Light

Woodland Light by Sam Knight

Shorter summer evenings. Intense light. Cool, almost crisp shade. A delighted dog. These are the moments which will play themselves out in our dying, evoking earlier and perhaps similar memories, including kaleidoscopic glimpses of the best of childhood.

Summer again, but now France. The smell of pot-pourri and honey. The stubborn Shetland pony who I adored, but feared a little too. The pony trap which was taken out in the afternoons rattling and shaking because the road was as yet unpaved. White flinty gravel and learning to ride a bike. Fear again, and then success. Jubilate.

Yesterday evening the dog needed his walk and I was pushed for time. The gingerbread had to come out of the oven in 45 minutes’ max., so there and back in half an hour I told myself. Then the patch of light appeared across the cinder path in the woods, a little ahead of us, and with it a certain imperative, a sense of having to stop and stand in it before it disappeared, knowing that in this moment of radiance was, to quote Dame Julian of Norwich, ‘all that is’.

A moment of knowing and a time to remember, especially, perhaps, in the moment of dying. In such moments comes the realisation, or deep knowing, that no real separation exists between light and darkness. As the writer of the fourth Gospel says ‘the darkness has not overcome the light’. He might have added ‘the light has taken the darkness into itself’, which is also to say that the light has allowed itself to be darkness, in order to transfigure it, thereby changing the way we see things.

The light has taken the darkness into God’s self, and transformed it. This overcoming of darkness by light is an act of God’s will, or purpose. It cannot just happen. That might even be to deny the laws of physics. Apologies to scientists for this possibly naive assumption. I am no scientist – but would welcome insightful comments here. In theological terms, the sudden interruption of light on the path we were walking on was an act of primal but ongoing creation. It was ‘all that is’.

We need both light and darkness in order to live. We need the rhythm of day and night, and of seasons, seasons of gestation as well as of flowering and bearing fruit, and in order for all of these to occur we need times of dying.

The writer of the fourth Gospel reminds us that the will and purpose for transfiguring the darkness was embodied in the God man, Jesus. Darkness, our own inner darkness, whatever form it takes, and the dark times of life, can make it impossible to ‘conceive’ life, to sense the light. They are times of dying. We cannot conceive and then propagate what seems simply not to exist, and yet, paradoxically, it is still possible to ‘know’ the light and the life it brings. The knowing of life, and of light, in times of darkness comes with surrendering in faith to the heart of that darkness. We surrender in faith to love. Love is the heart of darkness.

Patches of sunlight, or their equivalent, come as a knowledge of God’s immeasurable love. Part of this knowledge consists in entering joyfully into the will and purpose of God to re-make his creation, beginning with the re-making of our own selves and of the world we inhabit. When it comes to personal suffering, re-making begins with accepting that there is little, if anything, we can do to change ourselves, at least not at the moment. The real danger here lies in feeling that we can do nothing for anyone else either, and with it comes the temptation to think that our life is a waste and that we are a failure. This is the substance of depression.

But it is in vulnerability to God’s love, in other words by ‘faith’, that we are somehow able to go on accepting our situation. Here lies another paradox; acceptance and vulnerability become the surest defence against all that is life threatening, within ourselves and our surroundings, including other people and nations. In all these places of darkness, God’s love, and the love of others, returns us to the light.