… it is his [Rembrandt’s] light shining in darkness that convinces me even more powerfully of a mind and sensibility that dwelt long and longingly on the mystery of divine presence – and absence. Figures like the two apostles in his “Peter and Paul Disputing,” for instance, deeply occupied with their own urgent questions, seem oddly unaware of the radiance that surrounds them, turning their books to gold and burnishing their skin. Yet the room where they sit is transformed by an energy not entirely accounted for by a high window and the afternoon sun. The light that singles them out in a darkened chamber where winter cold closes in just beyond its touch works like dramatic irony: we see something they don’t.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
Drawn to the Light
‘We see something they don’t’ – the ‘we’ in this case being people viewing a Rembrandt masterpiece. Being outside looking in ‘we’ are privileged to see something ‘beyond’ the moment and the persons within it. Sometimes, indeed, a light surprises!
In our being able to gaze upon ‘an energy not entirely accounted for’ we, like Peter and Paul, can find hope – and something much ‘bigger’ than us – illuminated, spotlit even, in the darkened chambers of life and death, our human experience. Our very own lives are caught up in the stuff of dramatic irony – others seeing plainly what we ourselves do not, perhaps can not – our disputing how to enter or attain the light while failing to notice our books being turned to gold and the burnishing of our own skin.
Yesterday I was thinking about the gift of being able to laugh at ourselves (gently, and with affectionate understanding) so that we don’t take ourselves, our ‘certainties’ and our preoccupations too seriously – the intended implication being that we might thereby create a less disputatious and dangerous world. The great ‘Masters,’ drawing us to the light, show us how to do this – to recognise, sometimes at least, our own ‘failing to see’ and chuckling about it. Open to being shown, again and again, that ‘the light’ is not absent because we fail to see it.
There’s always ‘an energy not entirely accounted for by a high window and the afternoon sun.’
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