The Window and the Light Behind It

He stopped in the doorway because his eyes did not know what to do.

He was on holiday. It was somebody else's country and somebody else's church and he had come in out of the heat, mostly for the cool of the stone, and he had got about four steps in before the whole far end of the building did something to him that he had no word for.

Gold, and dark faces, and a great deal of candle smoke, and the smell of it, and a woman near the front standing absolutely still with her chin lifted.

And he stood there in the doorway with his hat in his hand and had the strangest crisis of his adult life, which was this: he did not know whether he was allowed to look.

He had grown up being warned about exactly this. Not viciously. Kindly, by people who loved him, in a tradition with bare walls and very good reasons for them, and the warning had gone in at about six years old and had never once come out.

So looking felt like disloyalty. And looking away felt like rudeness, and worse than rudeness, it felt like refusing something.

He compromised, the way you do. He looked at the floor and read the guidebook. He gave the whole thing about eleven seconds of proper attention in the corner of his eye, and then he went back out into the heat, and he thought about it for the rest of the week and could not say why.

Now, this is not only about a church on holiday, and you will know that already, because you have your own version.

Yours might be a small worn photograph on your grandmother's mantelpiece that you were never sure how to feel about. It might be a cross on a wall, or a window with light coming through colored glass onto your hands, or a hill at a particular hour of the evening, or a piece of music that undoes you every time and you have started avoiding it.

Something in front of you is doing something to you, and you are half certain you are not permitted to let it.

So your eyes lock. You look at it and you are guilty. You look away and you are poorer. And you have been doing that little maneuver for years, and it is exhausting, and you have never once told anybody about it, because it sounds like nothing.

It is not nothing. Something in you was made to be moved, and you have it on a short lead.

Where the looking actually ends up

Paul writes one sentence about looking that settles more than it argues, and it is worth taking apart slowly because every clause in it is load bearing.

And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image, from glory to glory, by the Lord, the Spirit.2 Corinthians 3:18

Notice first what is not there. There is no instruction about an object. There is no rule about a wall or a panel or a candle, and there will not be one on this page either; that is genuinely not what this site is for and it will never rule on anybody's practice in either direction.

What is there is an eye and a destination.

Beholding the glory of the Lord. The looking has somewhere to arrive, and the arrival is a Person. Which means the only real question about anything in front of your eyes is not whether it is permitted. It is whether your looking stops there or goes on through.

And then the second half, which is the mercy in it.

Are being transformed. Slowly, continuously, from one degree to another, by looking. Not by arguing yourself into it, not by getting the theology exactly right first, not by a single decision made in a doorway with your hat in your hand. There were envoys once who came back from a long journey and could only report that they had not known whether they were in heaven or on earth, and nobody had won an argument with them; something had simply got past their guard through their eyes.

That is how God has always worked on people, and it is not a lesser way. It is the way that gets to the part of you that debate cannot reach.

So here is the sentence for the doorway.

A window is worth having and it is not the light. You do not worship the window and you do not board it up. You look through it, and if the light on your hands is beautiful, that is the light, and it came from the sun, and the glass was only ever honest about it.

And this is yours right now rather than pending a ruling from anybody: you are free to look and free to look past, because what is written puts the glory of the Lord at the end of the beholding and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries an eye along that line.

Through, not at. That is as far as this goes, and it is far enough to open your eyes.