Heroes Not Zombies

I was about to write “What strikes me most about this scene is the light”, then I suddenly had the thought “We can’t actually see light, can we? What strikes me here is the tree and the way it is lit”.

Light travels throughout the universe but the universe remains dark. It floods the Earth but we only see it when it is reflected, and even then what we see is whatever it is that’s being reflected – in this case, a tree.

Even when we look directly at a source of light (don’t look directly at the Sun!), for example when we see a car’s headlights at night, we see the source itself lit by the light – we see the headlights, not light itself.

How can light be so bright yet remain invisible?

C S Lewis wrote about a sunbeam in his shed and compared the two experiences of seeing the beam of light as it lit the millions of dust particles in the air, and of looking along the beam itself to where the light entered into the shed. But, here, I find myself simply delighting in the phenomena of reflection and illumination, how light makes everything we can see visible, but remains invisible itself.

Some say God is like this. They say we can’t see God directly but we see God reflected in the forest, the birds, our loved ones. God illuminates, reflects, brings into existence all that is.

I’ll leave you with that thought for a Sunday morning.