Thinking Out LoudThanks to Dark Mofo, a winter festival run by Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art, a verse from the Bible appeared in my newsfeed this week.
Alongside a photograph of Ryoji Ikeda’s “Spectra”, an artwork that uses “forty-nine xenon searchlights” to cut through Hobart’s night sky: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. –John 1:5.
The festival is known for reappropriating and subverting religious symbols and ideas.
Walking through the red glow of “Dark Park” with a friend, as if through a surreal dream, I boarded a 212-metre ship with “THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO PRAY FOR” writ large across a wall.
As they walked through red-tinted light, groups of people chatted, drank, and laughed. I wondered how many prayed, and how many thought there was no point. How many had seen the words of John, and understood how radical they were?
The source material speaks, not of visible electromagnetic radiation, but the radiance of a person. A fully human, fully divine person, entering this lost, broken, darkened world, to change it from the inside out.
God himself coming down to us, as one of us, is more subversive, and more shocking, than anything that any festival could stage.
C. S. Lewis likened this life to a dream. It might seem real now, but one day will be seen for what it is: “The bad dream will be over: it will be morning.”
Is it really possible that one day I will have nothing left to pray for – not because I have exhausted every prayer, not because I’ve lost all hope, but because my deepest hopes have come to pass?
I’ve reason to believe it is. Because even now, even here, in unexpected places and unexpected ways, “the light shines in the darkness”.
This Thinking Out Loud first appeared on our social media accounts.