Let me tell you a story.
It’s Lent. The middle of Lent, to be precise. The part of Lent where cutting things out of my life has lost any sense of novelty and turned into deep longing. I know this feeling is part of the point of Lent, and yet my thoughts are turning from productive to bitter, so I come, like a pilgrim to Jerusalem, to the church. For a brief moment, it helps. I stand in front of a prayer candle, and close my eyes. I pray against the bitterness. I pray for peace. I pray for my cousin who is completing a gap year in Costa Rica. I pray for….
*click*
I pray for nothing else, because I’ve opened my eyes to the sound of someone’s phone camera, taking a picture of the prayer candle I just lit.
Is this sensation familiar to you, dear reader? Because it’s familiar to me. I fabricated the story above, but I did not fabricate my irritation. There are a thousand small things that make me feel this way: when someone talks noisily in the back of a church service, when people take communion mindlessly, even when someone cuts into a friend’s meaningful comment to hear the sound of their own voice. As a Christian, I see the world around me as fundamentally imbued with the divine, and thus fundamentally imbued with the sacred. As a Christian, I also see a world where the people around me proceed to stomp on that sacred like a piece of bubble wrap. Some days, it’s hard.
But at least I’m in good company. As I was reminded last week when I saw his painting of the woman caught in adultery again, Rembrandt agrees with me. Admittedly, I haven’t been able to confirm this from a personal interaction (although hopefully soon I’ll have saved up enough for that time machine I’ve had my eye on and we can have a proper conversation). Still, from the way Rembrandt depicts the story I feel confident that he doesn’t like the desecration of the sacred any more than I do. Look at the light in the paining. The beam of sunlight falls past the crowd onto the Christ figure and through him, the accused woman. Behind the woman, shrouded in black, are the crowds of religious rulers, too busy judging the scene and fighting amongst each other to recognize the most sacred act of all: that of divine mercy. Rembrandt gives them no quarter; they are painted so darkly one can barely make out their forms, outside the light of Christ and outside of his attention or concern. The woman taken in adultery, in contrast, is under the loving gaze of her Creator and dressed in white. It is she, Rembrandt seems to say, that is pure. It doesn’t matter that she’s technically the “sinner” in the room. She understands what is important here.
I admit, this interpretation makes me happy. Rembrandt is a kindred spirit, someone who gets it. If I were to add him to my fabricated cathedral story from the beginning of this post, he would be standing right beside me, pursed lips, sharing in the same irritation and scorn. We might roll our eyes, or exchange a knowing glance and then move away, content in the knowledge that we would never be so disrespectful.
It’s a blissful (even if completely ridiculous) mental image.
Well, it’s blissful right up until I realize that if the story of the woman caught in adultery was applied to my fabricated cathedral story, Rembrandt and I would play the part of religious rulers. What did they do that we haven’t done? We’ve scorned; we’ve painted people darkly, and we’ve probably missed divine grace in the process.
Luckily for Rembrandt and I, his painting is – in one detail – inaccurate. The world is not so starkly divided as he represents it. The real Christ pays attention to everyone, not just the woman caught in adultery. There is room in his love for the religious rulers too, flawed as they may be. There is room for both the scorned and those who scorn. There is room for failure, of a great many kinds. There is room for me.
But if scorn is not the right response to the desecration of the sacred, what is? As much as I want to leave this post on some warm and fluttery note about Jesus’s great love, I cannot. Sometimes the desecration of the sacred is far more evil than a cellphone and prayer candle. Sometimes it deserves righteous anger and confrontation. Sometimes a long suffering sigh does not do nearly enough to combat what is vividly wrong.
In these moments, it helps me to remember that I hold the human soul as something sacred too. The man who pulls out his phone to take a picture of a prayer candle is disrespectful, yes, but also a child of God. The girl who takes communion like she pops bubblegum was made in the same image I was. The person I want to snark for his rude interruption shares my divine DNA. Even if their actions belay it, even if they are frustrating and difficult and oblivious, there is something in them that is precious.
It is this principle that must come first. From there the situation might require grace and forgiveness or it might require righteous anger and then grace and forgiveness. Either way, Rembrandt and I (and maybe you too, dear reader?) must remember that it does no good to protect one form of the sacred by destroying another.
Nimbus of a Writer 
Very thought-provoking Anna.
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