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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Reflecting through a lens of history, hell, and hope on a hot and windy late-summer night.

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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.  The thought of eternal suffering in the fire of the descending circles of hell described in Dante Alighieri's "Inferno" can fill your mind should you find yourself in this spectacular wasteland of salt flats and imposing highlands towering high over every valley and basin for countless miles, baked dry in the furnace wind of summer, framing the flames of Dante's burning rivers.  At night the stars wheel overhead—carelessly peaceful yet utterly indifferent to the weary wanderer.  The distant glittering universe doesn't care—no matter how, what, when, where, why, nor even who you think you are.

 

This valley was named long ago by pioneers crossing this unforgiving California desert landscape determined to avoid the tragic fate of the Donner Party who made their ill-fated westward crossing hundreds of miles to the north through a sub-alpine pass high in the Sierra Nevada. ​ Dante crossed his own wasteland in a visionary trip to hell in a quest to understand how sin separates us from God and about finding return path to prepare for a journey home to God. ​ But journeys can be hard, discouraging, and even deadly. Could the creator impose such a journey?  Such a test? 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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Didn't Dante understand that God meets us where we are? That there is no journey of achievement?  Perhaps he started to notice this after his encounter of Beatrice, who meets him higher up, after having rejected his demons and his mess, as if God has been tracking him the whole time. Dante doesn't know how to escape the eternity of hell. Dante never pretended that he could actually just engineer an exit. He was lost, admitted it, and kept stumbling, unable to plot the path of escape. There was no map, no merit to earn, only the love and grace that saves souls out from the fire. This love and grace, characterized by Beatrice, takes him in tow and gets him moving again out of the depths like a fool stumbling forward who is starting to understand that without the "love that moves the sun and the other stars", and she ushers him away from a terrible fate from which there is absolutely no way out. He realizes that  in the broken and fallen state of humanity, each of us, has a hole that only God can fill. In the end, Dante sees the face of God—but this was never the goal, it is the revelation. It is a full embrace of the truth that nothing in life is ever all about us.   Everything is about God—and all he has provided for and done for us–along with the absolute clarity that we are all here along for the ride and the choices we make, and that the blessed hope of eternal life with him awaits, if we can humbly and profoundly accept it.

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The first part of this trans-formative process is to realize that without acknowledging God, we are all in the dark. Then there is the great reveal that there was never any journey to God and that he is always with us, and with this, Dante's jaw is lower than the floor and his ego is vapor. The hole in his soul is filled—not by having filled it with his desires but by collapsing into it powerlessly in the full embrace of complete dependence upon the creator and savior God. He is both shocked and utterly relieved. All the sweat, hurt, pain, disappointment and tears of this life were never actually his to control. He just had to say yes and fall forward into arms that where always open: nothing to perform nor to prove for salvation.   Pure grace brings the perfect mercy and perfect justice of God. One word—“yes”—and those open arms close around him. There had been nothing to earn, and everything had already been given. We are redeemed—purchased out of the slavery of sin, by the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ on he cross of Calvary.   And so then we must continue with our lives, not as part of this world but as eternal souls, dependent upon God through the time which remains here for each of us, as well as for the eternity to come, and purposefully love and glorify Him with the obedience and faithfulness which transforms our lives.

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This epic "Inferno" sequence is part of the complete larger work by Dante known as "The Divine Comedy".   A comedy—not as humor, but a story that blooms from the sustained elevation of hope to the victorious joy of triumph over death; the classical opposite of tragedy. ​ The triumph is the blessed hope of the invitation which God provides to us as our savior—as the one victorious over death. This literary work was Dante's elaborate warning to a decaying and corrupt society—a warning to reject the path of evil and pursue righteousness. How far have we come in the almost seven-hundred years since this stern admonition to the abusive and self-serving power-brokers of his 14th-century Florentine day?

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Not very far. Today all the same old poisons persist. Leaders living large on their greed, the masses cheering the chains that hold them down. Advancing technology continues to add window-dressing to the persistent rot as billions of people anchor to their devices and doom-scroll for dopamine hits and rage endlessly in wars wrapped in commentary, likes and emojis. The sulfur of continuous hell is streaming 24/7.

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Dante finally does get to heaven but the story reflects a journey which unfolds without a clear understanding nor full expression of the good news of the Gospel:  It unfolds without the realization that salvation is not a journey.   Salvation, the unmerited gift of the completed work of our Lord Jesus Christ in His victory over sin and death—the perfect gift of redemption and the restoration to Paradise—the finished work of Jesus on the Cross, is ours by grace alone.   Faith plus works?  Actually, Faith then works. Our journey is the actual transformation of our lives which follows this actual rebirth in the saving grace of God.  Our actual works, life choices and worldview subsequent to this transformation are what actually and tangibly come together to illustrate and demonstrate the true transformation.  Discordantly, Dante’s epic literary work paints salvation as an elaborately segregated sort-of Greek-mythology-styled hierarchical merit-based system where your "afterlife rank" hinges on your virtue, your penance, your climbing effort.  He works this system for the story most likely as an illustration of the time and the highly stratified society in which he finds himself.

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For Dante, the environment of the celestial afterlife is a progressive spiritual hierarchy of various distinctive levels of heaven which form an Orwellian scheme wherein some souls appear to be more saved than others. The Bible does not provide a multi-level heaven where those in all but the single highest level fall short of being in the presence of the Lord, nor does the Bible hand-off to Dante tidy circles of hell.  Hell is separation from the creator and savior God in the outer darkness of eternal suffering, an ever-burning lake of fire. 

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In the end, Dante encounters the presence of God beyond all space and time–behind nine orders of angels, looking nothing like the Gospel. No victory at Calvary, no “it is finished.”  Just ladders, ledges, celestial time-shares ranked by how many good deeds you crammed into the suitcase.  The Bible hands no such multi-level heavenly realm, just the joy of being in the presence of God.  For hell, the Bible does not describe a planned community defined with nine circles; For heaven, the Bible presents a single magnificent Paradise, not a pyramidal salvation hierarchy.  Augustine had spelled out grace two centuries earlier; Luther would hammer it again two centuries later. Dante just wrote to the culture he lived in, not the finish line the Lord already crossed long ago regarding this perfect gift of God’s grace—a gift often misconstrued and left unclarified by many teachers for a millennium. A gift still often misunderstood today.

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Nevertheless, Dante's vision of heaven fit well with the prevailing understanding of his time. It was widely accepted that our lot in life was to endure a constant struggle to develop spiritually for achieving a more desirable level of salvation. Dante imagines various stages of the afterlife including a time for the purging of sin followed by the soul's assignment to one of more than nine exclusive ranks of salvation—which more closely mirrors the frustrated journey of a soul still  struggling in the flesh rather than express the truth of the singular and eternal joy of unbroken fellowship with God,  made possible by one's own faith in the finished work of His Son Jesus Christ, which was recorded at the dawn of this age, as shown below:

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Then one of the criminals who were hanged blasphemed Him, saying, “If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us.”  But the other, answering, rebuked him, saying, “Do you not even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this Man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”  And Jesus said to him, “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”

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​Luke 23:39-43 NKJV

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There is no condemnation for this criminal after his repentance and conviction at Calvary. We know—that by the Lord's Word, in that very moment, this condemned man is saved.

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Dante's vision of a graded plan of redemption falls far short of expressing the completed work of the Lord and our own sinful equality among ourselves at the foot of the Cross. The reader can, however, certainly heed Dante's dramatic, literal and merciful warning: Hell is real.

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This prideful world holds its head high above conviction and embraces the destructive, costly, and futile pursuit of a self-sufficient and secular utopia. The world celebrates and holds fast to Dante's role as an individual artist, poet, and ethical thinker and ignores the Christian significance of such an epic work of literature. ​ My message is that we can know and we can do much better than to stop short merely at what Dante and the fallen world has concluded about the afterlife—we can embrace a level of understanding that far exceeds even the greatest insights of any epic work of man:

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We can know the Bible.

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We can know the Word—and we can trust the Author. ​ That means taking responsibility for our understanding of the Word. That is the part that never ends. That understanding is not the responsibility of others. That understanding must first matter greatly and then grow across all the years of the life we are given. There is only one truth, Jesus. He is the truth. Everything else is ourselves and other people trying not to lie to each other.  We need only to convict ourselves and submit to the Lord in full confidence and belief in His accomplished salvation for each of us. Test what you see and hear. Remember the Bereans.  We can know that we are saved and reborn to go forth to choose to do the will of God, for the glory of God. Our is a living faith. Your faith lives in the expression of obedience and in the glorification of God in your life. Why? Because it's not all about us, ever.  It's all about Him and what he has done for us. Salvation is not a feeling, it is the loving gift, to each of us, from God:

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For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

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​John 3:16 NKJV

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There is never a moment of coercion—only you can let the Lord into your life to change and shape your heart. This is only a message.

Only God can do this work—if you will allow Him. ​ Only His work, the grace of salvation, restores us to His presence. Only the blood of Jesus can cleanse us of our sins for the perfect justice of God.  All of the good that we do flows from the gift of God's grace.

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Any good that can be done by an individual who has rejected the work of our Lord on the Cross, though still a blessing to the recipient, does nothing for the giver because the good being provided is steeped in prideful self-sufficiency.  Such a giver chooses not to recognize our sinful state and will deny that the life-giving air, and our capacity to breathe it, has been prepared and provided by the Lord.

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There is no amount of good we can ever hope to perform to deserve, qualify for, or otherwise earn His grace. ​ We must earnestly tear down this wall of pride, the first sin, and realize that we have absolutely nothing to offer to anyone which God has not provided. We must focus our attention upon the promise of the eternal life that is to come and reflect this in the choices which we make and in the stewardship of our gifts.

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A life of living out our salvation and glorifying God is to live a life of hungering for the Lord without worry for what others think.  The world embitters us with lies and condemns us to a self-imposed deprivation of God's joy from our lives–fooling us into choosing the darkness which Dante so clearly described.

Like the pioneers determined not to perish in the desolation of the desert, we must rebuke the world's pervasive culture of death and its failed definition of the meaning of life.  Still, the postcard from Dante works. Hell is real—as real as the white salt, barren sky, heat, cold, hunger, thirst and dead silence of the emptiness of Death Valley.  We can heed Dante’s postcard from loneliness as a clear warning without booking the tour.  So why are we here?  We need to understand that we exist to know about God, the creator of each of us and of everything, and to glorify Him.

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The prayer I make is that the Lord be ever-increasing within each of us such that we might not be critical, cynical nor prideful in our ways with each other–and that we may genuinely embrace humility, love one another as the Lord has commanded, fill the aching hole in our hearts that only God can fill, and find the joy that we could never dream to build for ourselves. I hope that some of the images of time captured and collected here may help to remind us to see ourselves, always, as being in the presence of God. 

 

On these pages you will find images of creation from some places and things discovered that I have been blessed to see.  Of course, there is much more to see than can ever be seen–and with every breath, and in every moment, with Jesus at the center of our lives, I believe we can learn to see beyond the world to come—clear and bright—and focus our lives through the glass of eternity.

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There is no camera for this lens, yet we have been created for that eternal view and to embrace the humility of understanding what God has done for each of us by waking up to the amazing grace and victory of what he has already finished for us—and most of all—to be a light to others as we walk through our remaining time in this fallen world, in this present darkness.