Advent, Day 5: In a Fog

LOOK: Blind Light by Antony Gormley

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Sir Antony Gormley OBE RA is a leading contemporary sculptor and installation artist whose work focuses on the human figure. His Blind Light installation from 2007 consists of a large semitransparent glass chamber lit by fluorescent light and filled with a dense cloud of mist. “Upon entering the room-within-a-room, the visitor is disoriented by the visceral experience of the fully saturated air, in which visibility is limited to less than two feet.”

One visitor took a two-minute video of the experience:

Gormley says,

Architecture is supposed to be the location of security and certainty about where you are. It is supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty. Blind Light undermines all of that. You enter this interior space that is the equivalent of being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea. It is very important for me that inside it you find the outside.

Sometimes the human experience feels like a groping through fog. It’s hard to see the bigger picture. The not-seeing can be frustrating. There is a doorway leading out into the clear, into full vision—but our passage through isn’t granted us until the general resurrection. Meanwhile, “we walk by faith” (2 Cor. 5:7), stumbling alongside one another through mists of unknowing, but with God’s word and Spirit as guides, giving us glimpses of clarity and confidence to step forward. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face,” the apostle Paul writes in anticipation of the day of the Lord. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12).

LISTEN: “Clouds of Waiting, Clouds of Returning” by Jacob Goins and Hannah Wyatt, on in the twilighting (2020)

I’m quiet in cloudy waiting
Assured of little but weaknesses
Of faith and seeing
And I’m wanting only to be filled
In this day

And I know you’re coming soon
But would you show me where you are right now
In cloudy waiting

I’m craving the clouds of your returning
Assured of little but a strength
Beyond faith and seeing
But I’m wanting only to be filled
I’m wanting only to be stilled
In this day

I know you’re coming soon
But would you show me where you are right now
In cloudy waiting

I’m hopeful for the fruits of faithfulness
But they are slow in their growing
And I’m quick to accuse
When heavy silence comes