The Light That Gets Lost

"The Blue of Distance," a chapter in Rebecca Solnit's wonderful book A Field Guide to Getting Lost begins with a description of how color measures the distance light travels to get to us. The warmer colors are closest to our eye. At the farthest end of the spectrum, she writes, lies blue, the color of twilight, of far horizons, of deep water:

The light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole of distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

This chapter sprung to mind when I was meditating on Jesus' words in John 16. "It is better for you that I go." In particular, I remembered a passage later in the chapter where she compares a child's eye-view of the world, close-up and present tense, with an adult's view of life in retrospect. She quotes a writer describing an excursion to the Grand Canyon with his children.While the adults in the party sought vistas and panoramas, the children would 'scour the ground for bones, pine cones, sparkly sandstone... .' Solnit comments:

There is no distance in childhood... . The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, and the complexity of the terrain we traverse... .

With Jesus' departure imminent, the disciples are poised to discover melancholy as they too traverse more complex terrain -- physical, emotional, spiritual -- than they ever imagined. Solnit quotes Simone Weil writing to a friend:

Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.

Jesus' going away "for a little while" deepens our friendship by extending it. He shifts the disciples' (and our) gaze from the near, from close, daily contact, to the far horizon. He reveals that separation carries its own intimacy. "Love," writes Solnit, "is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between." Jesus tells the disciples of that love and gives a name to that particular atmosphere. It is the Comforter.

And, of course, without departure and separation we can never experience the exquisiteness of return and reunion, as Jesus tells his friends, tells us:

But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.