. . . in the semi-darkness? What? Well, with apologies to the unknown author of the Gospel of John, yeah. You may remember the pertinent bit, or you may not, so here it is.
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome
(or, maybe, understood) it.
– John 1:5
As a complete aside, this is what happens when I wander around innocently looking to check/attribute a quotation: I can get something altogether new. It looks as if the well-known and much-loved form of this famous quotation might be, um, misinformation/misinterpretation. If only the Gospel writers had written in English, we wouldn’t have these translation issues.
Back to the main track: A light shines in the semi-darkness. In this case, the semi-darkness at the baseball park (about which the Gospel writers were oddly silent, come to think of it. I think Jesus could have been the best baseball manager ever. After all, he intuitively recruited the right number of disciples to field a team under designated-hitter rules.).
We went to a baseball game last evening and all we got was a rain-out of the second game of a doubleheader, itself necessitated by the rain-out of the game from the night before. Well, that’s not all we got. We also got some lights in the sky, albeit inconveniently framed by a hodge-podge of communications infrastructure and concrete. They have not, however, overcome the light.
We got these lights in the sky, too.
Are there really lights of different colours in this light standard? The semi-darkness, the darkness, and I do not know. You might say we have not overcome it. We certainly have not understood it.
Isabel
Are we counting the same? You say that Jesus intuitively chose the right number of disciples to field a team under designated hitter rules. Pitcher, catcher, third baseman, shortstop, second baseman, first baseman, left and centre and right fielders, plus DH numbers 10. Jesus chose 12 disciples.
Has my light gone out so I’m misunderstanding?
Anyway, love the pictures.
Tom
Tom – Hahaha. You’re right. I got thinking it was 10, for some reason. Oh well, let’s call them the relief pitcher and the closer.
Yep, that works.
Whether the writer meant “understood” or “overcome” in the sense of “vanquished,” the statement about an enlightened consciousness is true in either interpretation. The state of consciousness in which “evil imaginings” arise typically occurs near or during sleep, which typically occurs in the darkness of night. That is because hearing shuts down with ear muscle fatigue at the end of the day, triggering the domino effects in body muscles that promote the state of (un)consciousness we call “sleep.” In that twilight zone before deep sleep, the left-brain retains some consciousness of the usually “hidden” memories and imagination in the right-brain. As reason loses control over the thought processes, it comes closer to making the person like those personalities whose poor hearing condemns the person to mental horrors while awake in broad daylight. Those are the “children of darkness” who cannot understand or comprehend “the Light” — personified in Jesus — of goodness, or what Roger Ascham (the Renaissance schoolmaster) called “right reasoning,” to which I would add its twin “self-control.” Fix that right ear and you pull the person out of “darkness” into “the light.” Your photo of the rainbow reminds me of how much more powerfully the “heavenly lights” impacted human consciousness before humans harnessed electricity to compete with them. Now, we work and play far into the night. I wonder what understandings we have lost to our inventions?
Laurna – We’ve fallen out of touch with the natural world in many dimensions. I don’t want to live in a cave or by firelight alone, but there are trade-offs for our creature comforts, for sure.
My favourite quote about light is this: “So shines a good deed in the naughty world.”
Sorry, that should have been “in a naughty world.”
My fingers have a life of their own.
Barbara – Between our fingers and the auto-correct fiends, who knows how things happen?