January - Your Light has Come...

Pray, Ponder, Preach for January, 2017, Carla Mae Streeter, OP

                                                …your Light has Come…

Thomas Merton once wrote that people would be surprised if he told them they were walking around shining like the sun. I suspect they would be more than surprised – they would be incredulous. We don’t feel lightsome. We don’t see light streaming from us. It’s just not our experience. Yet feeling and seeing and our experience are often far from the facts.

The Christmas season is about light. Our light has come. The scriptures proclaim it, the songs sing it, and the decorations, indoors and out, celebrate it. So what is this light, and if it is already ours, why do we feel so heavy, so enveloped in darkness? The facts, please, just the facts.

The One who has entered our history is light. He said so. “I am the light of the world…” He has bonded with our very DNA, so wherever it is, he is. A transformed human in his resurrection, no physical boundaries can limit him. He holds all the cosmos in himself, and wears the Milky Way as a garment. So if these be the faith-facts, regardless of my feeling and my seeing, why this darkness?

Faith is a dark light. It is a veil. We see only darkly. Why? Because this Holy One has to protect us from himself. Seeing the light we carry would undo us. We would be good for nothing. We wouldn’t be able to pay our taxes, take out the garbage, or take the car for a tune-up. We would be so caught up in the beauty that nothing could pry us away. So God mutes it so we can be for others. God hides so we can tend to the things that need doing in this time-space life. So in the dark light of faith, we are tempted to forget. We are told we are to be “…wise as serpents and simple as doves.” So we practice whistling in the dark. We know that what you see is not what you get…even in our everyday life.

Yes, our light has come. And it is ours. For there he is, shining through the many cracks in our lives. In fact, it is in those weak moments, when the dark gets so thick, that we know he holds us. Despite the lack of feeling, the lack of seeing, those are the facts: your light has come.

Holy One

I don’t see you

I don’t feel you.

I feel alone and dark.

Yet there you are

Playing peek-a-boo and holding out those baby arms.

Then you are gone-and I cry out, feeling lost, poor as I am.

Teach me that I already have what I cannot see.