"To bathe a thing in light is to merge it with the infinite." -Leonardo Da Vinci
Whether or not we are near the ocean, a single photograph can bathe us in her light.
Leonardo Da Vinci so bathed "things" in light that we are illuminted by his gifts to this day. By spreading light across his subjects – whether through paint, by invention, with analysis or through his reverse-written journal – he made them immortal for us. As surely as Florence Nightengale, Leonardo held a lamp amid the darkness.
Tonight, in a million places, one of our fellow beings will lie suffering on the floor in his or her own doubled-up shadow. Turning on a light will not relieve the darkness that burns them from within.
Physical pain intensifies loneliness. Each of us knows this.
When I awakened in the middle of one of those kinds of nights as a child, my stomach so abusing itself that I wanted to die, it was the comfort of my mother's hand or my father's voice that bathed me in light.
In the first few years after I contracted Crohn's disease in college, my nights doubled up on the floor were spent alone. I wasn't going to let anyone help me.
As the attacks continued after I was married, I still didn't want direct help, But, it was a comfort to know that my wife was nearby in case I did. When the doctor made a rare house call, it was his reassuring kindness that bathed me in light as much as it was his medication.
Because of the way Leonardo lit his Mona Lisa we all know her. A thousand years from now, medical students will still be reading anatomy books decorated with his drawings. His light is infinite.
Each time you, as a caregiver, let Love flow through you into the shadows of another's pain, you bathe that patient with a healing potion drawn from Love's endless energy.
The science of the medical caregiver is focused on treatments that will rebalance a sick body's chemistry. Great caregivers are also artists who paint bridges of light that arc Love into the weakened hearts of the ill.
Every note of music, every step of ballet, each insight of medicine, every line of poetry, each parable of the Bible – all describe the light we need so desperately – and prescribe for us what we need to have in order to live.
We exist amid precarious energies. Our troubled spirits need to bathe in Love's light each day in order for us to continue our truest journey.
Shortly after Leonardo's death, one of his students wrote that, "It is not in the power of nature to produce another such man."
Fortunately, Leonardo was one of those beings who affirmed that any one of us can bathe another in the light of the infinite.
-Erie Chapman
-Photograph – Ocean Sails #1 – copyright Erie Chapman 2011
Journal of Sacred Work 
Leave a comment