The dwelling of the light – 3 August 2012

I have previously mentioned Simone Weil, the brilliant young woman who died during the Nazi occupation of France. In her writings we find this statement: Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light. Well, she wrote that in darker and more dangerous times than we have known. When the key themes all around her were survival, or revenge, fear and hatred, she writes of spreading light indiscriminately. In John’s Gospel particularly, light is an indispensable distinguishing feature of Christian profession. I am the light of the world, says Jesus. Christ will give you light, writes St Paul. John enigmatically suggests that the so-called religious “light” that is in you might be darkness. And indeed, the church often has and often does cast a shadow in the world, rather than shed light. St John insists that there is always a choice between darkness and light – Men chose darkness, he writes, because their deeds were evil. And so it is a very radical thing to stop where we are now to wait in stillness and silence. In Christian terms this is to step into the light. It is to choose to be still and pay attention to the light which, in Simone Weil’s words, shines indiscriminately. It is not and cannot ever be a matter of deserving or worth. It is not a question of whom we know or what we have done, good or bad. Questions of acceptability end at the threshold of the light of God. We choose the humility to be still and to consent to be warmed, enlightened, known and loved. And yet it is not a private, self-indulgent thing. We carry the burdens of others, as we sit here. We have been admitted to a lot of pain along the way. A very large part of the total burden is that so much pain is without solution, beyond repair as we say. Well, we bring that burden too into the light and see how it looks. We express our love and trust with the simple repetition of the mantra – each repetition another step of faith and love, in the light of Christ.