Wording a Radiance I

 

From time to time I find myself remembering some of my “aha” moments, cognitively, emotionally, spiritually! I remember the day calculus formulae jumped off the board and became clear and real (I know nerdy right?!), I remember the moment my heart knew love as never before when I gave birth, and I remember my heart overflowing when I first placed consecrated bread into someone’s hands and sensed something like an electric current!

I also remember a moment which has become an intersection of all these domains. I remember realizing that light was actually all color merged into oneness. Prisms and refraction became real and metaphoric carriers of meaning, of invisible grace and holiness.

And so when I read a memoir of the wonderful British theologian Daniel Hardy I was not only intrigued by the title, Wording a Radiance, but was called up short in its early pages by these words: “this light I’ve talked about and see infused in people and between people and things isn’t white light, you know. It is colour: colour in its full and wonderful range. How do you see colour? The colour in you and in the people you meet and how you relate to one another?” 

Hardy went on to say that he considered himself, brown...”not too dark a brown...a warm, rich brown, probably with quite a lot of yellow, red, orange, and maybe some blue in it too: an earthy colour.” It seems to me that brown became another unification of colour. He was about to die and he was experiencing that all things merge into one, including colour.

Like so many things when placed in another dimension or realm, words are hard to come by. But I have always been intrigued with color, shade, hues, and the emotions they evoke as well as the grace they mark. On this crisp, sunny fall day, I go to the river to watch the light refract and reflect and will think about the browns differently. I will pay attention to the blues and greens, yellows and oranges and reds within; I will watch them differentiate and merge. I will be witnessing life.