By Tony Chvala-Smith
Associate professor of religion, Community of Christ Seminary, Graceland University
Light is a potent memory trigger. When it comes to teasing out a long-buried scene from one’s past, it is as powerful as scents or sounds. The restful hues of a remembered sunset can evoke deep longings in a way that is pure magic. To borrow a peculiar word that J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Lord of the Rings character, Sméagol, used, light can even be “tricksy.”
It was an early spring evening. In the contemplative stillness of a worship service, candles bathed the Temple Chapel in a warm yellow glow. It must have been the soft golden shades cast by the flames that surfaced a long-forgotten memory. I momentarily was transported back decades, far from the ambience of the chapel to the driver’s seat of our eastbound car.
Light is a potent memory trigger. When it comes to teasing out a long-buried scene from one’s past, it is as powerful as scents or sounds.
In my mind’s eye it was a mid-July evening. Summer’s long days washed the central Michigan countryside in a distinctive gold-green light. As quickly as my quasi-rule-keeping self would allow, I was driving on M-46 across the flat farmland of the area we Michiganders affectionately call “the Thumb.” The scene brought back how the ripening fields of winter wheat painted everything the color of browning butter.
But the point of the memory seemed to be that it pointed elsewhere. It was symbolic of the goal of that hasty trip. Highway M-46 would end at Lake Huron, where I would turn south on M-25. The destination was a reunion at Bluewater Campground. My wife, Charmaine, was already there, I having been delayed by work until late afternoon. I wanted nothing more than to get to that sacred place for a precious week of what our ancestors called “a foretaste of Zion.”
All this came back in an instant. The vesper light in the Temple Chapel acted sacramentally: the visual and tangible became a window into a wheatfield-colored memory, and through that memory, to what underlay it.
What lay at the root of the memory? Why did I urgently want to get to that reunion? These aren’t unfair questions: Human actions are crisscrossed with complex webs of invisible desires. It’s good to practice naming the wants that secretly drive us. My keenness to get to that camp was, of course, not without its own tangle of motivations. Yet being compellingly “drawn” toward camp couldn’t be reduced merely to motives or wants. There was “more” to it.
The vesper light in the Temple Chapel acted sacramentally: the visual and tangible became a window into a wheatfield-colored memory, and through that memory, to what underlay it.
Coaxed into consciousness by candle flames, what loomed largest in the memory of that golden summer evening was how the light enfolded everything—countryside, farm fields, two-lane highways, small towns, a driver’s anticipation, a campground on the Lake Huron shore. The light wrapped them all in a gilded embrace. Decades later, I now saw all this as signaling a Presence: infinitely broad and compassionate, yet untamable in its boundlessness.
The German theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) would have understood this moment. In his classic book The Idea of the Holy, he probed the meaning of religious experiences of the sacred. Forgive me for using a few of his Latin expressions, but they voice what lay at the root of my memory. The Holy, Otto said, is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the mystery that causes us to tremble and yet insistently pulls us to itself.
When we encounter the Holy, there is an “overplus” of meaning, Otto said, an “extra” that attracts even as it threatens to change us. Otto coined a new Latin word to describe the Holy as it encounters us in this way: the numinous. Think luminous, but add the idea of something so indescribably, immeasurably good, that it transformingly rattles your core. It’s like Moses’s experience before the brilliance of the burning bush in Exodus 3: He can’t leave that encounter unchanged.
The Holy, Otto said, is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the mystery that causes us to tremble and yet insistently pulls us to itself.
And that was exactly why I yearned to get to the reunion. There for a brief time of what Jim Hannah called “togethering,” I knew our gathered lives would again light up with possibilities, reignited by an inextinguishable divine love that had touched all of us in varied ways. The light of that love drew us there.
There was a monk of the Egyptian desert named Abba Isaiah. That other monks addressed him with the honorific title “abba” meant he was a reliable guide in things of the Spirit. He once invited a younger brother to his hut to teach him a lesson about the spiritual journey.
Having washed his guest’s feet, Abba Isaiah put some lentils in a pot to cook for their meal. The lentils had just boiled when Isaiah brought the pot to his guest and served them. The younger monk said, “They aren’t cooked yet, Abba.” But Isaiah replied, “Is it not enough simply to have seen the fire?” (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: the Alphabetical Collection).
The Abba is not being obscure, but metaphorical. If we probe our experience, we’ll likely get his point. Somewhere, somehow, we, too, have “seen the fire.” It’s what holds us to this hard, unpredictable, unfinished pilgrimage called faith. Amid our disappointments, failures, bungling attempts to serve, and regular misunderstandings of the good news, we have glimpsed that our truest freedom lies in surrendering to this tremendous mystery, this numinous “flame,” which our hearts recognize and cannot revisit enough.
What happened in that Chapel service? Quite simply, when a forgotten memory of a light-drenched summer drive was triggered by candles, I glimpsed the living reality embedded in my center. That reality was gently “tricked” into showing itself, so I might claim again this Divine Other who irrevocably has laid claim to us all.
Somewhere, somehow, we, too, have 'seen the fire.' It’s what holds us to this hard, unpredictable, unfinished pilgrimage called faith.
It’s no secret that church folk everywhere struggle to navigate our time’s complex social, moral, and global intersections. There aren’t simple formulas for doing that. But what if one way into our unmapped future is as old as a monk’s ancient desert wisdom?
“Remember what got you on this journey!” Isaiah would tell us. “Even if only once, long ago, you ‘saw that fire,’ it’s quite enough to have glimpsed it.” Keep refocusing on the numinous presence of the One whom the psalmist declares, “is wrapped in light as with a garment” (Psalm 104:2 NRSVue).