Glow

When children come in from a good afternoon of playing in the snow or on the ice, their cheeks are flushed with a healthy and merry glow, and all’s right with the world.  We’ll say that there’s a light glistening in their eyes, and if you were a literalist, and you believed only in what you could measure with a ruler or a balance-scale, you’d say that was nonsense.  “My light meter registers only such brightness in Billy’s eyes as was there before he strapped on his skates,” says Mr. Blind Man.  The point is that we see as light what shines with intelligence and gladness.  I don’t know that everything you see in the world will make you glad, but I do suspect that gladness opens the eyes, especially if it is that gladness that has known sorrow and not fled from it.  Says the Psalmist, “I was glad when I heard them say, Let us go up to the house of the Lord.”

This is surely something the old glaziers understood, those who worked on the stained glass in the great cathedrals of Europe.  If…