I was the kind of boy that, if you gave me an ideal, I not
only respected it, I actually tried to live up to it. When I started first grade and began to learn
the basics of citizenship, such as pledging allegiance to the flag, I took it
seriously. When I went to Sunday School
and they told me about the love of God and taught me about Jesus, I was more
than interested. I was enchanted. If you set before me the notion, say, of
moral behavior, I actually believed that it was a good idea to do my best to
live morally.
Now all of that is not coming from a bad case of bragging,
but rather a little self-disclosure. I
have nothing to brag about. Because with
all that stuff about being, if not the best little boy in all the world, at
least one who took a pretty good stab at it, there comes a shadow side. Deep down I knew, even in the second grade,
that there was a part of me that took delight in being not only mischievous
(what boy isn’t a little?) but sometimes quite mean. I don’t think in all that I’m very different
from any of you. It doesn’t take us long
to discover that there is more than one side of us. And if we deny that shadowy, perhaps devious,
side, ultimately it has a way of taking over.
There is a verse in Psalm 112 that is worth chewing on for a
minute, “Light shines in the darkness for the upright; the righteous are merciful and full of compassion.” What the text means is quite different from what you might think. “Righteous” in Hebrew does not mean morally faultless. Nor does it mean being the best little boy or
girl in the world. The word “righteous”
actually means being in right relationships with God, with the world, with
nature, with other people. It means
“doing what one is created to do, being what one is created to be.” Some years ago I heard a man describing an
experience he had in the Holy Land. His
car broke down on a stretch of desert road.
In the days before cell phones he hitchhiked to the nearest village and
found a mechanic, who agreed to come take a look at the car. Something like a belt had come in two and the
mechanic was able after towing the car to repair it. As he shut down the hood after finishing the
repair, He said in modern Hebrew, “Sadiq.”
“Now she is righteous.” In other
words, the car is put back in order, ready to do what the car was designed to
do.
Now the reason I go into this much detail about feeling
fully alive is that that is the most effective way I know of for describing
wholeness. And wholeness is a word that
is very closely related to sanity. And
sanity is not far from what it means to be healed. And healing is at the heart of what the Bible
means by salvation. So you see where all
this is going. When we are fully alive
and whole and well we are in fact experiencing God, who is always Life and
always Truth. We who speak the Christian
vocabulary talk about that Life and Truth to be embodied and exemplified in
Jesus, who is the Way that God manifests in humanity. But Jesus never ever meant, by his own
admission and teaching, to be the one and only example of God’s life in human
form. “I say to you, ‘you are gods, and all of you children of the Most High.’”
What he is by nature—child of God—is exactly what we become by grace.
When I was priest in a parish with a large day school, I
used to have the gift of conducting chapel for pre-schoolers almost every day.
We had a little ritual that the kids loved, namely lighting the candles on the
little altar in their chapel. I would
ask as one candle was lit, “Who is the light of the world?” They would shout, “Jesus!” And I would
agree. Then as the child lit the second
of the two candles, I would ask, “And who did Jesus say was also the light of
the world?” Silence was the initial response.
And I would say, “Jesus said, ‘You are the light of the world.’” And they would gradually come to say, “I
am.” I am the light of the world.
Now it makes sense, doesn’t it? That verse in Psalm 112 is, “Light shines in
darkness for the upright.” Yes it does.
And the source of the light is both beyond us and within us. God is not one or the other but both—beyond
and within. And the Light of God, which
is the Life of the human being, issues not in anything other than mercy and
compassion. Don’t ever forget that. Those who imagine that God is punitive,
graceless, unforgiving, terrifying, generally treat themselves and other people
just that way: first themselves, then others, and beyond
that the rest of nature with contempt.
Those who know that God is merciful and compassionate are far more
likely to be able to love themselves and almost naturally find that loving
their neighbor as themselves is not so hard after all.
It is no secret that we are right now going through a period
of darkness. Even the most optimistic
among us realizes, no matter what her opinions or his political beliefs, that
we are all responding to something like a cosmic eclipse of light. Even the President’s inaugural address
describes a nation stumbling about in darkness.
I myself see a good deal of light, but I do not deny that, ironically,
the harbingers of darkness are sometimes the very ones who are describing it
even while deepening it. The important
thing here is not who is responsible for the darkness, or even how deep the
darkness is, but rather that our call is to be children of Light. That is not the same as ignoring evil, nor is
it the same as whistling in the dark. It
is knowing that we are righteous—not morally superior, and certainly not
flawless. But by speaking the truth,
showing mercy, and being compassionate, we are letting our light shine. We are being who we were created to be. We will be doing what we were designed to do. That is what it means to be fully alive.
©
Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017
