God gave you a beam of light so you would not end up like Faust. Most people use it to find better mud.
Fluorescent light has a sound. If you have ever sat in a night class you already know it. A low electric hum that presses on the back of your skull and keeps reminding you the day should have ended hours ago.
Hofstra University. 2004. I was twenty-four years old, and I did not want to be there.
I had come straight from work. The Lab, right next to Nassau Community College, then a sprint across to campus, and after class a forty minute drive back to Queens where I would walk in the door around nine at night and wonder what the whole thing was for. I studied computer science. So what was a kid like me doing in a literature course built around Faust, the old German legend of a man who trades his soul to the devil for wealth and wisdom and power in this life, and buys himself an eternity in the fire?
I will tell you exactly what I was doing. I was pretending. I wanted to look like a young man who cared deeply about literature so nobody in that room would file me away as stupid, or careless, or one more derelict society was right to overlook. I had no ambition. I sat in that seat every week, stared at the clock, and ran the tape of everything I could be doing instead.
The Midnight Visionary you know now had no vision at all back then. He had a parking spot and a grudge.
Then a line hit me like a bolt of lightning striking a tree and setting the whole thing on fire.
The Line That Struck Like Lightning
It came out of the mouth of Mephistopheles. The devil himself, describing what he thinks of us.
Saving Thy Gracious Presence, he to me a long-legged grasshopper appears to be, that springing flies, and flying springs, and in the grass the same old ditty sings. Would he still lay among the grass he grows in! Each bit of dung he seeks, to stick his nose in.
I started to lean forward in my seat. Actually lean forward, for the first time in that class. Why is this ringing through my head right now. Why are my brain receptors firing like I just cracked the equation to save the world.
I had spent months faking attention. And a dead German poet, through the voice of a demon, had just walked over and grabbed me by the collar.
What Mephistopheles Was Really Saying
Here is the diagnosis, and it is brutal.
The grasshopper springs and flies and springs again. He looks like he is reaching for heaven. Then he lands right back in the same grass and sings the same old song. His whole life is a loop that goes nowhere. Mephistopheles is saying that human progress is an illusion. We make grand intellectual leaps, we spring, and we come right back down to the dirt and repeat the same errors we have always made.
But the cut goes deeper than that. Just before this, the devil admits that God gave man a gleam of heavenly light. A piece of the divine, on purpose. And what does man do with it? He does not use it to rise. He uses it to be beastlier than any beast. He takes the one thing that separates him from the animals and he sticks his nose in the dung with it.
That is when it landed on me like a weight I could not put down. I was the grasshopper. Sitting in that seat, faking a love of literature to impress people whose names I would forget, I had been springing and landing in the same grass for years. Everything I did to look good to the world was me dragging myself, and everyone near me, through the mud of corruption and the sea of earthly desires. I had a gleam of light in me and I was using it to find more comfortable dirt.
The Apostle Paul said it in one sentence, seventeen centuries before Goethe. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. Same grasshopper. Same nose in the same dung.
The First A I Ever Earned
Something changed in me that night, and it did not leave.
I did not work hard in that class to pass. I had no core requirement riding on it. Computer science was my degree. This was the elective I resented walking into. And yet I studied Faust like my life depended on understanding the trap, because I had just realized the trap was mine.
I earned my first A in a course I did not need. And I want you to hear the word earned. Not received. Not gifted for showing up. Earned. I understood that theme in my bones because I had been living inside it without knowing its name.
The gleam of light is real. God did not hand it to us so we would end up like Faust, mortgaging eternity for a good-looking Tuesday. He handed it to us so we would climb, and then reach back and help the next person climb too. Anything less is the grasshopper. Springing, flying, landing, singing the same old ditty, nose down.
Saved by Grace, Not by the Grind
Here is the part that took me twenty years to fully feel.
Faust does the deal. He earns damnation by every rule of the ledger. And at the end of Part Two, Goethe writes:
All that is changeable is but reflected. The unattainable here is affected. Human discernment here is passed by. The eternal feminine draws us on high.
Faust is not saved because he achieved. He is saved because of love and grace. Human discernment is passed by. His striving, his deals, his accomplishments, none of it is the thing that lifts him. Grace lifts him.
I built a company. I have chased and caught things twenty-four-year-old me could not have imagined. And I will tell you plainly that the grind is not what saves a man. Paul again: by grace are ye saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves. The achievement is not the ladder to heaven. Love is. Grace is. Christ is. The work matters, but the work is what you do with the gleam once grace has already reached down and pulled your nose up out of the dirt.
That is the whole difference between rising and just springing. The grasshopper works hard too. He goes nowhere.
The Midnight Move
Tonight, before you sleep, name the dung.
One place you keep sticking your nose in. One screen, one habit, one grudge, one comfort that has you springing and flying and landing right back in the same grass you started in. Write it on paper, in your own handwriting, so you cannot pretend you did not see it.
Under it, write the one thing the gleam of light in you was actually made for. The climb you keep avoiding by staying busy in the mud.
Put the paper where your eyes will land at six in the morning. That gap, between the dung and the gleam, is your entire assignment. Grace already reached for you. Stop being the grasshopper long enough to let it lift you.
What’s forged at midnight cannot be broken by the dawn.
— Gabriel Vangelatos, The Midnight Visionary