2008

March 3, 2008

Since April of 2002 I have been on a contemplative journey that has taken me into most of the classical and mystical literature. I have had no single experience that I would call "enlightenment", but I have recognized that the Spirit is at work in the deeper world of the self. Slight changes like choosing to be with God instead of doing something else, like having a voice speak inside me when my ego gets loose, like feeling the inspiration of the Spirit when I am speaking or writing. In addition to all these little signs of life, I am at peace. Perhaps this is the greatest gift that I could have ever, to be at peace with myself, with life, and with God. That is enough, more than enough; peace is like light: constant, abiding, settling, ground of becoming, and source of confidence.

I have been reading Houston Smith's Why Religion Matters and I have run across an idea and image that has captivated me: Light, the metaphor of Light! He says, "Light is a universal metaphor for God and what science has discovered about light applies to the nature of God." p 137. At one time in Einstein's life he said that he wanted to give the rest of his life to reflect on Light.

Light is different. Light is strangely different. Light is paradoxically different. All three of these assertions hold for God, as does a fourth. Light creates.

He cites a blind man's experience of the Light Within:

I began to look from an inner place to one further within; whereupon the universe redefined itself and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew noting about, a place which might as well have been without me as within. But radiance was there or more precisely, light. I bathed in it as an element which blindness had suddenly brought much closer. I could feel light rising, spreading, resting on objects giving them form, and then leaving them. Or rather withdrawing or diminishing, for the opposite of light was never present. Without my eyes, light was much more subtle than it had been with them.

Two things came from this experience: a continuous joy and a sharpness of his intuitions. To reflect more deeply on the meaning of Light, I will meditate on all the references to light in the N. T.