Contrasts

 

Is this beautiful? 

If it is, what makes it beautiful as the candle within shines out in the same way as other tealight candles do?  

It is both light and shadow, hollowness and opacity, a mixture of illumination and darkness - a contrast that creates a pattern that is cast out, cast upon. 

Contrasts...

Is not the sunrise particularly captivating because there is the emerging light that meets the darkness of the passing night? Would sunrise be the sunrise people wake up early to watch if it was just one gigantic blob of blinding light? 

Are not mountains intensely stunning because they rise high above their valleys? Would nature's landscape have the same power to take our breath away if it was just one piece of flat land? 

It is easy to admire the beauty of shadows - of light blocked by a lack of clarity and transparency. Shadows mesmerise, like how my students enjoy playing with them, cast by the light from the classroom projector. It is easy to admire the mountains and valleys, the ups and downs. Because they exist outside of us.

It is not so easy to admire contrasts when they are the shadows of our hearts, when they map the ups and downs of our chaotic life. I don't like such shadows and how I wish they were all eliminated at once! How nice life would be if it was all flat ground, easy to trek across! How about you? 

Yet, the reality is that contrasts exist within me, within each of us. Light and darkness, good and bad, strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, joy and pain, laughters and tears, hope and despair, love and fear, dreams and reality... the healed and the still hurting, the already and the yet-to-be, the I am and the still becoming.

Can there possibly be beauty in the seemingly imperfect, in the contrasts of our human reality? 

Or should I ask... Why can't there be? 

Why can't we celebrate the process of becoming instead of being so insistent that things must already be? 

We fear the shadows, the pain, the yet-to-be, the reality, the imperfections. Because we know our vulnerability that is capable of receiving deep hurts. We also know our power to hurt another. We fear being overwhelmed, that the boat of our lives be overturned by powers we are helpless towards. We fear the ugly for we long to be loved in our beauty. This is our human nature that longs for love. Love alone fills us. 

Blessed is he who finds love that embraces his contrasts, his human reality. But independent of finding such love, dare we relook at our own perception of what beauty looks like, of what life-charming entails? Dare we love ourselves in the reality of who we are, with the myriad of contrasts that affirms we are only on-the-way and have yet to fully arrive at the perfection we hope for? And then, to extend this love to others? 

Isn't this the redeeming love of God for us that delights in us even as we are only still becoming? The love He nailed to the cross in an irreversible way is such an all-embracing love. Lent isn't, to me, so much a time of intentional fasting and almsgiving to give up something that causes me to feel a pinch. While it is necessary to determinedly turn away from sin and be more loving, the way to this isn't quite to set goals to work towards but rather, by displacement - that I intentionally spend time to look more closely at how God has loved me and treated me, to stay at the foot of the cross for long and allow Jesus hanging there to speak to my heart about what His death and rising are truly about. Filled with His love, redeemed and transformed by His love, only then do I have the reference and capacity to love myself and others in the way I've first been loved. 

I bought this lamp from IKEA a few months ago because I knew its shadows would be beautiful. I only just got struck by its beauty tonight. Isn't it beautiful?