"Paradox: Light and Darkness"

Sunday, March 30, 2014

I'm not entirely sure whoever wrote the reflection booklet knows what a paradox is.  At the very least, they forgot they were going to mention paradoxes in the reflection.  But that's a superficial complaint.

It does make me think, though, about how our eyes adjust to the darkness.  It seems a simple but profound enough metaphor -- we forget how dark it is, because our eyes adjust to the darkness.  So that when some true light enters, we feel blinded by it.  It feels oppressive and even painful.  But only because we have been in darkness.  Only because we have sat in darkness until we convinced ourselves that THAT is the way the world is supposed to work.  It only feels like an invasion -- like unnecessary piousness -- because our eyes are working so hard to see in the dark.

The light will only blind us for a moment.

But I can't help thinking of another story and how it twists that metaphor.

Once, my family and I took a trip that included a tour of an impressive cave formation.  At the end of the tour, the guide turned off all of the lights that had guided our way.  Not just in the final cavern but throughout the cave so that everything around us was black.  He spoke into that unsettling darkness and told us that no matter how long we waited, our eyes would never adjust to the darkness.  There was no light at all -- nothing for us to grow used to seeing.

It's actually an amazing thing that our eyes do: learn to work with whatever light they've been given.  They find light in the smallest instance and use it to show us the world around us.  Imperfectly, but that's true even in the blazing light of day.  No matter how terrible the world seems, we as humans are programed to find the light.  To work with what light we can.  To see the world as much as possible even in the darkness.

Our sin comes from forgetting that the world could be better -- not from failing to love the light.