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Chapter VI
THE UNFAILING LIGHT
One of the meanings of light to every human being is that light is already a powerful source of healing utilized in x-rays, lasers, phototherapy, the Rife Ray Tube, and other medical machines and therapies. There is a whole new attitude regarding proper, controlled, but necessary exposure to sunlight as an important ingredient to good health and proper funtioning of body muscles and nerves. The complete avoidance of any exposure to sunight except for a small number of persons with sun sensitive disorders is now considered poor medicine rather than good.
Light, in the form of electricity powers much of our industiral enterprise. It also illuminates our homes, hardens the filings in our teeth, and entertains us with television. Our modern lives are unthinkable without the physical, outer light.
But the outer light is not the only form of light that has meaning for human life. The inner light also has meaning, in fact without the inner light we could not even see let alone comprehend the outer light.
In Book IV of the Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, St. Augustine writes:
"On entering into myself I saw, as it were with the eye of the soul, what was beyond the eye of the soul, beyond my spirit: your immutable light. It was not the ordinary light perceptible to all flesh, nor was it merely something of greater magnitude but still essentially akin, shining more clearly and diffusing itself everywhere by its intensity. No, it was something entirely distinct, something altogether different from all these things; and it did not rest above my mind as oil on the surface of water, nor was it above me because it had made me. He who has come to know the truth knows this light.
....When I first came to know you, you drew me to yourself so that I might see that there were things for me to see but I myself was not yet ready to see them. Meanwhile you overcame the weakness of my vision, sending forth most strongly the beams of your light, and I trembled at once with love and dread. I learned that I was in a region unlike yours and far distant from you and I thought I heard your voice from on high: 'I am the food of grown men; grow then and you will feed on me. Nor will you change me into yourself like bodily food, but you will be changed into me.'
...you flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.
...O Truth, you are the light of my heart. Let your light speak to me, not my own darkness."
The inner light is the most basic of the two lights (inner and outer) because it enables us to decipher, make sense out of, comprehend, the outer light. As Augustine writes in the quote just cited, "You overcame the weakness of my vision, sending forth most strongly the beams of your light." Zajonc writes in a similar vein "Without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind."1
As I wrote in Chapter Three, Teilhard de Chardin would certainly agree with Augustine and Zajonc that the outer light of nature and the inner light of mind, perception, etc., are inextricably entwined. The outer light is incomprehensible to the human eye wihtout various levels of development in the inner light of the mind. All the various concepts, explanations, etc., of the universe, of any phenomena one cares to name, including "light" are the direct result of the interaction of the inner light of the mind with stimuli that enter the mind through the various sense organs of the body. The external light (stimuli), affect the development of the inner light (mind) and the inner light shapes the ways in which the external light is received and perceived.
Light is the foundation stone of meaning; it is the key to conceptualizing, making sense out of our entire inner and outer experience.
Light is the basic Existent of the entire universe—not a something alone, but also a Someone—a something in nature, a Someone who forms and informs the human mind. The individual human mind has to be developmentally ready to both receive and perceive the light for the light to be comprehensible. This is a true state of affairs for both the light of nature and the light of mind. In Christian theology, human freedom and choice in terms of willingness to receive the light (the teachings and recognition of who Jesus is) is the essential prerequisite to Faith....
Light is the Sustainer and the Transformer: Providence
The way we choose to live may prevent us from seeing the light or worse, our lifestyle may cause us to see what is really darkness as though it were light. Good becomes evil and evil good. We wander about lost in a maze of continuing illusions. God, whose essence is light, transforms those who choose to live in His light, into Beings of Light themselves. They, like Ernest in the story by Nathaniel Hawthorne that I related in Chapter Two, become what they pondered and gazed upon all of their lives.
Alienation, Loneliness, and Depression
These three curses of the early Twenty-First Century human are, to a large extent, diseases of the heart, of the spirit. They thrive in a society that prides itself on the absolute freedom and independence of the human person. "I don't need anybody or anything. I'm my own boss! I decide what is right by the choices I make. If it's good for me, it's good!"
But I am lonely, adrift on a planet that is depersonalizing—a planet that focuses on technology and the mechanical. My consciousness, my human spirit, is considered to be an epiphenomenon, a freak occurrence, found only in the human species and not in the universe as a whole. I am but a tiny speck of consciousness afloat in a sea of things.
As life goes on I find that I am not immortal—I age—I experience the ailments of aging—I suffer. I can't seem to escape all the physical imperfections in my own body and in the world around me. Motor vehicle accidents, drownings, hurricanes, fires—all forces of destruction, impinge on my life and on the lives of those near and dear to me. The darkness at times seems to be much more pervasive than the light!
But that is not the way things really are! The Light is at the Center of the Universe and His light permeates all of creation including me. I was a deliberate creation of The Light. I am a separate, Divinely willed speck of light meant to absorb and radiate His light. I am made to know and to love the Light and to radiate this light to others.
Psalm 50 in the Old Testament relates God, The Light, saying quite clearly that it is not physical offerings he wants. "I want a loving heart more than sacrifice, knowledge of my ways more than holocausts." He doesn't ask for perfection or brilliance of intellect, he asks for love and knowledge of him. We cry out to him not to leave us alone or untended in one of the most popular of the Psalms, Psalm #23.
The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.
In verdant pastures he gives me repose;
Beside restful waters he leads me;
he refreshes my soul.
He guides me in right paths for his name's sake.
And He answers us in Psalm #91
Because he clings to me. I will deliver him:
I will set him on high because
he acknowledges my name.
He shall call upon me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in distress;
I will deliver him and glorify him;
with length of days I will gratify him
and will show him my salvation.
The light we have examined in this book as portrayed in the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures, in physics, in medicine, and in near-death experiences is a providential, caring light, not some remote impersonal force, but rather a living Being with all the qualities we ascribe to "person", so this Being is rightly called in Christian theology "Divine Persons", a trinity of three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but constituting a single Being—One God. In Islam and Judaism, this Being is also a single Person.
At the heart of things is the Light: a loving, compassionate, providential, all-powerful Being who is a Person/Three Persons. We are not alone. We are not alienated but rather reconciled and adopted by this Being who is Love and Mercy. We have every reason to hope, to be a people of joy and not of despair.
