From the Canvas to the Cross | Part I | Consider the Lillies

"The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

I was four years old, unboxing a beautiful porcelain doll with the rosiest of cheeks from my grandma, who is a brilliant oil painter. She was in a frilly white baptism dress and bonnet, and holding in her hands a very small white book with a gold cross on the front.

I asked my dad what the words in the little white book said. It was the Gospel of John. I got up on his knee and he started to read it to me. (I remember being on his knee, because I was very uncomfortable and fidgety and couldn't pay attention to what he was saying. It bored me. I didn't Understand it).

I probably interrupted him with my favorite question: "But what does it Mean, Daddy?"

"It means that Jesus Loves you very much."

Jesus.

I knew that Name. Of course I knew that Name. Everybody knew that Name. It was on every street corner in my town.

For the next 14 years, the doll sat in a wooden curio cabinet in my bedroom. My dad made it himself in his wood shop, and his favorite Story to tell about it was that he accidentally cut the boards to 60 inches, instead of 6 feet per the plan. A happy little accident; it was just my size.

Once in a while, I'd open the cabinet door and take out the little white book with its tissue paper pages and tiny words, some of them black, some of them red. It was the first five sentences that I would read again and again:

1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2. He was in the beginning with God.
3. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.
4. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.
5. And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

I certainly did not comprehend it. But it was Beautiful, and I kept coming back to the Word, longing to Understand.

It was these words I returned to this morning, yet again, when I opened my coffee table book on Claude Monet's Impressionist paintings. As I got to Know them, there was a single thread of gold tying each of his works together: Light.

Monet saw Light as the gateway to Beauty and Life. Darkness and gloom was all he had known in his own French art culture and its aesthetic, and he Resisted it in both art and life.

Despair wasn't the only norm he deviated from in his landscape art. As I was scrolling through photos from my visit to Musée de l'Orangerie avec ma maman, I came across these words from critic Louis Gillet in the Water Lillies Gallery:

"An astonishing painting, without pattern, without borders. There is no sky, no horizon, hardly any perspective or stable points of reference enabling the viewer to orient himself, just completely arbitrary boundaries between actual space and pictorial space."

You see, Claude Monet did not paint things as they were, as many great painters before him sought to do, but rather captured light, shapes, and colors as his own eyes perceived them, whether or not others appreciated it. His work is recognized by loose, visible brushstrokes and dabs of color that come across as out-of-focus. He had no Intention of portraying a realistic representation; he simply aimed to conveyed the truth of his own experience.

Near the end of his life, there was a Story that he would like to tell about the moment of his "artistic awakening." He was painting Haystacks strewn across a hillside at harvest time, and as he was working he realized that the light had changed and he found himself at a halt until the sun would be back in its same position the next day. 

His mistress' daughter was with him, and he turned to her and asked if she wouldn't mind going to the house to bring him another canvas, to which she obliged. But just a short time later, she was being asked to bring another. And then another. And yet another. By the end of the day he was surrounded by more than half a dozen paintings of the same haystacks, compositionally identical & strikingly different. Though the Subject was hay, the Artwork was the way the Light was reflected in the immediacy of the moment. 

As any Artist can relate, the process of such a masterpiece did not come without its frustrations. He probably didn't realize that what was a challenge for him at the time would become one of his most famous series of works with 25 completed paintings.

"I am...struggling with a series of different effects [haystacks]...but at this season, the sun sets so fast I cannot follow it..."   

What I find most Beautiful about Monet's Haystack paintings is that he ultimately believed that an object was born through Light. He Invited us to see the world through his own eyes, which changed constantly with the seasons and time of day. "For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment." 

As I sat with Monet's images and John's words, I got hung up on one word in particular. Follow me down this rabbit hole...we are going to the Greek. Bear with me. 

My childhood doll's New King James Version translation of the Gospel and the New International Version open on my desk right now present two perspectives of the same word: κατέλαβεν ("katelaben"). 

"And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." (John 1:5, NKJV)

"And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it." (John 1:5, NIV)

As a writer who chooses her brushstrokes with great Intentionality, I believe that John was no different.

κατέλαβεν [verb] 

1: to take hold of, to grasp, to comprehend, to Understand

2: to overcome, to defeat, to come down on something with force in the act of seizing 

As I was walking with a friend a few years back during her journey "to come to believe that a power greater than herself could restore her to sanity", she said something so profound that I will never forget it: 

"I don't Understand God. But I suppose if I did, I would be greater than God. So I think I'm okay with letting Him do the Understanding." 

So perhaps in this context, to fully Understand - to wholly comprehend - would mean to defeat. I think I've landed on letting God do the Understanding, too.   

John used a similar version of the same word again in Chapter 12, when he recorded Jesus' words to the disciples as he was speaking to them about his impending death:

"You are going to have the Light just a little while longer. Walk while you have the Light, before darkness overtakes you. Whoever walks in the dark does not know where they are going. Believe in the Light while you have the Light, so that you may become children of Light." (John 12:35, NIV)

Born of Light. 

Light: the Life of men (and women, and even - maybe even especially - those in between). 

C.S. Lewis famously stated, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else".

I didn't catch the sunrise this morning; not because I was asleep, but because today the sky is Dark. The heavens are grieving, their tears spilling out in loving attention to our earth. It's Holy Saturday. The day where Death and Darkness won. The day that God was dead.

But tomorrow? Tomorrow. Tomorrow we celebrate the greatest SonRise the world has ever known.