Winter Light

"Every time I confronted God with the realities I witnessed...He turned into something ugly and revolting." The world doesn't slow, doesn't relent for any soul. It is a mindless, and truly banal realm of violence, and spontaneous consequence; something that can only be explained - ushered down towards the role of God within our lives. How can God stand-by, alongside us -- and proclaim -- witness the same amount of cruelty as us? How can such an eternal force, meant to provide salvation, protection, and explanation, permit the abominations that beset the avid world below him? Why must he take good people from us, and leave us with the wicked, the intolerable forces of a human-driven curse?  The acts of man, and the seeming absence of God -- the lack of accountability, and deliverance -- effectively dim the light of a divine spirit. In the dead of winter, when the environment around reflects the cold and barren nature of human empathy, and consideration -- the light of God is as dead as its people -- for its the obscenity that occurs in this environment, that contracts his light. Winter Light may just be Bergman's greatest. Never have I found my faith in God, so channeled and confirmed. One can only look upon the news, the current state of the world -- how people continue to berate and treat each other -- and question the legitimacy of a figure meant to impose peace and benefit. Why must he funnel good people, into an agonizing storm, and allow evil corrupt, and eradicate them? Bergman conveys this misled and off-putting sense of faith in the perspective of a 'devout' priest. Suddenly, this character represents all our moral questions about the unexplained evil that resides within its people. A priest is meant to symbolize a guiding of faith -- yet much like our own raised morals and values -- are dimmed in the revelation of the surrounding climate. One can only act, and profess fondness of this divine soul, but secretly question it -- hiding it out of fear, and contradicting our own mindset. These questions are not explicitly presented; it can only be revived, and discovered in our capacity of love. God doesn't love for us, its an individual effort, one that he guides, and shines upon us -- that irresistible purity of human connection. A goodness that heartens the moral decay around us; like the frost of Winter, outside a church. The temptation to give into the cold, this loss of faith -- resort to disability of hope -- chills the convictions; but a church, the suffering of God, remains standing -- beckoning us to return with a warm embrace.