“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” In 2020 the doors of our cultural institutions closed as a result of COVID-19 restrictions: disease being the ultimate gatekeeper, leaving us without access to our cultural heritage. The desire to digitise the whole world is a flame that is fanned into life once again. But what is lost in the digitisation of a medieval manuscript, and what is gained? The medieval manuscript was created for many purposes - not just to bring light into the darkness through the dissemination of knowledge, but also to create a link to God through the scribal act. In the act of writing, the processes of creation involved in the making of a manuscript and the very existence of a manuscript in the world, we see the act of worship. And manuscripts provide solidity: their very physicality a way of warding off the forces of darkness. But digitisation doesn’t necessarily strip the weight from a manuscript, nor its ephemerality; in fact, digitisation can often find faces in the darkness that we did not know existed. Truth does not have to be lost, if a slow digitisation strategy [Prescott & Hughes, 2018] is employed. Bad digitisation leaves us bereft in a post-pandemic world where access to physical spaces, and physical artefacts, is limited: the metaphorical flaming sword, barring access to Eden. By examining a range of digitised manuscripts this paper will argue that digitisation does not simply capture images, but opens doors to us that have been closed in the physical world. It enables us not just to find things that were once lost, but to gain something that we may never have experienced. Arguably, with the right digitisation, there is nothing that we cannot capture – including God’s grace.