Other ideas about light

Last week, as Helena Iara looked at shadows, I told her Plato's allegory of the cave, which strikes me as an interesting way to think about how babies learn about shadows and light.  The end of the allegory, however, is just stupid: after all of the interesting process of learning how shadows play on the wall, how fire burns, and how to climb out of the cave, the philosopher just sits and stares at the sun.  From the interesting history and diversity of the cave, he ends up getting bored just looking at one light, which will end up blinding him.  A silly metaphor for knowledge.

So, several nights ago, I sat in the hammock with her and told another story about light, one I heard when I first started to study Liberation Theology, in Chile the year after the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship.  I heard it from a young priest who worked with the poor.

One upon a time," he began, "there was a poor man who lived deep in the forest.  Each morning her woke before dawn to break a path through the thorns of the wood to get to work, where he struggled and struggled to make enough money to feed his family.  Then, after dark, he would make his way home, once again constantly cut by thorns, and he would arrive to give what food he had been able to buy for his family, seasoned with his own blood, cut by the thorns of the forest.

But one day, a man came to the man's hut and gave him a gift: a flashlight.  He showed the man how to turn it on and off, and gave him enough batteries for weeks.  The worker thanked him and promised he would use the light.

Several weeks later, the man who had given the flashlight returned to see if his gift had made life easier for the worker, and he was sad to see that the man was even more cut and wounded and tired than he had been before.  "Oh, I am so sorry that you have lost the flashlight," he told the worker.  "I wish I had another to give you."

"Lost it?" the worker asked.  "No, it is right here.  And it has given me much comfort in my difficult life."

Comfort? the man asked himself, and then asked aloud, "Can you show me how you have used the light?"

The worker took the light, turned it on, and shown it into his own eyes.  A beatific smile opened up on his face.  "You can see," he repeated, "how you gift has been a comfort to me."

The priest who had told me the story then took a bible from the table before him.  "This is a flashlight," he said.  "We have always thought that we should use it like this [he turned the pages toward himself], but in truth, we must use it like this [then he turned the pages away from him].

It is interesting to compare this idea of light, knowledge, or God as something useful, something to make the world better, with the silly mysticism of Plato or much of traditional religion.  Light isn't just to make shadows, of course.  Helena will learn that in time.  But light certainly isn't just something to stare into.  It is something to use to understand our complex, compelling, and difficult world.