Light,
We have passed the midnight of the year, but our Northern world is still in its deep dark cold; the dawn is still far off. In this time, the church, in her wisdom, turns our attention to light. Three of the four major feast days in the season of Epiphany are associated with light. The feast of Epiphany revolves around the Magi following the light of the star to the Holy Child. The readings for the feast begin with the call from the prophet Isaiah in chapter 60, “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” Then, at the feast of Candlemas on February 2nd, we celebrate the presentation of Jesus at the temple and Simeon proclaims that Jesus is the “light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.”1 At this feast we bless the candles which will light our sanctuaries for the year to come. Finally, just before the beginning of Lent, we celebrate the feast of the Transfiguration, when Peter, James, and John gaze upon Jesus in the glorious light of His divinity as He stands with Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor. The church is telling us something important with these feasts: she is telling us that in the midst of the dark, we are in light. She is making sure that we hear with our minds and our hearts and our bodies that which we were taught on the eve of Christmas. “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.”2
Light is the first creation. The God who creates the heavens and the earth, before creating any particular thing, speaks light into being. Light makes life possible. Light makes perceiving and seeing that life possible. Light is the ground and energy of all that comes after. This is not the light of the sun or the moon. The sun and the moon are created on the fourth day, after the waters are divided into oceans and the firmament, after the dry land is separated from the waters, and after the grasses, herbs, and trees have been brought forth from the earth. This light is not the material light brought to us by the sun, this light is behind, and before that light.
This light is not physical, rather, it is, as St. Augustine teaches in the thirteenth book of his Confessions, spiritual light. It is God sharing God with creation. God wanted to share God so God said, “let there be light.”3 This light is the love of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God lights the world that is coming to be because God is, at essence, Love. Love is not a property or an attribute of God, love is the life of God, the energy, the vitality of God — and what is love except seeing and being seen, communicating oneself and receiving the other? Love is sharing reality. Light makes sharing reality possible.
The church fathers and mothers teach us that we are created out of nothing. Before light was created, before God shared God’s glory, the world was formless and void. All that is created is thus created from nothing and the light which is the glory of God. Imagine this creation of light, this splendour of brightness, at the beginning. This radiant glory in which the creation will happen. By sharing the light of the love of the Trinity, the Creator puts seeing and beholding, communication and communion at the centre of living. All that will be created will have this light as its beginning and will thus share in God. When we know any creature, we will know something of God. As the Psalmist says, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.”4 Light makes the divine life the reality of creation by being the life force of creation and by making it possible to behold God in creation.
Pseudo-Dionysius says that light is “The visible image of the Good. It draws and returns all things to itself, all the things that see, that have motion, that are receptive of illumination and warmth.”5 Pseudo-Dionysius will go on to say that this light “returns them (humans) to the truly real.”6 Light is the communication of God in creation, which binds us and draws all creation into God. The God who creates light is a God who wants to be seen, who is entering into relationship, who is connecting all of creation to Godself.
Darkness is not created. It is not spoken into being on the first day of creation. It is there but it is not created. If we follow the tradition of the church which teaches that we are created out of nothing, this means that darkness is nothing. The first verse of Genesis in The Orthodox Study Bible, a translation of the Septuagint, reads as follows. “In the beginning God made heaven and earth. The earth was invisible and unfinished and darkness was over the deep.”7 Here, we see darkness as incompletion, limit, insufficiency, and need. Nothing, like darkness, is a lack. It is not seeing, not knowing, not understanding. As a creature made from nothing and light, I cannot make myself.
Creatures are light receptors, not light makers. Sergei Bulgakov says it helpfully, “The creature is distinct from the deity itself not in respect of the source of its being, but only in respect of the particular mode of its reception of that being.”8 Creation and God are not different in their substance; we are made of the glory of God combining with our need for God. We are made of God sharing God with us who have a great need to become. Creation receives being into its nothing and becomes its own particular glory.
This darkness, nothingness, is not evil. We must be very clear on this. God does not allow evil by making us out of nothing and light. What God does is allow creation to exist even though creation is not God. What God allows is becoming. God is complete, sufficient, eternal and infinite. In creation, God makes being that is not complete, he makes being that needs to become. God is love and God wants this nothing to become full of light. This allowance of God creates a space, a place, in which development, learning, beholding, growing, and choice happens in creation.
The definition of all creation is thus to be a light receptor. Darkness is the place in which our natural receptiveness, our natural need, happens. Evil came into the world because humans didn’t want to need; we didn’t want to be dependant. We wanted to know and live without the light of God. We wanted to know good and evil for ourselves. We have declared that we don’t want to receive light; we want to make our own light. But creatures cannot make light. We can block light by our resistance to it, we can be diminished by it, and we can diminish others. By our blocking the light with our refusal to be its receptors, light is fragmented, it does not flow through. By refusing light in our dark places, in our weak places, in our relationships of interdependence, we fragment light, we break the flow. In so doing, creation can be distorted into something malformed and even monstrous. History has shown the great sorrow of human evil. It shows the results of blocking the light.
Christ, in His Incarnation as God and man, allowed all the light of His divinity to shine through His humanity, His need. He was unafraid of weakness and dependence on God; no light was blocked by any exercise of ego or desire to assert His right to make light or to own light. God was fully available in the person of Christ. This brilliant light revealed the diminishment and distortions of our humanity, and we hated what we saw. Thus, we refused the light definitively by crucifying Christ. However, because Christ is God and man, in the crucifixion light becomes present to all the wrongs of all of history because God remained the light of love all the way unto death, into nothing, into our fragments and rose again from the dead, thus saturating ultimate evil with the presence of eternal light. God took light into our ultimate refusal to receive light and loved us there for all eternity. “The light shines in the dark and the darkness comprehended it not”.
Why does all of this matter? It matters because it is midwinter and midwinter is hard and naturally dark. “The world’s whole sap is sunk” as John Donne puts it so eloquently in his poem “Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.” The world’s whole sap is sunk, and so is our sap sunk on these cold dark days. We are in a time of latency, of little energy, of waiting in the dark. This is not ‘evil’, this is the natural rhythm of creation. We are nothing and light and that light is a gift from God; sometimes we have to be still and wait upon that light to give us strength. Winter can teach us that, but it can also make us scared, impatient, and restless.
To compound issues, the world is not only naturally dark in this time in history, it is also unnaturally dark, fragmented, and sometimes the present evil seems monstrous. “There are wars and rumours of wars.”9 The political and environmental weather of the world is harsh and cruel. Just so, our understanding of light and dark is crucial to us now.
The creation story teaches us that the promise in the midst of the dark is not only that the light will come again, but that light is always present. All that is has light as its substance and ground. Light is here, in the dark, in the fabric of everything. And this light is the glory of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons and one God held in unity by the life of love. No one and nothing can withhold the light of God from any created thing.
Light is present even in the deep dark because creation is present in the deep dark. If you are present in the deep dark, light is there because you are formed in God and held in God, in the light of God’s shared glory. Furthermore, even when that deep dark has been perpetuated by our human refusal to receive light, even when I refuse the light, still light is present. Christ on the cross is present at the place of our refusal, loving all of us and bringing light.
The difference that Christianity makes is that Christians do not believe that this light is a right or privilege of all people, all plants and all animals. Christians believe that this light is the reality of all people, all plants and all animals — all creation. The difference between a right and privilege and a reality is fundamental. When we fight for rights and privileges, we do so from energy stores we believe to be our own. We think that we are granting someone or something rights and privileges that they didn’t have before. We think that we are making a new reality, a new world filled with light. However, when we attempt to make new realities, we again only block light by our ego and pride. It is exactly for this reason we must remember that we are not the makers of light in dark places — we are the receptacles of light in dark places. This difference asks for us to act with humility, hope and love; this difference asks that we live in forgiveness.
As Christians, we have been shown that human weakness, our dark, our nothingness, is not to be denied or hidden. Rather, it is to be the place of light. Thus, we as Christians have a great responsibility to the glory that is in every dark place. God is present, even in the monstrous fragments which seem to block the light. God is present through the cross of Jesus Christ. By his death and resurrection, we are forgiven for our blindness and brought into God’s everpresent light again. By the grace of God’s forgiveness, we are called to receive the light as we are naturally able and to let light flow through our fragments and our inabilities to respond.
So, daily, in the dark of midwinter and the evils that we face, we return to the words of Isaiah for courage and strength:
“Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”
- Luke 2:32
- John 1:5
- Genesis 1:3
- Psalm 36:9
- Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Trans: Colm Luibheid. The Classics of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, New York, 1987. pp. 75
- Ibid, pp. 76
- Genesis 1:1-2
- Bulgakov, Sergei. Sophia: The Wisdom of God. pp. 61
- Matthew 24:6
