Out for a walk on the loveliest of late-summer evenings. The fields are still full of flowers--mostly Queen Anne's lace, but some thistles, clover, butter-and-eggs and other floral miscellanea, and the asters (my faves) are just now getting going. The air on my face was friendly, a little cool, a little damp--perfection The peace of this quiet season, its mild reflectiveness, can get into a person, and that happened as I headed out along the path to the mall.

I ran my few errands, dawdling happily through the drugstore and supermarket, and started home with my backpack full of purchases, toothpaste and school supplies and a tub of cream cheese, just as the light was beginning to go. There was one particular moment when the light took on that odd quality it gets just before it starts to fade away: coupling clarity and great gentleness.

It's not that anything's blurry in this light; in fact, things seem to stand out with greater definition, more precision--but not sharpness. There's nothing sharp about this light. It brings out the richness of colour, so that the greens seem richer, the red of a geranium more deeply joyous, the yellow of the butter-and-eggs flowers strong and happy. There's no shift to the colours of things, merely an intensification of what they are, so that when you look at the grass, you seem to be seeing the very soul of the colour Green, and a neighbour's lobelia is the Perfection of Blue.

It occurred to me: if you want to know the truth of a thing, you need to bring it into bright light. There's nothing like bright light for showing you exactly what a thing looks like, all its bumps and hollows, its whiskers and wrinkles, or the fine details of its sags and slumps. My idea of hell is a brightly lit changing room in a clothing store. If this is truth, it definitely HURTS. On the other hand, if you want to apprehend the mystery of a thing, you have to sidle up to its dark side--its contradictoriness, its unclarity, its hiddenness, what it will not reveal to you or what you cannot understand. Which is maybe why Christmas Eve is often so much more moving than Christmas Day.

But (maybe?) if you want to know the soul of a thing, you need to come looking for it when the light's like this--still bright enough for vision, but softened by a small side-order of darkness. It's Truth with a smear of Mystery that gets at the heart of things.

If that's the case--and I'm only guessing here!--then maybe this is the sort of light that we face in God's face, at that moment when we stand before him. He shows us what we have made for good or ill of the gifts of life and talents that he'd dowered us with. There is clarity in this vision; it doesn't hide or cover up anything. It will be a truthful accounting, and all that we thought we had successfully hidden will come into the light of day.

But that Light, while searching and truthful, will also be full of the mystery of Grace. It will reveal to us who we are, accurately and precisely. But I don't think it will be a halogen bulb blinding us and cruelly flattening out whatever beauty we have. I think it will show us what there is in ourselves to love, as well as to hang our heads about. I think it will be a light like this light, a light of gentleness and reflection as well as of clarity--a light that brings out our own rich colours, for us to see and understand.

We do well to leave God's incomprehensible grace at the core of belief, instead of trying to tease it out into something that isn't dark to us, for this reason: that the Light unsoftened by Mystery would be more than we could bear. When we extend that grace to another human being, instead of focusing on that person's failings, we do what should hope and pray God will do for us--and if we don't think we need that grace, it's because we haven't looked at ourselves with any truthfulness at all.

If God clearly wants the dark gentleness of Mystery at the heart of things, who are we to argue?

The light slipped away that one small fraction, and we were heading into evening as the colours faded a little at a time. I found myself singing the last verse of a hymn I'd loved since childhood:

Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm,
Whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm;
Be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray,
Your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.