We just finished celebrating the All Night Vigil for the Feast of the Holy Archangel Michael and All the Bodiless Hosts (our parish feast). One of the neat things about the Vigil service is that it is loaded with hymnography; Lord I Call, Litya, Aposticha, Canon, Praises, plus Tropars and the Kondak, all of them are full of poetic theology. The imagery they painted tonight include some great descriptions of the throne of God: the angels continually circle it in adoration. It is where God’s glory shines the brightest in this world. One of the hymns pretty much made the angels like planets circling the Triune Sun!
The image of God as the Sun is powerful, so powerful and true that it resonates throughout time and place. One of my favorites is Plato’s parable of the cave from The Republic. You know the story: men are chained in a cave, their reality is limited to the shadows of hand-puppets cast on the wall by the fire in cave. Someone manages to leave the cave and see real objects by the light of the real sun. For Plato, these are the philosophers. The ending is a bit of of self-pitying conceit: the enlightened one goes back in to tell the others and they reject and ridicule him.
As an academic pseudo-intellectual, it was always easy for me to see theosis (sanctification, divinization) in these terms. Even after I rejected the role of knowledge in the process (hard to do… I’ve read a lot of books!), I thought of enlightenment as providing the kind of wisdom that would make it easier to explain Orthodoxy to the people who prefer shadow puppets. While that would be nice, I think I see the Church trying to teach us something even more profound.
For the repentant sinner, encountering the Glory of God really is like the trogledyte seeing the sun, but the gift of this encounter is not philosophy or pedagogical grace. It is grateful awe. And while poetry and art come closer to sharing the profundity of this meeting, the language that presents it best is silence.
How can we convey the Glory of God to those who sit in darkness? How can we keep the rays of its perfection ever in our hearts and minds?
Not with the logic of philosophy or dogmatic theology, nor with the hallelujah’s of contemporary praise, nor even with the greatest iconography, hymnography or homoletic exegesis. We bask in the Glory of God in silent awe. As beautiful as the hymnography and music was at vigil tonight, it was the silent pre-vigil censing of the church with Holy Doors open that really captures the reality of our encounter with the Triune Sun.
