The Meet Hope Podcast

104: Encounter Advent 2 - Jesus is Light and Life

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How does light shape our lives? In this special series for Advent called, "Encounter Loves Pure Light,"  we're here to guide you through the season with a fresh perspective and creative reflection. Join us this week as we illuminate the powerful metaphor of light with HOPE member Jack Shaw, who has vast experience in lighting and set design. Jack explores how lighting transforms spaces and experiences, mirroring the illuminating grace and life Jesus brings into our spiritual journeys. Be sure to listen each week as we interview a new guest!

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Meet Hope Podcast, where we have conversations about faith and hope. Hope is one church made of people living out their faith through two expressions in person and online. We believe a hybrid faith experience can lead to a growing influence in our community and our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope.

Speaker 2:

Hello, our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope. Hello, welcome to the Meet Hope podcast. My name is Heather Mandela and I am excited to be here with you today. We are on week two of our Advent Encounter series. If you want more information on that or would like to sign up for the weekly emails that run throughout Advent, you can do so on our Today page, meethopeorg slash today With me. Today I have Jack Shaw Now. Welcome, jack. Hi, full disclosure Jack Shaw happens to be my father, so Found father.

Speaker 2:

There you go. So yes, lots of history here. But we specifically invited you on today because we are in week two and we are talking about Jesus is the light and life, and I happen to know your background in theater and lighting design and set design. But I thought maybe you could share a little bit about your background with some of our friends.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, that was my undergraduate major in a and it's been an avocation as well as a vocation at various times through my whole life and I've used lighting in many different places, not just theatrically but in church and in, in working in events and things like that commercially.

Speaker 2:

So there's, yeah, I have a history of lighting and television production and using lighting through television production and things like that as well. So, yeah, I have a history of lighting, yeah, and television production and using lighting through television production and things like that as well.

Speaker 3:

So, yeah, lots of use of… yeah, lighting is critical. Yeah, lighting is critical. When you teach it, basically, you start with the four purposes of lighting, the first of which is to provide visibility. It seems sort of obvious, but that's what you have to do to start with. The second thing is to provide some kind of emphasis. Lights can be in a position where some things are brighter than others and they can provide more emphasis to some things or people more important than others. The third function of lighting is to provide style, and that is, there's different kinds of productions, different kinds of things going on, and what you're doing with the lights, you know, creates style. And the fourth thing, which most people are probably familiar with, is mood. You know, mood lighting we've all heard about, but you know it depends on, again, the production, what you're doing. Mood is important.

Speaker 2:

Sure, and I think that's more and more popular these days too, because, if I you know, you go online and you look around everybody, around everybody can buy lights that, the LED lights that change color, even within their own home. You can preset mood lighting to your lamps so that you can have it be, you know, late night TV watching or bright morning exercise.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and so those are the four functions or purposes of light. And then so the question is what are the characteristics of lighting that change? There are four of those as well, the first of which is brightness, or intensity. That seems again sort of obvious. The brighter the light is, the more intense it is, the more emphasis goes there, the more visible something is Energy, the more.

Speaker 2:

Yes, Exactly.

Speaker 3:

The second is color again, which we talk about, mood, and we think of color most of all when we talk about mood, sure, but it's not just color, it's mood and intensity. You know soft lights, bright lights, that kind of thing. The third is location. You know where the light is and especially theatrically, it makes a big difference where the light is coming from, and you know. And then the fourth is movement. You know, do the lights change and what kind of emotion, what kind of effect goes into or is the audience see as a result of movement of light?

Speaker 3:

So there's some fun examples. I mean, if you're doing a play I did a number of plays over the years Arsenic and Old Lace, and Can't Take it With you plays that are supposed to be like realistic, and you build real walls and real steps and real doors, and if you have a window or a door that leads to another room and you're trying to do something realistic, you have to remember to have a light outside the stage that comes in. So there's lighting coming in the window, right, and that lighting can be at one point in the play it can be bright, sunlight. At another point in the play it could be moonlight.

Speaker 3:

Soft moonlight, yeah, everything else that's going on on the stage is less, and then that's within realistic. But then there are some plays which depend upon lighting to be the whole thing. Sure, one of the most important that I remember is a play called the Fantastics, which is one of the longest running plays in history. Great little show, yeah, and its set is just platforms and a couple of pipe drapes. Pipe and drape, yeah, well, not even much. In a way, drapes are really just some pipes on the platforms, but, yeah, there are a couple of drapes that hang from that. But the mood changes considerably throughout Fantastics. In fact, the whole first act is happy and it's got a lovely song called Soon. It's Gonna Rain, and it's a very romantic kind of first act.

Speaker 2:

And so it's all lit in the blues and greens and the lavenders of a nice cool— Haze, yeah like a nice, pretty gentle haze, exactly.

Speaker 3:

And then part of the point is that life isn't all romance In the moonlight. So in the second act the sun comes out and so suddenly the lighting becomes much harsher, yellow and straw, and those kind of lights as we move literally from moonlight to sunlight. And then there's another scene in that where one of the characters is in the fires of trials and then it becomes really red and really dramatic and lots of movement of the light, so it can perform a lot of different functions.

Speaker 2:

I love that and I think there's a couple of things. We were talking about location and that struck me for a moment, because you know so often people who aren't familiar with what happens on stage. You know like our lights in our home are either directly next to us on a table or they're above us, right and on stage you really don't want anything directly above you because it just washes your. You can't see face.

Speaker 3:

It becomes very Frankenstein-ish. It casts unnatural shadows. If you go back to the textbooks and lighting students, they'll tell you there's a guy named Stanley McCandless who came up with the first theory. It said lighting is supposed to be coming from two sides. There should be a warm side and a cool side, and it should be 45 degrees up from your eyes and 45 degrees to each side. So that's the key is 45, 45, 45, you know a couple of lights coming from angles and that provides a relatively natural looking lighting of the face, and that is important because you know it-.

Speaker 2:

No one's going to relate to Frankenstein when he's trying to woo you. Yes, and I actually. I love this because it's making me think right now, and I'm. It's a stretch, so y'all hang in there with me, but I, um, I love the fact that if the, if the source of light is only coming from directly above and um, for me that would almost be a distant understanding of God, right, like so.

Speaker 2:

If God is the source of light and life and I really only have a casual understanding of who he is, he's somewhere up in heaven shining down on me, right, and I may be reflecting him really imperfectly. Others may see my attempts as Frankenstein-esque, because I may not really understand how I'm coming off right In my desire to please God or understand God. I may have a hyper-focus on rules. I may feel like I have to stand directly under it and can never walk out of that one light that's up over my head, right, and so what happens is that we become a little more harsh in the way that we might come off to others, just like that lighting makes us look a little more harsh, but when we have those 345s, right, yeah, and it's interesting, if you go, even take it the next step to the stage television lighting, you have to have a third light, which is that one that is coming from above or behind you.

Speaker 3:

You can almost look, to take your metaphor or illustration, if you look at all the lights of the world that come toward us every day and yet the thing that sets us apart is that backlight, that top light it provides. You can provide a kind of halo if it's really bright when you're looking at it on TV. Yeah, Without the dimensioning light, without those backlights, especially in video and film, it's very disconcerting. Yeah, and you can even disappear into the background. Yeah, so you need that highlight.

Speaker 2:

To set you out, right, to set us apart, because we are different than the world. But it's those other lightings, and where I go with this too, but it's those other lighting. So it's, and, and where I go with this too, is it's the relationship that I have with Jesus, which would be on the same level as me, right?

Speaker 2:

So that's the lighting that's coming in at the 45 by the eyes you know it it's, um, it's allowing people to see what's unique about me, but through his light, and then that third aspect of lighting that is like the Holy spirit working in me. Right, and so I love that. It takes us having a deeper and multifaceted relationship with Jesus to truly understand him and then to accurately shine that out to the world right To carry through the illustrations of lighting's functions and characteristics.

Speaker 3:

There are colors of our lives at different times in our lives, and so we can be seen how we project our blue times, how we project our sunny times. Absolutely, we become an instrument of all those things we talked about, of projecting mood and style and happiness and visibility, all ourselves. And there are different times in our lives, we have different emphasis, so we may be brighter in some places than we were in others. So, yeah, I mean it's not hard to stretch, it's not that much of a stretch.

Speaker 2:

Not that big of a stretch, right? Yeah, and it is. What I do also really value and appreciate is the fact that, just in and of itself, when we talk about lighting, there wouldn't be a show without lighting. You know there wouldn't be. You know, tv requires lighting and productions require lighting. And so for us to be at our best, you know we it, it, we require light, you know we to really be able to look at ourselves and be the best version of ourselves, it requires God's grace and God's goodness, um, shining on us and then through us, um, but I do love that, and I what I like about the illustration with color as well, um, you know, we each bring our own unique color to it, right, so it's God's light shining through us, but we all bring our own uniqueness.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and similarly movement. You know, we see, especially with dance, there's one. There's fast movement and slow movement and there are times when you just want to kind of a general stage lighting and there are times when you want to isolate someone. You know.

Speaker 2:

A soliloquy or a yeah, See what?

Speaker 3:

they're doing. And again, you know, movement, you know, is a critical piece of both dramatic and lighting qualities.

Speaker 2:

No, I love that, and that's part of what it is for us too, right, you know? And I like the illustration of the Fantastics as well, because you've got, you do see, the progression of lifestyle, or of our lives timeline played out in front of us, and so it's from the beginning to the end. The lights are always changing, and so while God never changes and his light doesn't change in that sense, the way that it shines through us, the way we experience it, does change. You know, certainly there are times where we may feel like we are walking in a desert time right, where we feel like we're not hearing God's voice, we are feeling alone and isolated, and so the way we are reflecting his light is going to be different than those times that we are feeling joy or peace or excitement about what God is doing and being in our lives.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we've gone through a number of studies Bible studies or book studies where we talk about the seasons of life. Mm-hmm, light is a great reflection of the seasons of life and the seasons of you know, when you think about you know, the four seasons Sure, winter and summer, and spring and fall really all have their own kind of lighting and colors that are unique to them. And as we look at our seasons of life, our movements change. Our colors certainly change. The air goes gray or goes away, yeah, and you know lots of other things change. The air goes gray or goes away, and you know lots of other things change.

Speaker 3:

So there's a lot of you know we have to move with it and I think part of that movement is remembering too, as we grow in Christians, that there should always be movement. You know that you don't just set one point and say, okay, this is the brightness I'm going to be, this is the color I'm going to be, this is the. You know, this is where I'm going to be. You know the reality is is we're different things of us at different times and different things we become good at at different times. So you know we have to grow. We should be prepared to grow Small groups Great thing.

Speaker 2:

Yes, you know, I've had the pleasure of being directed by you a number of times throughout my life and Beyond just clean up your room.

Speaker 1:

Beyond, just clean up your room.

Speaker 2:

Yes, no, usually it's Heather Lee. Find the light. Yeah, why aren't you in the light? Get in the light, heather.

Speaker 3:

Lee, where's the?

Speaker 2:

light and I love that actually, because, as I'm thinking about that, as we're talking, and I'm like, yeah, you know we can.

Speaker 2:

God's always there. That light is hitting its mark. The question is whether I've hit my mark right. Am I standing in the light? And if I'm not standing in the light, it doesn't matter pretty much what any of those guys back there do. Right, that whole team can be working their tuchuses off to get the lighting right, but if I am not standing where I am supposed to be, I am not standing where I am supposed to be, it's not going to shine, it's not gonna do his job, Right.

Speaker 2:

And so there is a um, a relationship between us and the light, right? So there's this relationship between us and Jesus, and we have to keep our eyes on him and where he's moving, Right. And so it is a, it is a. He is always there, he doesn't ever go away. But sometimes we get distracted and that cue goes up and we are not standing in the light. Yeah and yeah.

Speaker 2:

And it makes me think of again your reference to small groups, right, Because I then count on those people around me to be like Heather, lay, go, get in the light. You, I don't know where you are, but you're not in the light. And that's why we hold each other accountable and say like, hey, just rest in Jesus for a little bit. Rest in Jesus for a little bit, it's okay. Take some time. Find that light. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it and I want to encourage everyone listening. How is that light shining on you today? How are you shining that light out into a dark world? How are you being the light of Jesus? If we can help you with that, if we can get you connected in any way, never hesitate to reach out. You can find us at meethopeorg. See you next week.

Speaker 1:

See you next week.