meditation on a microscope Alex Beukers But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. (Eph 5:13 NIV) Knowledge, they said, would begin with the butterfly wing which rested on the glass as if for just a moment. The bulb translates the wing into a stain. By laws of magnification it defeats doubt in an instant, guiding the light upwards from the mirror, and stretching beams out, to project a new image in the ocular, big enough for me to see: coarse plains with great chasms in between. Blemishes, once unremarked by human eyes, are thrown into sharp relief. I tune it by thumbing it clumsily into clarity. I know I have no bearing on the light: the dance of angles accomplishes without me. For whether I am ‘eye’ or not, physics works within, invisibly.
But then I looked again and saw that the wing, now finely focused, is a vision of beauty— crystalline scales sheathed like armour and braced with lightning. It’s a far cry from the loneliness of that dead sample on its slide. What had I learned from it, This transformation? It stemmed not from knowledge, but from the union of divine insight and our perception, and He made it— so that a broken specimen could be made whole again. And perhaps this is the reason why later, in my mind’s eye, I saw that butterfly rise— stirring with an inner light, changed, revitalised. > <
Alex Beukers is a third year English student at Merton. She enjoys tennis, exploring old buildings, and more recently, music by the Grateful Dead. Besides learning to cook things other than variations on pasta with pesto, there is still much she wants to do over the remainder of her time at Oxford. 10
