Lent Day 2
by Will Gray
Joel 2:1-2
Blow a trumpet in Zion;
sound an alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of the Lord is coming; it is near,
2 a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness!
Like blackness there is spread upon the mountains
a great and powerful people;
their like has never been before,
nor will be again after them
through the years of all generations.
The Disciples Peter and John Running to Tomb by Eugène Burnand
I was barely teenaged when I learned that color exists only because of light.
As a child, I had experienced the kaleidoscopic dimmer switch called “sunset,” but I must have thought—as the color slowly drained from the day—that it was simply too dark to see the colors anymore.
I was wrong.
Color isn’t easier to see after sunrise. It doesn’t exist until sunrise. Blues, yellows, magentas and sages all bloom into being only after sunlight shines onto the world, after everything in its gaze absorbs and reflects a dose of its rays. The result of that tinctured conversation between light and each thing is . . . color.
I thought of that rainbowed dialogue as Lent waved from over the wintry-dark hill we call New Year’s Day. I thought of it when my two-year-old son cried after the sun “went away,” and we had to remind him that other people need it to visit them too.
I thought of it because of Joel 2, a terrifying Lent passage where the day of the Lord isn’t really a day at all but the night-time darkness of his absence.
There’s terror in this darkness, because it means creation in reverse. It means that all the color and happiness is drained from the world of those who disconnect themselves from God.
It’s easy to forget that we’re never truly threatened by the presence of God. It’s his absence that maroons us in the darkness, and his arrival that’s a gift.
During Lent, we remember more than the murkiness of a world gone astray, more than the line between light and dark running through our hearts. We remember the One who entered the darkness for us, both the palpable dread of the garden and the daytime gloom of the crucifixion. He did it for us, you know. He did it for everyone who would join the family that the Lord makes his face to shine on.
In the next life, there will be no need of the sun. The presence of God himself will blossom us into our technicolor True Selves for good.
For now, in these years of in-between, we remember where our hope, our definition come from. There will be seasons of darkness, of not-seeing-why, of suffering. These seasons are teaching us to long for . . . even to pre appreciate . . . what happens when the light finally arrives.
Will Gray helps people and organizations discover who they’re made to be, through his companies ALIGN and Vocationality. He is husband to Alison, father to Eden, Vincent, and Sydney, and grateful recipient of a PhD from the University of St Andrews.