A young man, alone and forlorn following a late-night revel that has left him empty and unfulfilled, wanders into a darkened church that appears to be no less empty than the party he just left. Seeing that he is the only one there, he sits down and, amid the surrounding silence, stares into the darkness.
He sees a light flickering in the distance. It is the light coming from the sanctuary lamp, upon which he fixes his gaze. It occurs to him in a single lightning stroke that if that light is true, if it actually signifies something real, then that makes everything different. Both he and the world will have to change, will need to reorient themselves to this new and unforeseen reality.
The scene I’ve just described, without any artifice to adorn the telling, is taken from a novel by Sigrid Undset, which, unlike her more famous epics set in the medieval world, takes place near the end of the 19th century, and tells the story of this young man’s conversion. I know this, by the way, only because Bishop Erik Varden, who presides over a small diocese in Norway where the novel is set, recounted the story
