By
Rev. George W. Rutler
(
Crisis Magazine)
As a rather observant child, I
made a mental note of the fact that my maternal grandmother would ask
me to “make a light” instead of asking me to switch it on. When she was a
child, no one switched lights on. At night, light was not had without
effort, not in her English town nor in most places yet. She was born on
the day that Gladstone introduced his Irish Home Rule bill in the House
of Commons, the same Gladstone who gave a lamp to Newman who had “never
sinned against the Light,” a lamp that still can be seen on his desk in
Birmingham, and it certainly was not electric. Four years after my
grandmother’s birth, Florence Nightingale recorded her voice on a wax
cylinder patented by the Edison Company. My grandmother harbored a
devotion to the “Lady with a Lamp” for her town’s regiment had fought in
the Crimean War and some of them remembered the Lady visiting at night
the wards in the Selimye Barracks of Scutari and it most definitely was
not an electric lamp: that was the year Thomas Edison was born.
While eclectic in theology, and something of a Universalist, Florence
Nightingale moved from Unitarianism to Anglicanism, and soon came to
admire the slum work of the future Cardinal Manning who provided her
with ten Catholic nuns to help nurse the soldiers in the war. They,
along with fourteen Anglican nuns, nurtured the English custom of
calling all nurses, mostly secular but usually veiled, “Sister.” A
lamp, not electric, became the symbol of nursing organizations even in
the United States. Then there was the friend of my grandmother, a very
old lady, Granny Pye as I called her, who had been born in Scotland in
the year that the missionary David Livingston died in Zambia. Although
she belonged to the Old Kirk that did not allow ritual candles, she had a
ritual of her own, for she read from the family Bible every night by
candlelight, as though light bulbs were somewhat profane.
My point is that artificial light is so available now, at the flip of
a switch, that we are losing a sense of wonder at the gift of light.
The first creature was light itself “Let there be light….” It is hard to
describe light without referring to its opposite. “The people who
dwelt in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2). The first
thing one learns in painting, after tackling perspective, is that colors
seem bright only by contrast, and that principle of chiaroscuro was
known well before the likes of Caravaggio and de la Tour. You don’t
have to spend a winter in Lapland to know that: just spend a few dim
days in February, or try selling an apartment without a view.
Light and life go together and there are countless “last words” that
have to do with light as life ends. As he was dying, Goethe cried out,
“Mehr Licht!—More light!” but in his case it probably had no spiritual
meaning. He had also been a scientist who considered that his best book
was “The Theory of Colors.” He most likely was just asking that the
shutters be opened. To give him his due, anyone who has read his
Faust,
knows that he also knew of moral darkness and what happens in chambers
of the mind that choose darkness over light. In retrospect, it is
poignant, though not of any religious significance, that Theodore
Roosevelt said as he went to bed for the last time: “Put out the light.”
He was thinking of electricity and not mortality. That good man just
wanted a good sleep, but he did not know how good it would be. Very
different and far from prosaic, was what young O. Henry, abandoned by
his wife Sara, said with his last alcoholic breath in the dim gaslight
of his rented room: “Turn up the lights—I don’t want to go home in the
dark.” However oblique his spiritual intuition may have been, it seems
laden with an ancient appeal to One “in whom is no darkness at all” (1
John 1:5).
Our Lord’s utterances stunned, enthralled and shocked the crowds, but
none was more startling than this: “I am the light of the world.
Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light
of life” (John 8:12). As the light itself, his human decibels shouted
to the sky that his essence is not a creature, but the divinity who
creates physical light with the agency of “the Father of lights, with
whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration” (James 1:17), and
with their Spirit who will “enlighten the hearts of the faithful” with
the fire of love. Frail human voices have the inestimable privilege of
professing that mystery each Sunday in the Creed: Jesus of Nazareth
is “Light from Light” from beyond Nazareth.
God offers the human race the light of life in order that it might
“shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give
glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt 5:16). Morally, the
exercise of the free will can make that light beautiful or garish. On
his visit to the United States which gave the world so many congenial
quotes, G.K, Chesterton was entranced by the billboard lights in Times
Square advertising soaps and cigarettes and hair tonic. He remarked,
“What a garden of delights this would be if only one could not read.”
Our Lord dignifies the human race by enabling his own light to shine
through his human creatures so that it might give “light to all the
house” (Matt. 5:15). That house includes everyone’s own
neighborhood, with its astonishing challenges and potential. In my own
instance, that neighborhood, which is my parish, consists right now in
the largest real estate development in the nation, besides some
venerable older fixtures including the Empire State Building. It becomes
a nightly light show of colors that would have got another book out of
Goethe. The saints are an even more wonderful light show themselves.
They are the “generation that seeks him…” (Psalm 24:6). To risk the
rhetorical indecency of a pun, the generator that lights this generation
up is not in Manhattan, for it is in the City that “has no need of the
sun, nor of the moon, to shine in it. For the glory of God has
enlightened it, and the Lamb is the lamp thereof” (Rev. 21:23).
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