Light and Dark

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
~John Constable
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
~Sir Francis Bacon

There are things that I am convinced become more beautiful with tragedy.

The splashes of black across an otherwise brilliant array of colors can make something brilliant and beautiful.

We only notice the brilliance because of the infusion of this dark matter.

I don’t know the underlying theological issue here, but it is my guess that we only understand good in light of evil. We only understand joy in light of pain.

We only understand friendship in light of loneliness.

We only understand healing in light of brokenness.

And, to be sure, there is no way around experiencing the negative aspects of light in favor of the positive.

You would be cheating yourself if you didn’t break once in a while.

Because it is then, and only then, do we truly understand what it means to experience grace.

In Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Gospel of Mark he writes,

“’Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?’” (Mark 8:37-38 The Message)

This has always been hard for me to understand, because everything that everyone ever told me about being a Christian was all about putting on a happy face regardless of your situation.

Joy was a façade that allowed me to hide the tumult going on inside my gut.

What I’ve come to understand recently is that embracing suffering includes experiencing suffering, and all that it might include.

The kind of sobbing that wracks your body with convulsions.

The kind of grief that leaves you questioning your faith.

The kind of sorrow that leads you to those thoughts of self-loathing that nobody is supposed to share.

With anybody.

Ever.

God is bigger than your despair. That is for sure.

But, rather than clinging onto that truth to escape the despair itself, we should be more like Christ who “because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” (Hebrews 2:18 NIV)

Is this not the lesson of the life of Christ?

Yet we seem to gloss over it every Sunday.

We talk about suffering, but in disaffected tones that seem miles apart from real pain.

Real pain creates a hole in your soul that cannot be filled with a 12 Step Program, or a Bible Study on Wednesday night.

Nor should it.

We embrace our brokenness within a brotherhood of Man that is broken and redeemed at the same time.

True beauty is lived in these shades of dark, weaving in and out of the constant light of Christ, and, surely enough, ends in eternity with the Lord of Everything.