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This is
the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and
in him there is no darkness at all. (1
John 1:5)
Try to imagine
an infinite source of light, its rays streaming millions of light years across space
in all directions to the infinite beyond with neither beginning or end, instantaneously
encompassing all reality within its brightness so that there is nothing outside
itself.
Then, see yourself
fully enveloped in the light who is everywhere encompassing everyone and
everything of every time and place, past, present and future.
Now, take
another step and feel the light as the warmth of kindness and welcome. For, to
say God is light is to say God is kindness in whom there is no unkindness, love
in whom there is no unloveliness, a heart in whom there is no hate, a mercy in which
there is no boundary, a friendship in which every hidden part of you is welcome.
Julian of
Norwich, the beloved Christian mystic, meditated for decades on her visions of
Christ’s suffering and death. ‘I saw no kind of wrath in God,’ she wrote after
20 years of prayer and reflection. ‘God is that goodness which cannot be angry,
for God is nothing but goodness.’
The anger, judgment
and condemnation we feel, Julian writes, is a projection of our perversity and
resistance to peace and to love, the result of our sin and blindness in which
we cannot truly see God.
If we saw God
continually, she writes, the ‘sweet, gracious light’ of Christ would evaporate all
our harmful feelings and fears. ‘For though we may feel in ourselves anger,
contention and strife, still we are mercifully enclosed in God’s mildness and
in his meekness, in his benignity and in his accessibility.’
Enclosed,
enveloped, encompassed in the Light who embraces every moment of our
much-less-than perfect lives, God bathes us in the light of love, that with
hearts awakened, we may abide in Christ, the light of the world.
David L. Miller
