Buried in the age-old pages of Judaism’s medieval Talmud, there is a rabbinical tale of particular meaning to Christians. While it has been recounted in innumerable versions, the main action of the tale has remained the same.
Come Inside!
One can imagine the action unfolding along the cobbled streets of Europe. A man is walking along in the darkness of the Slavic night, traveling the road that will lead him home. It is late and rain has been pouring upon the stone roads for hours. At a certain point, the man comes before a window whose dressing has been pulled back, flooding the darkness with light. The man peers into the window and catches sight of a group of people flailing their arms in wild formation. Puzzled, the man stands there for a moment, making some attempt to learn the purpose of the group. Just before he pushes ahead, a woman comes outside and beckons the man to come in from out of the rain. He hesitates, but then accepts her invitation. Once he steps inside, he can see that the people — who looked mad to him from the outside — had been spending the evening hours dancing at a wedding feast. From the inside, the actions of the people made sense to the man: He could see their bright and cheerful faces as each one circled the dance floor. And, as he watched the people dance, he found himself relishing a moment’s rest along the road home.
In his book, The Truth of Catholicism, George Weigel makes the point of this Talmudic tale his own. There, he invited his readers to come inside the doors of the Church and to examine the controversial beliefs of Catholics from within the context of the convictions that gives them shape and meaning. It is this invitation — to come inside — that the Church has extended to the world for two millennia. In fact, this invitation defines the whole of the Catholic experience, which can be expressed in the ancient formula “come and see.” These words have echoed down through the centuries to this generation as the Church has invited each age to consider anew the life and message of Jesus Christ.
In Toronto, during the summer of 2002, Pope John Paul II, standing in persona Christi Capitis and as the successor to St. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, urged the pilgrims who had gathered at Downsview Lands Park to ask, “on what foundations, on what certainties should we build our lives and the life of the communities to which we belong?” With this question, the pope was asking his listeners to consider the “insides” of the Christian creed. His question was at once speculative and practical, theological and pastoral. And, for this reason, he was right to raise it in the context of an overnight vigil. For the vigil, situated as it was against the backdrop of the black Canadian night that hung over the shores of Lake Ontario that evening, invited deep reflection. It was a kind of portal for the pope’s listeners to enter into the Christian experience.
Indeed, the nighttime has long served as a unique access point to the Christian life. For ages, it has constituted an important theme in Catholic apologetic and spiritual writing, chiseled in the Catholic imagination like letters in black stone. After all, it was at nightfall that Israel won its liberation and came to know the enduring love that God had for His Chosen People. So, too, it was during the night that God chose to enter into the world and to dwell in the flesh among men; and it was in the blackness of the night that Christ chose to institute the light of life, which is the Eucharist, the great memorial of His love and the future pledge of His presence among men. And it was in that same night that Christ chose to hand Himself over, in total freedom and trusting obedience to the Father, to be crucified and put to death on a tree.
Through the centuries following the Passion, death, and Resurrection of Christ, Catholics have continued to reflect on the spiritual significance of the night. St. John of the Cross, for example, provided rich mediations on the dark night of the soul and its progress from the night of death to the bright morning of the Resurrection and unending life. St. John of the Cross understood the night, to be sure, as an expressive moment of the total unification of the soul with God for which each human heart longs.
The World’s Night
Even outside the Christian communion, night has been the source of reflections about matters of the human heart — where tenderness whispers rumors of the divine. Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical book, which bears the title Night, is one such instance. That short work is a timeless plea for peace and justice in our world, a plea that grew out of his tormented encounter with the long night of Nazi oppression and persecution. When that work is read with the heart of the Christian, it becomes a signpost for humankind’s need for Christ’s forgiveness and love.
Like Wiesel, Pope John Paul II came into close contact with the harsh realities of the Nazi regime while coming of age in Poland. As George Weigel recounts in his biography of the Polish pontiff, it was in the night that the then Karol Wojtyla stole across the frozen Vistula River past Crakow’s ancient Wawel Castle in order to join his friends in the blacked-out Debniki district. There, along with them, he would carry out an act of clandestine cultural resistance. Moving under cover of night, he knew full well that if the Nazis spotted him, he could be deported to a concentration camp and meet with a hideous death.
In an apartment overlooking the Vistula, he gathered with his friends in a candlelit room to begin a dramatic recitation of Adam Mickiewicz’s Polish national classic Pan Tadeusz. Weigel recounts that, at one point in the evening, the Nazi megaphones posted outside began to blare in the streets below, broadcasting another message about a world without God — a message as cold as the frozen waters of the Vistula. Yet, the college-age Wojtyla continued his reading through the night, unfazed.
Years later, as the first Polish pope, he would have occasion to address a much larger crowd in the open air of Warsaw’s great Victory Square. Again, he would be interrupted, but, this time, it would be by the cries of his Polish brothers and sisters shouting with one voice, “We Want God! We want God!” That moment would confirm the pope in his belief that the cries that emerge from the night are without variance filled with the cheerful expectation of the rising sun.
Perhaps that realization helps to give meaning to the Church’s anticipation on the night of Easter of “the night [that] will be as clear as day: [the night that] will become our light, our joy” (Exsultet). I think that it was the deep spiritual significance of the night and its profound relationship to the light of Christ, the Light of the World, that prompted Pope John Paul II to gather more than one million members of the present generation on the shores of Lake Ontario on a late summer’s night in order to pose to them his timeless but nonetheless urgent question about the strength of our convictions and the foundations of our lives in communion. John Paul was a man of great drama. And so, it was fitting that he should have chosen the theatre of night and light in order to invite the present generation to come inside the Church, to examine the convictions of Catholics from within the context of faith. For in so doing the pope was able to make a sensitive appeal from within the world’s doubts and confusions — its own night of unbelief — in order to beckon it toward the light of a new evangelization.
In this the pope was drawing upon another truth precious to Catholics. In order to understand the truth, we must first believe. That is, in order to walk into the brightness of revealed truth, we must first wrestle with the dimness of trusting faith. St. Anselm understood well that in the life of the Christian the light and the night come together. Our doubts and concerns, aspirations and hopes, fears and anxieties, are inherent in — not separate from — the life of faith. It is so because we are born into a world of sin where faith and reason must contend with one another even as the truth contends with itself. To put the point in different words, we are called to be in the world — the world of reason — but not of the world alone. The Christian is challenged to be present to sinful and suffering humankind while at the same time learning to fix his or her gaze on the broadening light of heaven itself.
Show People Who They Are!
We are called to be the light of the world, shining in the dark places of human life. In fact, the passage from St. Matthew that teaches that “we are the light of the world and the salt of the earth” was chosen to be the theme for the week-long pilgrimage to Toronto and the final meeting with Pope John Paul II. In that passage, we were taught to be witnesses to the Light that is Christ, the Light that shines in the darkness, a Light that no darkness can overcome.
I think that that means that we must bear witness to the truth of Catholicism, but also to the truth about ourselves created as we are in the image and likeness of God — the God Who has destined us for freedom in Himself. Yet in order to become His witnesses we must first enter into the communion of love that He has prepared for us from the beginning of time; we must enter into the truths and the realities of faith. And, when we do so, we will find that the doubts and confusions we experienced in the past were pointing toward the light of faith all along. For in the ultimate sense there can be no lasting tension between faith and the darkness of unaided reason, between night and light. As St. Thomas Aquinas taught, reason is in accord with faith as truth is in accord with itself, for the one God has brought both into being. Thus, in the middle of life’s most difficult times, it is essential to remember that
Love is the light — and in the end, the only light — that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working. Love is possible, and we are able to practice it because we are created in the image of God. (Deus Caritas Est, n. 39)
And so the question of Pope John Paul II and the invitation of George Weigel lead to the admonition we are given by our current Holy Father. We who are baptized into the life of Christ must bear witness to the truth and build our lives upon it. We must light up the night with love.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
John Paul Shimek frequently writes about the JP2 generation and issues related to men's spirituality. His writing has appeared in the National Catholic Register, the Newark Catholic Advocate, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He lives in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Readers can contact him at intermirifica@hotmail.com.
