In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr tells the story of Marie-Laure, a French girl, and Werner, a German boy, whose lives and worlds collide amid the calamity of World War II.
Marie-Laure has been blind since age 6, and the war takes her to the small coastal town of Saint-Malo to live with her uncle, Etienne. The Germans confiscate all the radio antennas in the town to hinder the resistance, but her uncle keeps one hidden in his attic. As the violence of the war comes nearer and nearer, her uncle agrees to use his secret radio for the resistance effort, broadcasting the location of German troops from the secret attic hideout.
Werner is an orphan and lives in a small mining town in Germany, where he stands out for his gifts in science and mechanics. He finds a broken radio and fixes it, and he and his sister spend their nights listening in the dark to a French professor hundreds of miles away delivering broadcasts on science for children. Werner’s talents are discovered when he fixes the radio of a German officer, who lands him a spot at a prestigious academy for Hitler Youth. From there, he’s placed on a special assignment with a team to track down radio signals of the resistance and kill the broadcasters.
Broken and numbed by violence, near the end of the war, Werner’s travels lead him to the town of Saint-Malo, where he tracks down a radio signal that reminds him of the one he and his sister would listen to back in the orphanage, of the French professor and his science broadcasts, the one that had given him such comfort and hope and expanded his world, when it had seemed so small. Of course, this signal leads him to Etienne’s attic, where he meets Marie-Laure. They develop a friendship and even a young love, and Marie-Laure opens Werner’s eyes to the wider story of which they are both a part, and, like it or not, are forced to make choices within, choices Werner would soon have to confront.
The novel’s title comes early in the story as Werner and his sister listen to the French professor broadcasting out into the darkness, teaching them about the science of light, color, and vision.
What do we call visible light? He asks. We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other [leaving just this infinitesimal sliver for us to see], so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.
I.
There is so much we simply cannot see. This is mathematically true and plainly obvious, and yet we often forget or assume otherwise. There is much that happens in our lives and in the world that is beyond our knowing, but is there, and connects us to each other and with all of creation.
The brush of a hand between two people feeling a spark on a first date surely contains more complexity and mystery than our largest data center could compute (at least for now!). How much more, many years later, the last time their hands touch? There’s so much light we cannot see, but at times desperately want to.
Think of the depth in your own mind and heart, your life’s experience, and what you have learned and relearned, what you have loved and lost and found again ”all the nuance, all the shading, and then multiply all that by 8 billion. All those people walking around with the same complexity and mystery. There’s simply too much light for us to ever see completely.
From there, consider the cosmos. It’s now believed that all the matter in the universe that we know of, what’s called ordinary matter, matter that interacts with light so that we’re able to see it, only makes up about 5% of all there is in the universe. This means that 95% of the universe remains an almost complete mystery to us. Is this terrifying to you or comforting?! Makes it hard to rule out anything or to speak with certainty about much at all when we’re talking not just about all the light we cannot see, but all that light itself hasn’t see.
II.
And of course, this is to say nothing of the mysterious and largely unknowable way God moves in the world.
Over and over again in the story of scripture, just when the people of God begin to get comfortable in their knowledge of the Almighty, so that they would presume to know what God is up to, or where and with whom God is ”and, even more, where and with whom God could never be ”God goes and throws the whole thing upside down. All of which comes to a head in the life and ministry of Jesus and the coming Kingdom of God he claims to usher in, which we’ll hear about later on in the Gospel of Matthew in the year ahead.
A world where the first will be last, and the last will be first. A world where, if we want to be found in the company of God, we need to find ourselves in the company of those who are poor and outcast and reviled. How many times will we hear Jesus urge us toward humility, reminding us of all the light we cannot, or perhaps more often than not, in our stubborn oblivion, will not see?
How many times will we be reminded that though we so often feel alone, or struggle to find meaning in our lives as we now live them, we are, in ways that are as mysterious as they are true, perpetually in the presence of the one who made us in beauty and purpose? It may be that 95% of the story of scripture we tell together each year is about all the light around us that we alone fail to see.
But when we each see our little bit, and share what we have seen ”the glimpses, the sparks, the subtle glowing off in the distance like the eastern sky anticipating dawn, and yes, the times when, praise God, like the shepherds watching their flocks by night, the glory of the Lord is œshown round us ”when we each share these encounters with the light, then the light we all know is now greater, and we begin to see more than we ever could by ourselves, which is what this celebration of Epiphany is all about.
III.
We don’t know who they were or where they came from, or even how they knew what they were looking for. We’re simply told that after Jesus was born, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking anyone they could find, Where is this child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.
This is the first we hear of this star. No one nearby or on the inside seems to know about this star or what it means, or even that they should be looking for it, and yet here are these strangers from afar, foreigners, having come a great distance and at great risk, following this light that’s been revealed only to them. And this, too, is part of the story of Christ coming into the world.
Praise God for the light we cannot see, but that others do.
Right from the start, we learn that this gospel story we’ll tell together in the year ahead ”this story of good news about how God’s love and compassion and goodness come into the world in the person of Jesus ”is so much bigger than we could ever hope to tell ourselves, and is often brought to us by people and voices we could not have imagined.
It is a story as big as the world, both seen and unseen, and it will take all of us to tell. Every last one of us ”with all of our experiences, our hard-won wisdom, even our blind spots. It will take all of us sharing the light we’ve each seen for any of us to speak with any clarity and depth about the light that has come into the world.
And not only us, the people in this room, or all the people who count themselves among the people of this church, or even all the people in all the other churches the world over. If the wise men have anything to teach us, it’s that it will take all the rest of the people of this community and this world who are outside the family of the church ”most of them happily so, we should say ”but who are well within the family of God’s love, whether they know it or care to be or not. People of different faiths, or no faith, yet each given eyes enough to see the light, at times when we can’t.
We need them, too. It’s a story so big it will take all of us to tell it. It’s a light so expansive, it will take all of us to see it. All of us. Even me. Even you.