THE LIGHT AND THE SUN

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... light can fill the mind's eye and pierce the darkness. 

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"You can really only be a photographer when your passion for taking pictures somehow transcends photography, and engages or meshes with other concerns, interests, and passions. Being 'just' a photographer is a way to keep yourself from being a photographer, you might say."

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Mike Johnston/The Online Photographer

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Reflections on History, Hell, and Hope on a Windy Late Summer Night

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Written at Dante’s View, Death Valley, California

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In the hush of Death Valley, hell can slip into your consciousness like a hot wind.

 

It does not take much imagination.

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There are places where an idea remains an abstraction, safely contained in language, and there are places where the physical world seems to give the idea weight. Death Valley can do that. The thought of eternal suffering—the descending circles of hell described by Dante Alighieri in the Inferno, the burning rivers, the terrible separations, the isolation—can begin to inhabit the imagination when you find yourself standing in this spectacular wasteland of salt flats and imposing highlands towering above every valley and basin for countless miles.

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Everything has been baked dry in the furnace wind of summer. Mountains rise from emptiness. The floor of the valley turns white with salt. Distance becomes difficult to judge because there is so little by which to measure it. Heat removes the ordinary comforts of landscape. Shade itself becomes valuable.

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And at night the stars wheel overhead.

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They are carelessly peaceful and utterly indifferent to the weary wanderer below. The distant glittering universe does not care how, what, when, where, why, nor even who you think you are.

 

That can be a useful experience.

 

The valley was named long ago by pioneers crossing this unforgiving California desert landscape, people determined to avoid the tragic fate of the Donner Party, whose own ill-fated westward crossing had become trapped hundreds of miles to the north in a sub-alpine pass high in the Sierra Nevada. They had been trying to get somewhere. That is important. They were not sightseeing. The wilderness stood between where they were and where they believed they needed to be.

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Journeys can be hard, discouraging and even deadly. You could be alone. You could be with the Donner Party in November 1846, unable to escape an early and brutal winter in the wilderness—locked in a wagon circle eating yesterday's dreams.

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Dante crossed his own wasteland. His was visionary rather than geographical, but he too begins lost. The opening fact of the Divine Comedy is not that Dante knows where he is going. It is that he has lost the straight way.

 

That seems much more important to me now than it once did.

 

I once wanted to correct Dante's journey by saying that Christianity means there is no journey to God—that salvation is already accomplished and therefore the journey itself is somehow the theological mistake. I no longer think that adequately describes what Christ asks of us. Christ does not hand us a proposition about a journey and then tell us that no journey is necessary.

 

He says: Follow Me.

 

There is the journey. But there is an enormous difference between following Christ and constructing a road to God.

 

We do not manufacture the destination. We do not accumulate enough spiritual mileage to force open the gates of Paradise. We do not negotiate our salvation by piling achievement upon achievement until God finally owes us something. The journey is possible because God has first come to us. Christ enters the world. Christ calls. Christ heals. Christ forgives. Christ dies. Christ rises. Christ conquers death.

 

And then He says, Follow Me.

 

Suddenly Dante's stumbling becomes interesting again.

 

Dante never pretends that he can simply engineer his own exit. He is lost and knows that he is lost. He cannot plot his escape from hell. He needs guidance. He needs rescue. He needs to be led out of the disorder into which he has wandered.

 

Virgil accompanies him. Later Beatrice meets him. Dante is not congratulated for having devised a sufficiently clever evacuation plan. He is confronted, corrected, humbled and led. And perhaps that is where the image becomes more Christian than my earlier reading allowed it to be. God meets us where we are, certainly—but not merely so that we can remain where we are. He calls us from there.

 

The Christian life is not the announcement that I have arrived. It is repentance: metanoia, the turning of the mind and heart, again and again toward God. It is not merely the intellectual recognition that I require rescue. It is learning to live as one being rescued.

 

That distinction now seems enormous.

 

The hole in the human soul is not filled by finally obtaining enough of our desires. It is not filled by self-actualization. It is not filled by becoming sufficiently admired, sufficiently comfortable, sufficiently independent, sufficiently knowledgeable, sufficiently correct, or even sufficiently religious.

 

It is filled by God. And that does not make the person disappear. It makes the person alive.

 

The Christian life therefore begins to look less like the construction of a spiritual résumé and more like the surrender of an illusion: the illusion of self-sufficiency. All the sweat, hurt, pain, disappointment and tears of this life were never entirely ours to control. We are creatures. We receive our existence. We receive the next breath. We receive the capacity to love, to repent, to forgive, to get up again after falling.

 

Grace does not make us passive objects. Grace makes life possible. God acts, and we respond. God calls, and we follow. God gives, and we receive. God forgives, and we repent. God loves, and slowly—often painfully, imperfectly, repeatedly—we learn to love.

 

There is no boasting available anywhere in that arrangement.

 

Dante's Inferno, of course, is only the first movement of the much larger Divine Comedy. “Comedy” does not mean that the work is humorous. It describes a story whose movement is ultimately upward—from darkness and catastrophe toward hope, restoration and joy rather than toward the final destruction of tragedy.

 

Dante's journey continues through Purgatorio and finally into Paradiso. He eventually beholds God, although even there language begins to fail him. And perhaps language ought to fail.

 

How exactly does a creature describe the Creator? How does the finite describe the infinite? How does an eye describe the source of light by which the eye sees anything at all?

 

Dante finally reaches for “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” That line survives every argument about Dante's cosmology.

 

Love.

 

Not sentimentality. Not indulgence. Not the modern demand that love validate whatever I already happen to desire.

 

God.

 

The source and end of everything.

 

And suddenly the stars over Death Valley look different. They remain indifferent in the ordinary material sense. Sirius does not alter its course because I am lonely. The Milky Way does not rearrange itself because I am frightened. The universe does not negotiate with my ego. But creation itself is no longer meaningless. The heavens declare something precisely because they are not about me. That is an extraordinarily liberating discovery. Everything does not have to be about me. Perhaps almost none of it is.

 

Dante wrote his elaborate warning to a decaying and corrupt society, confronting the abuse of power, greed, betrayal, hypocrisy and the astonishing ability of human beings to justify themselves while destroying one another. How far have we come in almost seven hundred years? Not very far.

 

The same old poisons remain remarkably durable. Leaders live large on greed. Crowds cheer chains that hold them down. Technology changes the scenery without necessarily changing the human heart. Billions of people carry astonishing machines in their pockets and can spend hour after hour doom-scrolling for dopamine hits, raging through wars conducted in commentary, likes, reposts and emojis.

 

The sulfur of continuous hell streams twenty-four hours a day. Dante could not have imagined the device. He would have recognized the passions immediately.

 

That word—passions—has acquired a meaning for me that it did not have when I first wrote this essay. Our culture treats passion almost exclusively as a virtue. Find what you are passionate about. Follow your passion. Build your life around your passion. Passion has become a kind of currency by which desire certifies itself.

 

Christian ascetic understanding offers something considerably more sober. A passion is not simply enthusiasm. It is desire that has begun to rule us. And hell begins to become comprehensible not merely as a medieval collection of ingenious punishments but as the terrible terminus of disordered desire: the self curved inward, demanding, consuming, accusing, grasping, unable to receive because it has forgotten how to attend to anything beyond itself.

 

This does not mean Dante has supplied us with a geographical survey of the afterlife. I no longer need him to. His circles of hell are poetry. His mountain is poetry. His celestial spheres are poetry. They belong to a medieval imagination drawing upon Scripture, classical literature, philosophy, theology, politics and the cosmology of his time. They do not need to be treated as revealed floor plans. And I no longer feel any need to demolish them because they do not resemble the diagrams of another theological system. That, too, was a kind of distraction. The question is not whether Dante successfully drew a map of eternity.

 

The question is whether I am paying attention.

 

There is a moment at Calvary that still seems to me almost impossible to contemplate without stopping. Three crosses. Three men dying. One of the criminals mocks Christ:

 

If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us.

 

The other rebukes him. He acknowledges the justice of his own condemnation. He acknowledges Christ's innocence. And then, with virtually nothing left—no future in which to construct a better reputation, no years available for religious accomplishment, no opportunity to restore what he has damaged—he turns toward Jesus.

 

“Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”

 

And Christ answers:

 

“Today you will be with Me in Paradise.”

 

I once read that almost exclusively as a proof text: evidence that works cannot possibly have any place in salvation because the thief had no time left to perform them. I now find the encounter much larger than the argument I was making with it. Look at the man. He is dying. He has nowhere left to hide. He cannot bargain. He cannot perform. He cannot pretend that the sentence against him is unjust.

 

He confesses.

 

He recognizes Christ.

 

And with whatever remains of his life, he turns toward Him.

 

That is not an abstract theological transaction. That is repentance occurring in front of us. The thief's remaining journey may be measured in minutes, but he spends those minutes turned toward Christ.

 

And Christ receives him.

 

There is no room there for pride. There is also no room for despair.   

 

The Church has preserved that thief in her memory for centuries not as an argument against obedience, transformation or the Christian life, but as an astonishing witness to mercy. At the very edge of death, with nothing to offer but repentance and faith, he asks to be remembered.

 

And the Kingdom opens.

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Despair is to think it's pointless to repent and that God is not bigger than the mess we make.  Peter, too, made a terrible mess. He wept—and returned. Judas despaired. The difference was not that Peter had nothing to repent of, but that he repented without deciding that his failure was greater than God's mercy. Humility must be prevented from being distorted into hopelessness. 

 

That changes how I now read Dante as well.

 

I do not need to decide that Dante's great error was depicting salvation as a journey. Scripture itself is filled with journeys: Abraham goes. Israel leaves Egypt. The people cross the wilderness. The prodigal son gets up and returns home. The disciples leave their nets. Paul runs a race. Christ tells us to take up the cross and follow Him.

 

The error would be imagining that the walking purchases the destination. It does not. But neither does receiving the invitation mean that walking ceases. There is no contradiction between grace and transformation unless we first decide to construct one. This is why the ancient Christian language of salvation increasingly fascinates me. Salvation is not merely acquittal. It is healing. Communion. Participation. Transformation. The restoration of the human person to communion with God.

 

The East calls this theosis. Not becoming God by nature. Not dissolving into God. Not becoming another member of the Trinity. Becoming by grace what the human creature was created to become: truly alive in communion with God.

 

Suddenly obedience is no longer the invoice paid after salvation. It is life with God. Prayer is not payment. Fasting is not payment. Mercy is not payment. Repentance is not payment. Love is not payment.

 

They are participation.

 

They are the life of someone learning to say yes. And that “yes” must be lived. There is never coercion in it.

 

Christ calls.

 

We may refuse. We may wander. We may attempt to fill the aching center of ourselves with everything except God. We may even become extremely sophisticated in explaining why the substitutes ought to have worked. But God remains God. Only God can heal what sin has wounded. Only Christ conquers death. Only the grace of God can restore the human person to communion with Him. And yet, mysteriously and without diminishing grace in the slightest, He does not ordinarily drag us toward Himself as objects. He calls persons.

 

That means our response matters.

 

Our choices matter. What we do matters. What we love matters. Where we direct our attention matters. How we treat the person standing in front of us matters. The life of faith is living. That realization also changes something else from my earlier understanding.

 

I once wrote, with great confidence:

We can know the Bible.

 

I still believe we must know Scripture. Perhaps I now believe that more deeply than before. But I no longer believe the Christian answer is simply that each individual must take responsibility for constructing the correct understanding of the Bible. That sounds responsible until one notices what it actually requires. The Bible did not descend from heaven already bound, indexed, translated and cross-referenced. The Gospel was proclaimed. People heard. Apostles taught. Communities worshiped. Baptism was administered. The Eucharist was celebrated. Bishops and presbyters were appointed. Letters were written into the life of an already-existing Church.

 

The faith was received.

 

That word has become increasingly important to me.

 

Received.

 

Christianity is not an archaeological reconstruction project in which every generation begins with a book, clears the table, and attempts to recreate

Christianity from the textual evidence. Nor did Christ fax everyone a list of instructions. He called apostles. He established His Church.

 

At Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended not upon a printing press but upon people.

 

Peter stood and preached. People heard. People repented. People were baptized. People entered a life. Scripture belongs inside that life, not outside it as an independent mechanism by which I stand above two thousand years of Christianity and adjudicate everyone who came before me. That does not diminish Scripture. It restores Scripture to its home. And it requires a humility I did not fully understand when I first wrote this essay.

 

“Test what you see and hear” remains good counsel.

 

But so does:

 

Let us attend.

 

I have become increasingly struck by those words.

 

Let us attend.

 

Not: Let us demand attention.

 

Not: Let us demonstrate that we have mastered the subject.

 

Not even: Let us immediately decide what this means according to the framework we brought with us.

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Attend.

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Listen.

 

Receive.

 

Notice.

 

Be present.

 

The difference may be enormous. To experience joy is to attend. And perhaps one of the fastest and most efficient ways to manufacture misery is to demand continually that we ourselves be attended to. The two movements face opposite directions. One opens outward. The other collapses inward.

 

Death Valley can teach that without saying a word.

 

Stand there long enough and the landscape refuses to flatter you. The white salt does not care about your résumé. The barren sky does not care about your status. The heat does not care how persuasive your arguments are. Cold comes after sunset without consulting your theology. Hunger remains hunger. Thirst remains thirst. Silence remains silence.

 

And there you are. A creature. Breathing borrowed air.

 

The pioneers crossing that landscape knew something about attention because in such a place inattention could kill you. Water mattered. Distance mattered. Weather mattered. Direction mattered. The condition of an animal mattered. The condition of a wheel mattered.

 

Reality had to be received as reality.

 

One could not survive by insisting that the desert accommodate one's preferred interpretation of it. There is something spiritually useful in that. The postcard from Dante still works.

 

Hell is real—as real as white salt, barren sky, heat, cold, hunger, thirst and the dead silence of the emptiness of Death Valley. I do not need to book Dante's tour in order to heed the postcard. Nor do I need to pretend that Dante has photographed the geography of eternity. He has done something perhaps more useful for literature: he has made sin ugly again. Our own age desperately resists that.

 

We rename the passions. We market them. We celebrate them. We tell ourselves that authenticity consists of obeying them because “I cannot lie to myself.”

 

But that can itself become an inversion.

 

If what I call my authentic self is simply the collection of desires presently demanding obedience, then refusing a passion may feel like dishonesty when it may actually be the beginning of freedom.

 

Christian asceticism is therefore not hatred of life. It is learning how to live without being ruled by everything that asks to rule us. It is not anhedonia. It is not the destruction of joy. It is the clearing away of that which prevents us from receiving joy. And this is where the journey becomes strangely beautiful.

 

One never finally gets to announce, “There. I have become Orthodox.” At least I cannot imagine that as the point.

 

One is always becoming Orthodox—always being called back toward right worship, right glory, right attention; always repenting; always discovering another corner of the self that would rather be sovereign. Crossing a denominational boundary cannot possibly be the finish line.

 

The finish line is Christ. Indeed, Christ is not merely waiting at the finish line.

 

He is the Way. That makes the entire landscape different.

 

The prayer I make, then, remains very close to the prayer with which I originally approached these photographs, but its meaning has deepened. I pray that the Lord may be ever-increasing within each of us, and that we may become less critical, less cynical and less prideful in our dealings with one another. I pray that we might learn genuine humility; that we might love one another as the Lord commanded; that the aching hole within us that only God can fill might cease to be treated as an appetite to be satisfied by the world.

And I pray that we might discover the joy we could never manufacture for ourselves.

 

Perhaps some of the images of time captured and collected here can help. That, after all, is what a photograph is.

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Captured light.

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From a fraction of a second to a long exposure during which someone attended.

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The photographer stopped.

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Looked.

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Saw.

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And initiated the opening the shutter to attend to light to record what it will write. The moment itself continued immediately into history, but something of the act of attention remained.

 

On these pages are images of creation from some of the places and things I have been blessed to see.  There is much more to see than can ever be seen. That statement has become less frustrating to me with age.

 

Of course there is.

 

Creation exceeds us. The world exceeds us. Another human person exceeds our ability to comprehend him completely. God infinitely exceeds us. We were never asked to contain everything. We were asked to attend.

 

With every breath, in every moment, with Jesus Christ at the center of our lives, perhaps we can learn to see the world differently—not by looking past creation as though it were disposable scenery on the way to heaven, but by learning to receive creation as creation.

 

Gift. Sign. Beauty. Responsibility. Something given rather than possessed.

 

The camera has always been useful to me for that reason. A lens imposes attention—sharpening the light to form the image. Move three inches and the composition changes. Wait thirty seconds and the light changes. Change the aperture and the relationship between subject and background changes. Look away and the moment may simply disappear. There is no camera for the final lens through which eternity is seen. Yet perhaps we are being taught to see. Not by escaping the world. Not by conquering it. Not by accumulating enough knowledge to stand above it. And certainly not by making ourselves its center.

 

We are learning to see by becoming attentive to the One through whom all things were made. That is why the great Christian invitation is at once so simple and so inexhaustible.

 

Follow Me.

 

The invitation does not flatter us. It does not tell us that our desires are sovereign. It does not promise that the road will be comfortable. It does not even promise that we will understand the road while walking it.

 

It gives us Christ.

 

And perhaps that is finally what Dante understood when all of his elaborate architecture—circles, terraces, planets, arguments, politics, poetry, history, philosophy and imagination—reached the point where language itself could carry him no farther.

 

Love.

 

The Love that moves the sun and the other stars. The same stars turn silently over Death Valley. The salt remains white beneath them. The mountains remain black against the horizon. The heat finally leaves the earth and the desert becomes cold. A person can stand there beneath an incomprehensibly large universe and feel very small. Perhaps that is not a problem requiring correction. Perhaps smallness, properly understood, is not humiliation.

 

It is freedom.

 

I do not have to move the stars. I do not have to save myself. I do not have to invent the faith. I do not have to reconstruct the Church. I do not have to compel the world to notice me. I can receive. I can repent. I can pray. I can love. I can follow. I can attend. 

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I can choose to pay rather than seek attention.

 

And if there is anything worth carrying from the wasteland—from Dante's dark wood, from the frozen Sierra, from the white salt basin, from the terrible heat, from the silent stars, from all the photographs and all the years through which we are permitted to wander—it may finally be something very simple.

 

We are not the center. Christ is.

 

And the recognition of that fact does not diminish human life. It is where human life finally begins to become intelligible.

 

There is no camera for this lens. But we have been created for the eternal view. So for however much time remains to each of us in this present darkness, perhaps the task is not to stare anxiously into the distance trying to prove that we have arrived. Perhaps it is to remain faithful to the invitation. To receive what has been handed down. To repent when we fail. To get up when we fall. To love the person God has placed before us. To give thanks. To become, rather than merely declare ourselves to be.

 

And above all, amid all the noise, all the argument, all the glowing screens, all the passions clamoring to become necessities, and all the innumerable ways the self tries to reclaim the center:

 

Let us attend.