If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! (Matthew 6:23)
How can the light that is in me be darkness? I think this is difficult to talk about because we are so defensive. Our choices in life are what they are. Sometimes we made decisions, took choices which are now at least problematic… but mostly it just happened, we played the cards we were dealt… we grew up in a family or tribal environment which was imperfect, violent or simply ignorant… or the circumstances of adult life forced choices on us which we couldn’t help… But at any rate it is not helpful to me if you point out that things should be otherwise, or if you criticise what I do. I don’t know that it’s darkness, the way I’m living – I hope not -- but it is often very gloomy, and I do the best I can. Anyway, you’re not so perfect…! Have you had that conversation?
Well Jesus felt free to be stridently critical of some people’s choices. The scribes and the pharisees lived for the sacred law, irrespective of its effects on ordinary folk… whited sepulchres, Jesus called them. The priest and the levite who walked past the injured man on the road to Jericho evidently lived for moral and ritual purity, and also considered a Samaritan, a foreigner, not worth their bother. Jesus immortalised their choices in a memorable story. The man who built bigger barns to store his wealth was living for that because, as he said, he could now take his ease, eat drink and be merry. That was his dream… you’ve got to have a dream. The men who thought it proper to stone an alleged adulteress to death inhabited some essential male cult of power and control… numerous men still do. In our day it has become trendy in some circles to live “Me-Time”, so the self, the ego, comes to have dominance and priority. For many, hedonism in all its forms seems the obvious way of life – what else is there? Looking for happiness… but in the wrong places, says Thomas Keating. Religion too, it must be said, no less in our day can be pretty dark… darker to the extent that it misrepresents the way of Jesus, and relies on ignorance, superstition, credulity and greed.
St Paul taught the way of Christ as a bringing of light in our dark places: It is the God who said “Let light shine out of darkness” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (II Cor 4:6). The light shines in the darkness, writes John, and the darkness has not overcome it (Jn 1:5). John Henry Newman wrote of the kindly light by which he now lives – I was not ever thus, he added… I loved the garish day… pride ruled my will… I woke, the dungeon flamed with light, sang Charles Wesley. Once you were in darkness, writes Paul to the Ephesians, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light… the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true… Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them… Therefore it is said (and here he quotes from some early Christian hymn): “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light”.
The contemplative experience is that, in the disciplines of silence and stillness, in our readiness to set self aside, and in our hospitality to the Spirit of the Risen Lord, we begin to see things in the light of Christ, we come to know at the level of our deepest and best self, and we find the freedom to respond in love.
No comments:
Post a Comment