Here is the message of the Amen, the faithful, the true witness, the ultimate source of God’s creation: I know all about you: how you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were one or the other, but since you are neither cold nor hot, but only lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth. (Rev 3:14-16)
Even in the final book of the Bible, this whole one thing or the other is still going on. Tepid doesn’t go down at all well in Divine circles and, so it would seem, neither does grey. The first words issued from God’s mouth are: Let there be light! And then He divides the light from the darkness so that there’s day and night. He doesn’t simply create a single thing called daght or lirk, and after all, there’s dawn and dusk for those in search of subtleties. But equally He hasn’t said: Let there be dark. The darkness is somehow a side result of the original indistinctness of creation.
The bringing forth of light serves to box-up the darkness into a manageable place called night. God sees that the light is good but has no matching feeling for the darkness. Still, He looks back over His handiwork on the sixth day and sees it’s all very good. (1:31) Because it’s ordered. Order is good and beautiful. That’s the message and why rebelliously mixing the things God has rightly delineated is bad and ugly.
Now, all this might sound a bit black and white; a little too binary for the complexities of real life and a good story; precisely more like the childish delineations between the goodies and baddies of fables. But I’m pretty sure that’s not the point being made here.
One of the most haunting novels I’ve ever read is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s brilliant on so many levels, and rightly recognised as such, but I’ll confine myself to our reflection. It portrays the greying of collective existence in a post-apocalyptic world. The particular disaster is never named but a hidden root cause seeps from the pages like an open wound: appropriate protecting lines have been crossed. Virtually all that’s left thereafter is for us to be consumed, figuratively and literally. Grey is present on nearly every page as the outward sign of transgression. It’s relentlessly rammed down each character’s throat and also every reader’s.
By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.1
The world has to get really mixed up to produce this sort of grey. In the absence of clear day and tender night, it creeps in through fitful sleep and waking nightmare. Right from the opening paragraph the father looks eastward with withered hope for the smallest sign of the rising sun. This can easily be understood as a Resurrection motif (Jn 20:1). The reader knows what’s in the father’s mind: please, let there be light!
We look to the novel’s final paragraph for a clearer sense of this collective sin. We failed to cherish the ordered beauty of our world: its cool mountains and living streams, its healing smells and incredible creatures. The mystery of creation surrounded us like a mantle, vastly exceeding our meagre presence, but we ignored it. And now things can’t be put right by a people that barely remembers the difference between right and wrong; who are numbed and jaded as much by the day as by the night. What’s the sense even in surviving when hope itself hangs by a noose?
The writers of Genesis remind us that even though life is complex, it’s no fable that light and dark are distinct and nothing’s to be gained by reducing all to grey. For it is only by seeing light and dark aright that there can be any proper discernment of those innumerable shades of grey in between.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Picador, GB, 2006, p 32.