysterious as she is, she is goodness and grace. MacDonald doesn’t use the words holy or divine, but this royal lady is one of the faces of God for me. In her room, Curdie finds a hearth where “a great fire was burning, and the fire was a huge heap of roses, and yet it was fire.” The royal lady has a task for him, telling him it needs only trust and obedience, and promising, “It will hurt you terribly, Curdie, but that will be all; no real hurt but much good will come to you from it.” Curdie is willing, and the lady tells him to thrust both hands into the fire. Curdie does, painfully, with the end result that his hands are as white and smooth as the lady’s, and with the gift of discernment that as the story progresses helps him to know good from indifferent or evil. We also learn that the lady felt Curdie’s pain every bit as much as he did. Near the end of the book, the fire of roses appears again, bringing health to one character near death and transformation to another. As one of the characters in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books warns about Aslan, the great lion who plays a Christ-like role in the books: “He’s not a tame lion, you know.” The light of God is not a tame light, you know. Sometimes it burns like a refiner’s fire, burning away dross, purifying the silver and gold. Today's bright sunshine made for a world of interesting shadows, whether outside on the snow, or inside with houseplants and metal sculptures. I'm pondering light and shadow in other ways these days. Darkness and shadow tend to carry negative connotations for us, and they can be scary, and threatening. But they can also be gift, as in Brian Wren's song, Joyful is the Dark, which poetically provides us with numerous images of times of darkness that were "the cradle of the dawning."
There's the holy, hidden God, in the thick darkness on Sinai, and in the mystic's "cloud of unknowing." There's the dark chaos over which the spirit breath of God hovered in the beginning. There's the darkness of the stable, and the coolness of the tomb "waiting for the wonder of the morning." And today I had an illuminating moment as I made my way through this rather dense sentence from the book Sophia: the Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton, by Christopher Pramuk: "And although it is true that his cosmic view of Christ frequently shimmers with cataphatic light and presence, we shall see that as Sophia it makes ample room for the apophatic paradox of darkness and hiddenness..." Cataphatic and apophatic are technical theological language, but the concepts aren't hard to grasp. The cataphatic path is one in which we experience God through the richness of the created world -- through our relationships, through nature, through scripture, through faith imagination, through music and poetry and song. The apophatic path is where we encounter God through experiences of absence and emptiness, silence and darkness. Words and images fail to hold or express all that God is. God is mystery While one strand may dominate for a given individual at a given time, these are two sides of the same reality, and both are intertwining strands in our lives. My photos of sparks of light are in the cataphatic strand; when i sit in silent prayer, I am in an apophatic mode. I'm eager to read more about Merton's experience with Christ as Sophia/Wisdom. I know his poetry and prayers are full of light and presence, as well as the hiddenness and the darkness that births new life. I'll continue to pay attention through this time of Advent, watching for the interplay of shadow and light, and for experiences of the cataphatic and apophatic ways for knowing God. _This lightpost and banner on the GC campus captivated me this morning. Or rather, the sparkling of the frost that covered them did. Both banner and light were scintillating. (Great word, scintillating. Sort of like tintinnabulation, only with sight instead of sound.) You can get a bit more of an idea with a close up -- the white specks here are not a malfunction of the camera, but rather sunlight glinting off frost crystals. You can see a few more sparks on the globe -- and a glimpse of the sun. But none of these do justice to the light show that I could see standing there, or the shimmering that happened as I slowly walked past and the sunlight sparked off of different ice crystals. A bit like religious experiences, perhaps. The attempt to share it gives a faint idea of what it was like, but it just isn't the same as your own experience as you interact with the Light.
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My approach to contemplative photography --
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver in "Sometimes" Archives
August 2020
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