March 22, 2008
Easter Vigil
Alleluia, Christ is Risen.
This is the night.
When our ancestors were delivered.
When Christ broke the bonds of death.
When all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of death.
When wickedness is put to flight.
When pride and hatred are cast out.
When earth and heaven are joined.
This night is a line of contrast between light and darkness, between life and death, between hope and despair. And it is along that line that we find signs of the depth of a great reality we might otherwise miss alltogether.
One of the hardest lessons I have tried to learn in drawing and painting has to do with learning to mark and choose the edge of shadows. Shadow edges move and vary in response to the surface they represent. A hastily drawn shadow is just a blob on a page. A carefully observed shadow is defined by its edge, which when drawn carefully can bring an image to life. I heard several art teachers say the same thing in different ways. One had us reduce images to black and white using only a brush and india ink. The choices of where to end the shadows and how to represent their shapes seemed arbitrary. I would marvel at his examples and wonder how he had been able to see the core shadows so clearly. They seemed obvious when he put them down, but not until then. Once on paper, everything came into view. His choices made sense.
I thought at first it was just his facination with black and white photography and movies that were enjoying renewed popularity in the sixties. Films like Bonnie and Clyde and Cool Hand Luke were shot in black and white for the drama of the contrast in a time when color film had been the norm for twenty years. Lots of us had bottles of chemicals in our basements for processing black and white film, and even in the psychadelic, multi-colored times, high contrast was all the rage. Andy Warhol reduced Marylin Monroe to a couple shades of orange on a yellow background and the rest was history. Art and culture were then as always inseparable, and the art world seemed to be serving as the keeper of hard lines in an age of anything goes.
That teacher's interest in learning to make careful choices about shadows was, however, more than a passing style. When I began trying to learn about drawing people, one teacher would say, "I don't want to see any smooth curves or straight lines at the edges of your shadows. The demarcation between shadow and light is never that simple. Drawing that line requires careful attention. Those lines wander." And then he would draw a line that I saw as straight, only he would weave it in and out in a way that didn't seem to make much sense until he was finished and then a living arm or leg or shoulder would appear.
This is the night, says the Church down through the ages. This is the line between darkness and light, between hope and despair, between life and death. This night draws a line through our culture and through our lives. It is the line that brings us into focus as our shadows are divided from our highlights. It is the line that brings us to life in an ever deepening response to the work of our creator. It is the line where we are always being made into new creatures. The line marked by the resurection of Christ is not a simple, easy to draw line through humanity, or through this community or through our changing stories. No one could have seen that the line would pass through compassion and caring until it embraced suffering. No one would have guessed that the line marked for us tonight would have passed through our worst fears and anger and darkness and emerged into brilliant light.
This night begins a new moment in the work of creation. Once and for all, and again each year as the church brings us back around in this liturgy. This night will define us, recreate us if we let it.
How blessed is this night, says the ancient hymn when earth and heaven are joined and we are reconciled to God. This night will define us and remake us because we are new people in a new relationship with our creator. This night is about finishing the work of creation. The edges of our lives that come into focus in the light of the risen Christ are the frontier of our becoming. The light that shows us who we are will advance into the darkest areas of our lives until all is light.
The light we hail this evening is the new creation moving over us, through us, into us. The risen Christ we greet will never leave us, will stay beside us until we are made new and imperishible like he is. This is the night when we say with countless saints down through the ages. Alleluia, Christ is risen.......
John Baker