Catalog of Light

When my father was twenty-two years old, one of his closest friends died suddenly.

After the first few moments of shock wore off, my father remembered the night before. In his room, as he lay down to sleep, a ball of light appeared near the ceiling.

Just like that. A ball of light hovered above the bed.

Later, my father asked the officers what hour his friend had passed.

Saint Elmo’s fire is a flicker of light at the tip of a mast in a storm at sea. A weather phenomenon akin to lightning. Only, lightning is a movement of electricity from charged thing to charged thing, and Saint Elmo’s fire is just sparking, a burst of electrons into air. There is an electrical imbalance, and the molecules tear.

A will-o’-the-wisp is a flickering orb of ghost light, an atmospheric condition common in humidity. People wandering about in the darkness have found them hovering over swamps, bogs, marshes, but I don’t know a soul who’s seen one. Will-o’-the-wisps may be spotted less often now because most marshlands have been drained for practical ventures like agriculture or housing. It doesn’t, perhaps, matter.

Will-o’-the-wisps are often believed to be connected to the souls of the dead, or fairies, or other supernatural spirits that mean to drown those looking on. The lights flicker away from the path and attract the lonely traveler. As one approaches the light, so the light recedes. And the seeker never quite finds.

Moses came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. And Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.

The source of the name, Saint Elmo, might be a mispronunciation of Saint Ermo or Saint Erasmus, the patron saint of sailors. Perhaps because at sea the sight was so common. But the blue flame isn’t seen only on the ocean. And it doesn’t actually burn. It can happen anywhere—in a thunderstorm from the sharp tip of a pole, or on land at the eruption of a volcano. Saint Elmo’s flames have been sighted up on a church’s spire or on the high ridge of a tomb. And one man made it happen himself: Nikola Tesla, conducting electricity from a Tesla coil, reported seeing Saint Elmo’s fire over it. Also reported: a butterfly, wing tips lit with blue halos, flying around the room.

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Burning Bush is called the Unburnt Bush.

The flame Moses saw was the light—not fire—from the glory of God. And the vision itself is directly linked to the Theotokos, to Mary, Mother of God, who carried divinity in her womb, and yet was unconsumed.

Etiology: the study of origination. Of causation. The study of why.

An etiological myth is a story to explain a name or create a history— for a family, people, or place. It comes from the Greek, aitiología, “to give reason for.”

The term is also used for the study of the origins of disease.

In naming, etiology participates in stories that make sense of this life.

My father does not often tell the story.

At the time he thought the spirit of his friend was visiting him. But then he read the stories: To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. God was not one for confusion.

So, he used to say, it must have been some demon, posing as an angel of light.

Plasma conducts light. It is ionized air that emits a glow.

Even in societies where ghosts are real and to be feared, light is often a comfort.

The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people. I have heard them crying out. I am concerned about their suffering.”

Many places and many times, it has been said: God came down.

Legends like this—of burning bushes and a voice like thunder—compel their tellers’ descendants to make a claim on place.

We want to locate where exactly the bush burned. Where the voice of God rang out. On which mountain? Which swath of sky spread over the happenings? Which valley lay below? On which corner of the earth did God appear? And can we go there again?

So, it isn’t only about revelation. The Lord came down to see some- thing, talk to someone. Warn. Hold accountable. Destroy.

The usual divine tendencies.

Let’s assume all this is true: Theophany is the appearance of the divine. Epiphany is, likewise, a showing forth of a deity.

Both share a common source in Greek, phainein, “to show,” and are related to the modern use of phantasm.

In Old French, fantosme has the nuance of dream, illusion, or fantasy.

In the Greek, phántasma can mean image, apparition, or unreality.

In most claims of theophany, there is a recurring theme of light. Of fire, emanation.

For most of history, light was too intricate to parse out completely. Light seems somehow akin to dream. Belonging to the unreal as much as the real. To the super as much as the natural. We cannot understand. And therefore, phantasm.

The trouble remains: How on earth could we possibly know our origins?

The earth moves, ever. It plays in shifts.

Our memories are muddled.

Our histories consist of fact and fiction in the first place. They begin in one space—a dry patch of grass burst into flame—and travel to quite another.

In the end, any rise in land becomes something more akin to mountains, and there wasn’t a spark only, there was God, consuming all and yet not consuming anything. Someone got creative. Someone needed to tell the etiology of bitterness. The source of suffering. The beginning of pain.

It is not my intent to break it all down. I am not presenting a story as fact and then yanking the carpet out from under our feet.

A story is not a joke.

Don’t lead someone down a path and then whap them upside the head.

Don’t lead someone to think some real thing and then at the end, poof! It was all a bad dream.

This is not a dream.

This is not a straw man I’m pulling apart at the seams. Sometime, somewhere, there was a god.

Sometime, somewhere, the god came down.

Don’t we all have these? Stories we tell ourselves to live, to believe, to keep believing.

My father’s friend died at the exact time the ball of light appeared. These days, he tells us, he’s not quite sure what to make of it.

Neither am I. I believe enough now about the body and the mind—how they intertwine—that I realize such experiences seem to come only to those who need them.

Or, those who need the stories hold on.

At the time of the death and the light, my father was “dabbling,” as he’d say. He and his friend would predict on cue certain silly things—a phone call, a knock at the door, other menial happenings that didn’t make much difference in their day-to-day lives.

It didn’t make much difference, and yet that psychic dabbling seemed to mean that something in this world was transpiring just beyond their understanding and control. They had seen a glimmer, and both were beginning to turn.

And then he died. And then the light. The history blurs.

Mostly, I don’t believe in God.

Mostly, I believe so hard my head hurts. I am not being clever.

What seems true: At one time, in one place, a ball of light appeared near a ceiling and hovered above a bed.

Its appearance coincided with death.

Its appearance was the beginning of the deepening of a long history of awareness.

How he tells the story has changed—like any unexplainable encounter—to fit with his shifting spectrum of beliefs.

Sometime, somewhere, someone believed a god came down.

Sometime, somewhere, someone believed light could be more than atmospheric trick.

It hurts no one to believe this.

note: Certain sections of this essay quote the New International Version of the Bible, sometimes in slightly altered form.

Read more from Issue 15.2.