I posted this image on a Sunday in 2013, a couple of days after taking the photo at a Catholic spiritual retreat I was gently compelled to go to by my parents – I wasn’t a fan of the church at the time.
The image is taken from a workbook, and I seem to recall that the ocular illustration was meant to convey some theological concept or another — from aleph, the lid, to dal, the pupil — but I don’t remember what.
“Contemplate,” it says.
I do remember that this retreat was the first time I learned what an “epistle” actually means; “you’re telling me it was, like, actual correspondence? We have some guy’s emails attached to the back of the word of God?”
No, I wasn’t a fan of the church at the time. Nor did I know a whole lot about it, almost by design. For us, church was an identity; a Christian in Lebanon is keenly aware of Christian presence — the persistence of existence — while the Christian message is often lost or very badly confused.
Contemplate. Consider all the ways Christianity keeps Christ buried among the dead through dogma and exclusion; contemplate the ways we keep Christ nailed to a cross with our arrogance and ascriptions; meditate on how Christ is betrayed — how we betray Christ — again and again, through Christian fear and Christian insecurity.
Sit in that pregnant pause.
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The art world has a term for the interplay of light and shadow: chiaroscuro, from Italian, which literally means: ‘light-dark.’ It refers to compositions with stark contrasts, whether in the paintings of Rembrandt, famous for his “mood lighting,” or the films of Tarkovsky, best known for his austere spirituality in a time of state-mandated atheism. Eastern cultures have similar concepts, such as Japanese nōtan, most widely recognized across Asia in the symbol of the yin and yang.
These concepts bring to high relief, as it were, the checkered nature of our existence: we exist within the interplay of the good and the bad, however we might define either, and for many of us, acknowledging this reality is an important step in our spiritual journeys. It’s net-positive to see the negative spaces that shape the borders of our perception and self-identities. It’s net-positive to strive for a balance between the two.
And yet, there remains a stubborn element of Christian thought that takes this idea one step further: the arrow of time. We do not sit on a dark stage with light streaming from the rafters–we move from shadow to light, from the depths of despair to the hope of eternal life. The Christian message is not a static composition; it is a story of and in motion.
We reconcile these elements in our theology when we acknowledge that, for many of us and most of the world, we are still living in a kind of Holy Saturday, just before the breaking of dawn. We return to God every Lent and recall Christ’s resurrection every Easter precisely because the whole of creation is still groaning to be reborn: to rise up from the depths of hell, as Christ rises from the dead and out the tomb. That is the deeper meaning of the Paschal mystery.