Light of the World

It’s that time again!

No, I’m not talking about the Christmas season; rather, this week brought us the premiere of the latest soon-to-be blockbuster, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Thousands of people will spend millions of dollars to see the film, and I will probably join them at some point.  I fall into that category of people who like the movies well enough, but wouldn’t consider myself to be a hard-core fan. 

Nevertheless, even I am aware of the underlying theme of all the Star Wars movies:  the battle between “The Force” and “The Dark Side.”  The characters and their motives are well-known after four decades of moviegoing:  Jedi knights like Luke Skywalker rely on “The Force” in their struggle against the dark forces of Darth Vader and his “Dark Side” co-conspirators.  The balance of power shifts from one side to the other throughout the series.

A variation of this theme transcends era, culture, and spiritual tradition.  “Good versus Evil,” “Right over Wrong,” “Truth trumps Deceit,” and “Love Always Wins” are the stuff of story, as well as the foundation of many of the world’s religions.

John echoes the same thing in his “mystical” introduction of the Christ in his gospel:

In him was life, and that life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it (John 1:4-5, NIV).

The scholarly notations in my edition of the New International Version of the Bible point out that John refers to Jesus as “life” more than any other gospel writer by far—36 times, in fact.  John relies heavily on this type of metaphorical language to describe Jesus to the reader:  life, word, and light, to name a few.

Richard Rohr, the noted Franciscan contemplative and author of numerous books that emphasize the mystical nature of the Christian faith, writes that the only way one can write or speak effectively about spirituality and the nature of God is through the use of metaphorical language.  How else can one describe something that cannot be experienced directly through the five senses than to make good use of rich and illustrative comparisons?

The metaphors and similes work well.  When John likens Jesus to “light,” we should know what that is, and what it isn’t.  And when he goes further to say that the light shines in darkness, “but the darkness has not understood it,” we can comprehend—or at least begin to comprehend—what that means as we reflect on our own experience.

I remember being afraid of the dark as a child, as are many youngsters.  “What might be lurking under the bed, or just outside the window?” We worry and obsess, and the darkness and all it obscures begins to draw us into a widening, deepening vortex of worry and fear.  We toss and turn, we cry out, we find ourselves paralyzed with anxiety until the morning light comes.

So great was my fear at one point, I asked my parents to put a heavy blanket over the curtains to block out the moving shadows of the shrubs and trees outside my window.  Of course, this just made the interior of my room darker!

As much as we fear the darkness, sometimes we are inclined to deepen it, to magnify it, to empower it! The darkness is something we understand, and even though we know there is an alternative—light—we don’t understand it as well or accept it as easily.  Better to be restless in the darkness than to risk that which we don’t fully understand, it seems.

The nativity narratives of the other gospels, particularly Luke, are rich in images that convey deeper symbolic meanings than those we would see on the surface.  A baby in a manger (innocence), born of a virgin (purity); kings and shepherds worshipping together (equality in the eyes of God), and, of course, a brilliant star.  Again—a light shining in the darkness.

There is so much worry, fear, despair, and hopelessness in the world today.  Regardless of how one leans politically, there is no denying that there is darkness all around, from Aleppo to Pyongyang…from the uneasy feeling that “truth” is negotiable, to the apparent death of respectful discourse…from the glorification of ego and greed, to the blind eye turned toward pain and suffering throughout the world.  As I write this, I think of the families and friendships that have been irrevocably broken by the hateful words spoken and written in the context something as temporal as a presidential campaign. 

Darkness, indeed.  We live in it, we accept it, we deepen it, we choose to succumb to it, we even identify with it, rather than to turn to something we don’t yet fully “understand”—the light.

Perhaps that is the real spiritual work of this Advent, of any Advent: to simply turn to the light, which is life.  It is a light that was manifested in the manger of Bethlehem, but which has been with us from the beginning and will be until the end.