There's a Light in the Darkness

I recently received a flyer for "The Bay Area Masters Series" for the advaced study of the fine arts. I can't figure out why I received it, as I'm hardly advanced in the fine arts. I was thrilled, however, because the flyer had a photograph by an artist, Katherine Westerhout, whose work I had encountered years ago at the Oakland Museum. She's done a whole series of abandoned building photographs. I am amazed at her ability to go into these creepy, dark, rundown places that I wouldn't dare enter and capture light, beauty, and living water. http://www.katwest.com/architecture_bay_area.html

These photographs speak to my condition as I wrestle with a query that came to me while speaking in Meeting for Worship: How do we enable ourselves to listen to the Light in the midst of whatever impossible conditions we find ourselves? There are times and places where it is easy for me to feel the presence of God: in the company of friends, watching birds, teaching, when I sing. Yet I find these "easy places" little use to me in times of despair or conflict. Thinking of a "few of my favorite things" has never helped me to feel not so bad. So I find myself drawn to more complicated, even paradoxical, situations when searching for something to hang on to in hard times.

I heard this example a few weeks ago on the radio, as part of Sen. John McCain's essay for This I Believe http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4538138:

As a scared American prisoner of war in Vietnam, I was tied in torture ropes by my tormentors and left alone in an empty room to suffer through the night. Later in the evening, a guard I had never spoken to entered the room and silently loosened the ropes to relieve my suffering. Just before morning, that same guard came back and re-tightened the ropes before his less humanitarian comrades returned. He never said a word to me. Some months later on a Christmas morning, as I stood alone in the prison courtyard, that same guard walked up to me and stood next to me for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew
a cross in the dirt. We stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away.

I've been thinking about this guard for weeks now. How awful, to be the person who has to tie someone up in torture ropes. Yet, had he rebelled in any obvious way, he would not have been able to make these compassionate gestures to McCain. We rarely find ourselves in such dramatic circumstances, yet we all are in compromised positions from time to time, struggling to determine the right thing to do when the very situation is not right.