The mass of the Rocky mountain range pulled the sun down toward the horizon on a late summer afternoon. Heavy drapes kept the sun's heat and light at bay. The room was dark and I don't know why my five-year-old bare feet weren't outside playing with the neighbor kids. Perhaps I was being punished-there are some things for which a lack of memory is a relief. Then I spied it. A single ray of light came through a tiny hole in the obscuring material. In the dark, the ray was invisible but for tiny dancing motes of dust. (My mother will be mortified should she learn that there was dust in her house.) I was fascinated. They hung in the air, suspended, motionless until some unseen force moved them. Without knowing it, I had rediscovered Brownian motion-many years too late to have it called "Parkersonian" motion. Years later I bought an old tank prism. From my Physics books I knew that light would split into its component colors when shone through a prism. It cost $3.50 from the Edmund Scientific Catalog. I took it into a dark room and shone a ray of sunlight through it. On the opposite wall a burst of color spread itself across the wall. I'd never seen such intense red, green, blue. Colors to dazzle the eye; colors to hurt the eye; colors to hypnotize. Still later, when my children were small, there was a total solar eclipse. We prepared by putting a pin hole in the bottom of a Quaker's oatmeal cardboard box-you know, the round ones. We planned to point the pinhole in the bottom of the carton toward the sun and place a piece of white paper near the open top end. This would project an image onto the paper through the pinhole. Playing with it, we noticed that looking at the pinhole, you could see nothing on the other side. Closer to the hole, a dim pinpoint of something could be seen. At eyelash distance, a whole new world opened up. One could see nearly as much as you could with a normal field of vision. Unfortunately, it was cloudy that day, so it got dark for an hour and then we had dawn again, but no sunlight and no image of a solar eclipse to hang in memory's halls. The church is like that. We live in a dark world, with the powers of the air at work all around us. The Church is the hole. Small, too small to see anything through. But a glimmer of light shows through from the Other Side. This narrow beam of Otherness shines in stark contrast to the darkness through which it passes. If the environment is clean, nothing shows. When a mote of "dust" comes into the light, the Light immediately reveals the mote for what it is. It shows the Brownian motion of the action of the prince of the power of the air. The light is white-a combination of all those who make it up, but the prism of examination reveals that the light is made up of individual gradations of color-the differences of each of us shine with the intensity of the original Son-light, but with different wave lengths and different attributes. Another prism, oriented opposite to the first, would recombine the variation back into the original white. So we, being many and diverse, are one in the pure whiteness of light that is Jesus, in His Body. The hole in the fabric of space/time, perhaps eaten on purpose by that Moth Who created all things and can makes holes wherever He wants-the hole is Us. Transparent, consisting of nothing at all but an opening to let the realm of non-space/time show through, we are a pin-hole view of that other non-place and non-time. The closer one approaches, the more of the other realm appears, until at eyelash range, a wonder of light and color and texture appears; the realm of true reality. May it be that we, the Church, will fulfill our ultimate purpose; to be a hole through which Light shines through and through which others can catch just a glimpse of That and Who lies beyond. 2008Pinhole View