“Let There Be Light”

Photo Credit- Ariana Arabadjiev

“Let There Be Light” (Genesis 1:3).

While I was always familiar with this verse, I only recently considered why God chose to begin with light. Not sound, not water, not food, not love. Light.

I began to contemplate the significance of this verse after witnessing the hour before sunrise at the Chestnut Skyspace. The Skyspace is an art exhibition made by James Turrell, an American artist who uses the sky as his medium and seems to paint with light. Turrell’s skyspace is comprised of a rectangular opening in the roof of a Quaker space of worship, surrounded by hidden LED lights that illuminate the ceiling around it. As the sun rose and the LED’s color shifted, my perception of the rectangle of sky I was able to see totally shifted. As we stepped outside, I perceived the world anew, grateful for the full expanse of the sky and the light that the sunrise was casting around me. 

A few weeks later I was lucky enough to be able to drive up to Vermont and watch the total solar eclipse on a beach with some friends. The fleeting moment of totality was indescribably beautiful, but equally beautiful were the moments right after. Light seeped back into the world and a mere sliver of sun rapidly repainted what suddenly looked like an arctic landscape with mountains and a church steeple visible on the horizon. Watching this, I ran into the partially frozen lake. The light’s return was so beautiful it overcame any cold of the water, and for a moment I felt I was more fully able to appreciate the scene.

While these two experiences were breathtaking, I don’t believe it is only in these rare and spectacular moments that the gift of light is most fully realized. 

I’m intrigued by a theory presented in an Ars Vivendi discussion that there is fundamentally more beauty in everything than any person is capable of perceiving. When two people see the beauty in an object differently, perhaps they are both only seeing a small sliver of the fullness of beauty contained in that object. 

For instance, two people may look at the same chair, and one may see it as beautiful while the other may not. Perhaps neither of these people are fully correct in their perception --- instead, both are only seeing a small sliver of the beauty contained in the chair. There is a realm of beauty contained in every object that we can only access a portion of.

As I considered this more, I came to the conclusion that the gift of light is the illumination of some of the beauty contained in the world around us. By creating contrasts and shadows, patterns and colors, light allows us to glimpse some of these angles. We are able to perceive a sliver of the beauty contained in the objects around us thanks to light. Perhaps in some rare moments we get to glimpse more of this beauty, but the true gift of light is that it reveals to us a portion of this beauty at all.