Musings on “Night Vision”
O Lover,
In the recent 2nd Sunday of Advent homilist Fr. Daniel Groody, CSC, an international authority on immigration and faculty/administrator at Notre Dame, cited an image which remains with me. He related how during one of his innumerable trips to Central America during “the trouble” (1979-92) he had a conversation with a nun. She had spoken about her ministry of repeatedly seeking out and returning the decapitated heads of Salvadoran indigenous to their respective families as an act of healing. In response to Groody’s query as to how she sustained hope in such a bold and hazardous ministry, she had used the image of “night vision,” the capability via technological enhancement to see a broader portion of the electromagnetic light spectrum (including infrared & ultraviolet) rather than that merely accessible to the naked eye. She had identified such “vision” with the vastly larger perspective of You, O Lover, and of the life of faith amidst the darkness.
I have been pondering whether the sister’s image does not point to the central challenge of our time, namely how to hold knowledge of destructive conflicts, be they personal, relational, national or planetary, within Your massive and Mystérium-shrouded dream for the cosmos. Are we not vulnerable to despair when we neglect or forget that You as Reality Itself are vastly more expansive than the spectrum we are ordinarily able to see? But if so, how do we come into an enlargement of that spectrum to include Your “evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1)?
I experience the narrative of the birth of the Christ, both oxymoronically understated and yet revolutionary, to be the microcosm ever-bursting forth into the macrocosm inclusive of EVERYTHING! Dismissed as a remote historical and geographical obscurity or trivialized as having to do solely with the birth of a baby, this story becomes a glimpse into the vast precincts of Your Mystérium which far outstrip human sense, analysis or culture. Rather than what I perceive within my wavelength constraints, Your unfettered M.O. consummated in Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28), often dismissed as antiquated, unrealistic, and thus irrelevant, blossoms forth. With the image of “night vision” sister was wagering all on the omni-transcendence of Your cosmic dream.
In short, the Feast of the Nativity is Your invitation to us, with all other creatures implicitly in tow, to live as if You, Reality Itself, were characterized by the vulnerability, immanence, interpenetration, promise, and eternalityof that Bethlehem narrative. As if the lion indeed is lying down with the lamb (Is 11:6-9); as if the training for war is ended (Is 2:4); as if “all things [are already] well” (Julian of Norwich); as if Your final Word (Lógos [Jn 1:1,14]) is always Easter Sunday life, not Dark Friday death. In short, as if Your unbridledness by chrónos de-absolutizes our human thralldom to it allowing the Christ event to be the operative and definitive paradigm in all times and all places. The “night vision” image thus brings even richer meaning to the Apocalypse’s reference to “the end of time” (chrónos [10:6]), for in it the Christ, and Your Mystérium which he ongoingly showcases (epiphany), are embraced over all the exigencies of this or that. In short, in You, O Lover, there is vastly more to be seen than what we naturally see, and that “more” is all the difference.
In embracing Your “night vision” Fr. Daniel’s wise and courageous colleague added her “yes” to Your Big Picture, and in so doing witnessed to the inextinguishability of Your Light ever shining into, and deconstructing, the darkness (Jn 1:5).
