An Insistent Light

Rembrandt. Supper at Emmaus. 1629.

“It is the artist’s vocation to surprise us into remembering that the ordinary elements of our messy, material lives are gifts. Rembrandt restores us to a sense of the sacramentality of daily life. This daily life provides the terms in which he ‘reads’ the biblical stories and invites us to read them—moments of real encounter among real people working out their salvation with a God who made and makes himself known in palpable, visible, surprising ways. Their faces tell stories of sorrow and struggle and hard-won understanding; an insistent light has broken into the dark rooms and landscapes they inhabit. Emerging out of so much ambient shadow, these figures remind us to give thanks for the light we live by, even in the darkest times.”

—Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Drawn to the Light