The Tribune

THIS Christmas column is dedicated to a dear priest friend, a source of mercy, of laughter, and of everlasting friendship, who continues to discover and to share new light and life.

The incarnation of God in human history is the revelation and splendour of love’s pure light:

“Silent night, holy night

Son of God, love’s pure light

Radiant beams from Thy holy face

With the dawn of redeeming grace…”

Wonderfully crafted and hewn in the image and likeness of our Creator, we reflect love’s pure light, though the darkness and shadows of our sinfulness and self-absorption diminish, occlude and trap this light. Our many forms of blindness or, alternatively, receptivity to light affect how we see and treat others.

An episode entitled, “Dear Sis” of the television series, M*ASH, offers a glimpse of how we may be vehicles of light and joy and hope and love. The chaplain of the mobile army surgical hospital set during the Korean conflict is Fr John Patrick Francis Mulcahy, a generally mild-mannered Jesuit priest who is also an amateur boxer.

In the episode, Fr Mulcahy feels he is mostly ineffective as compared with the medical professionals daily saving lives. He believes he is on “the edge of effectiveness”, bumbling, and often failing in his duties of pastoral comfort and care.

During the dreary and drab Christmas celebration in the mess tent, most of the hospital staff recall better Christmases as they long to be with their loved ones.

The brilliant surgeon and blue blood and wealthy Major Charles Emerson Winchester, who is sometimes obnoxious, aloof and condescending, is dismissive when told there is a present under the tree for him.

Winchester opens his gift, expecting little. To his overwhelming surprise and delight, the gift is his childhood toboggan cap, evoking powerful and wonderful memories from past Christmases. He is mystified as to how this loving gift made its way from Boston to Korea.

It turns out that it was Fr Mulcahy who wrote to Winchester’s family months earlier asking them to send a gift that would cheer their son amid the misery and gore of war.

The response of the typically bumptious Boston Brahmin to Fr Mulcahy: “You saved me, Father. You lowered a bucket into the well of my despair and you raised me up to the light of day. I thank you for that.”

The episode concludes with the camp singing “Dona Nobis Pacem” (Grant/Give Us Peace) as a choral gratitude to Fr Mulcahy for his compassion and his bearing of goodness and light.

The lead surgeon and character Hawkeye Pierce reminds the camp that Fr Mulcahy is: “Someone who’s too modest, too utterly simple a man to know how much strength he gives us just by the decency of his life among us.”

Love’s pure light shines or is refracted through the prism of our lives, whether through acts of kindness such as those exemplified by the fictional Fr. Mulcahy or through the fragility and wounds to which we are all heir.

Human prism

At the end of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway reminds: “The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.” These fractures and broken places are a part of the human prism through which light may pass, no matter how strenuously.

An addiction endured or arrested may be a source of empathy. A human weakness or mistake leads to a more merciful heart. A terrible diagnosis or illness becomes a fountain of gratitude. The death of a loved one serves as the lifeblood for greater service to others.

Emily Dickinson offers us another way of seeing and experiencing light:

“By a departing light

We see acuter quite

Than by a wick that stays.

There’s something in the flight

That clarifies the sight

And decks the rays.”

Mercy in the midst of darkness, of despair, of distress, is one of the most penetrating incarnations of light. Michelangelo reportedly and famously declared: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” And: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

A friend recalls the story of a pastor seeing another in despair and like a sculptor wielding the chisels of compassion and mercy, carved through stony despair to set the better angels free from another in desperate need of liberation.

The engulfing and consuming darkness of our egotism, self-absorption, pus-filled wounds, crippling lust for power and money, negativity, judgmentalism, meanness of spirit, self-pity, nastiness and viciousness, and all manner of deadly sinfulness can be purified, redeemed and healed through love’s purer and more powerful light.

The French impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926) was fascinated and obsessed with light, helping to spark “a revolution in painting”. He was fascinated initially by how light breaks up on things, moving along to how light breaks up between things to how light breaks up by itself.

Monet’s most brilliant study of light was through the Nymphéas, the famed Water Lilies he began painting in 1914 and continued until his death in 1926. The Water Lilies is not the name of one painting. It is a series of more than 250 paintings, and are among the most iconic images of Impressionism.

“The water lilies elicit light and shadows of the passing hours from sunrise in the east to sunset in the west… The artistic study of the changing effects of light was communicated through painting the same landscape at various hours of the day.”

“Monet did not explain his fascination with light; rather he used his art as sensation to comfort French citizens in the wake of the devastation and carnage of war as they moved on with their lives.”

Monet’s garden

Monet purchased a home and garden in the French town of Giverny, where he and his large family settled. The house and grounds covered approximately two acres and was a retreat where he spent half of his life.

He was an avid gardener, who oversaw the growing of his water lilies and the cultivation of the ponds on which they grew. On a programme on TVO on famous gardens around the world, the presenter discussed the many years he spent studying Monet’s gardens and Water Lilies.

Yet, it was not until a particular trip to Giverny that he fully realised that more than the lilies, Monet was painting the light on the lilies. He painted the light through the tragedy of World War I, through the loss of a beloved wife, through the dark periods of his life and those of his family and friends.

He kept trying to capture the light, just as many of us do when we are drawn to the many sunrises and sunsets in nature and in our lives.

In 1923, Monet had two surgeries to remove cataracts. Paintings done during the cataracts affecting his sight have a reddish tone. Some suggest that following surgery “he was able to see certain ultraviolet wavelengths of light that are normally excluded by the lens of the eye; [having …] an effect on the colours he perceived.”

We all have cataracts and spiritual and moral obstacles which colour or blur our vision or blind us to sources of light and the colours of hope they may grant. There is more light in the world and in the ordinary circumstances of our days and dark nights of heart and soul than we often dare imagine.

The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is a Light of the World that is not diminished by the sinfulness that haunts our weary souls, our weary world, and the tsunami of evil that haunts our planet, including the voracious greed despoiling God’s creation.

When we look at our lives we are often horrified that we struggle still, year after year, decade after decade by the very same patterns of sin. And, yet, salvifically, gloriously, wonderfully, the patterns of grace and mercy and love’s pure light abound!

Why our Christmas jubilee? “Why your joyous strains prolong? What the gladsome tidings be/ Which inspire your heavenly song?” Our jubilee is love’s pure light. Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo!

From the imagining of light from Raphael Rudnik:

“The light, God’s white light breaks and must bedizen:

Colours are the deeds done by light as it breaks.

Life itself breaks, bright crowds of things happen,

My soul must break into words as it speaks.”

The colours of a rainbow are a spectrum with more variation and splendour than can be viewed by the naked human eye. Yet through the prism of our human being, our souls and spirits, we have the ability because of our Creator, to enjoy and express the spectrum of love’s pure light.

Even when we are shattered and in pieces, even when we only barely make it to the foothills of hope, even when we are praying for the desire to have the desire to love again, even after our most tragic mistakes and falls, even after we endlessly repeat our frailties and weaknesses – love’s pure light has the power to redeem, to replenish and to restore.

This is the gift of the Incarnation from which may flow the many gifts and incarnations of love’s pure light we may reflect to others and to ourselves.

Blessed Christmas!