Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Today’s reading

1 John 1:5-7

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:5-7).

Prayer

You are light, not merely light’s source, but light itself. How can I understand this? I stand beneath a cobalt winter sky, cloudless and cold. The blinding sun of mid-morning burns crystal white on a sea of snow coating the earth and freezing clumps of wet hair beneath my cap as I shovel, sweat and freeze all at once. I look at my boots, at the dull gray shovel in gloved hands, my head down lest I be blinded an intensity for which human eyes are not intended.

You are light. No more can I look into your face than I can face the sun. Yet, as I know the sun on my back, its wan winter weakness notwithstanding, I know you as the power of life, the light of being in all that is. The blinding sun of glistening winter mornings is your art, but did you have to make it so cold?

Without light Earth grows cold and the green shoots of spring never appear. Without you nothing ex-ists; life remains only a ambiguous possibility, for you are the light that shines in all that has life, all that is has being only because it shares in you who are Being Itself.

Light brings life, warmth, illumination, growth, freedom to move about and to see, to be, to live. To say you are light is to say you are life, power, wonder and joy. Yes, you are the joy of what tiny goodness moves me and my machine to my neighbor’s driveway. And though muscles ache, the soul soars, laughter fills my lungs and a shout of (could it be?) joy and determination throws me and my snow blower into the next snowy expanse.

Could it be that this joy is your light alight within me, and that I, too, am your art, the shining sculpture of you who are Light Itself? I think so, but I cannot see. The light is too much for me. Amen.

--Pr. David L. Miller