Life Imitating Art

Sparklers are about the least fun firework. About the only thing cool about them is the fact that they can be held. Most other stuff at the fireworks stand will blow a finger off.

Actually, there is one cool thing about sparklers. Who hasn't flicked them around like a magic wand or the baton of a symphony conductor. The incandescent brilliance of the magnesium flame is resistant what scientists call our inhibitory system. That is, it resists our brain's reflexive reset button which prevents light-stimulation from disrupting our vision. It keeps things from getting blurry by constantly receiving new stimulus and rejecting old.

Sparklers leave their wake behind them, so that when they are waved in the dark our eyes see not only their current light but its path. They remove time from the equation, if only for a fraction of a second.

I was listening to NRP today as I drove around. Today was Science Friday, and they had an illuminating (pun intended) piece on "light painting" . The light painter's brush is light. His canvas is the film of a camera, which is exposed over the course of 30 seconds. As the shutter remains open, the artist waves the lights in intricate patterns. This creates a sense of depth and a preserved picture of movement suspended in time.

This occurred to me to be a modern counterpart to the tapestry illustration. The tapestry illustration seeks to explain God's sovereignty in the midst of a chaotic world by comparing existence to a tapestry. On the back side of a tapestry we see mostly loose ends and only a simulacrum of order and beauty, but on its reverse side we see a true, intricate and beautiful masterpiece. This is said to illustrate the fact that one's perspective can prevent one from grasping the order or beauty "behind" what they are viewing. Because we are limited to a view of the back and can, in this life, only make sense of what God allows us to through his revelation (general and specific) as well as our faculties of reason and sense, we will err in our scrutiny of his work.

This is the message of Job. This is what was revealed to the prophet Isaiah:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

The poet William Cowper put it this way:

Blind unbelief is sure to err

And search his works in vain.

God is his own interpreter,

And he shall make it plain.

The segment on light painting, however, presented a new twist on the tapestry illustration: time. The comment was that these paintings are created by compressing movement into a single moment. 

Spiritual transformation is enigmatic. It seems neither linear nor cyclical. At times we feel as though we have regressed only to find that we've been in the process of a deep change. At time we feel as though we've progressed only to find that hubris and unbelief had been masked by a sense of personal success. Many times we reflect on our growth and cannot discern whether we are progressing or regressing. This, in and of itself, creates a sense of inner regression as we recall how simple things seemed in previous installments of our lives.  

As I write this I am fighting off a sickness and experiencing a prolonged season of such spiritual ambiguity. At times I suspect I am simply free-falling from whatever heights I might have once attained. When I am more lucid, it is apparent that these heights weren't always as they seemed.

God gave Paul a deeper understanding of his circumstances and struggles via his infamous "thorn in the flesh." It is clear that Paul had viewed this thorn through an entirely negative lens--pleading through 3 sustained seasons for its removal. It was God who eventually allowed Paul to see the arcs and waves of his work (over time) through this affliction.

It is as though we all have a spiritual inhibitory system. This allows the present to remain somewhat vivid, but causes the past to tell a nebulous message. What we need is to be good stewards of those challenges and personal spiritual responsibilities that lie before us, but an awareness of these unknown patterns and order--this unknown beauty of our lives--may help us remain sane. At times God may give us such insight into what this seemingly arbitrary dance is producing, but always at our disposal is truth that God is bringing order and beauty about. 

We are, you see, the light in the hand of God. Compressed in time, we might glimpse what he is doing, but, in the now, we can only strive not to obstruct the motion of his hands. 

Long before light paintings, God mentioned a similar analog:

 

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: "Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.

Then the word of the LORD came to me: "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the LORD. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand.

Selah