Divine Radiance

The Incarnate Son, therefore, took careful pains to set paths before us which would lead to Him: the First-born Son, the Eldest Sibling, our own precious Brother. And by this, He revealed to us that our family ensign and crest is Life, that our Royal Family alone is the Author and Overseer of animate, sentient, holy Life. And today's Gospel lesson sets out a royal example.

Such a thing cannot be hid, Jesus suggests (Mt 5:14). Even the local synagogue ruler, who has been told that Jesus must be depreciated, runs to the Lord of Life in desperation. Along the way a woman, hearing of His sovereignty over disease and death, touches Him and is healed. But He gives His followers to know that the giving of Himself exhausts Him, that lifeforce, which He calls δύναμις / dúnamis, passes from Him to them. You see, there is subtraction on His part, and addition on the part of those to whom He minsters. By this they are given to know something very important: that Jesus is not other, but rather organically part of their web of life. He is one with them. What He does, therefore, they can do: preach the Kingdom, heal, raise the dead, make disciples. Do we not read of all these things in the Book of Acts? If but Peter's shadow fell upon them, they were healed. His disciples are not passive and chronically ministered to. They are not carried along a sandy beach. But rather they are sons of God and, by that fact, bringers of light and Heavenly ministry:

And who is the son of man if he is not you and I and everyone following our Exemplar as the Master intended.

☦

Many years ago, I lectured on scientific subjects in various parts of the world, traveling more or less constantly. One night I sat in Hong Kong's airport waiting for a flight to California. I was too tired to read or write, so I simply sat gazing. Across from me sat a group of Buddhist monks. They were calm and collected as one would expect. But there was something else, one aspect of their presence which could not be willed nor hidden: these monks gave off light. There was an unmistakable radiance. And I sat there contemplating it, and then called it back to mind many times during the intervening forty years. I humbly offer the lesson of this encounter: we are intrinsically light-bearers. (I mean this literally as well as figuratively.) That is our native state. Have you ever walked into a room to watch an infant napping? But this Divine light dims as we are dominated and finaaly overtaken by our carnal appetites. In the end our light is snuffed out and the transformation over the course of a lifetime from light to darkness is completed .... or it is not. If we say "No" to our many animal appetites, our lifetimes instead would chart a course from lightness into darkness then into light. It all depends upon us. It is our choice and our choice alone.

Now, I continue to admire all those who choose the path of light, denying their base passions. This is the essence of Buddhism. What Buddhists call the Four Noble Truths are all about ridding ourselves of cravings and all manner of dissatisfactions. And this denial of the animal self will cleanse our spiritual pathways, will free us of pollutions, will permit our inner light to shine. For this is the great difference between the human creation and the other animal creatures. All others are weighed down by the shackles of desire, caught up in the deadly rivalry of a food chain. Of all God's creatures, humans alone radiate light.

I lament the tragedy of Buddhism, therefore. To progress so far down this noble path of enlightenment and to miss the One Who is Divine Light, Who said,

And those who followed Him up the Mount of Transfiguration saw with their own eyes that the ascent upward, above the world, means a return to our natural state, where all is bathed in Uncreated Light. Many years later, one of those witnesses would write,

At the beginning of his book, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton set the following versicle:

This mystery bespeaks an emptiness that is fullness, for which the soul longs. It is the nothing that is everything. Anyone who has experienced this mysterious nothing, perhaps on a windless mountaintop or in a desert at night, has ventured into this truth.

The silent mountain Merton considers is the self — emptied of all noise, void of all thoughts, rid of all desires. As Merton writes,

And what is the prey that draws chattering, pecking birds, crowding out silence with their compulsive movements and unbridled desires? They tug with each other over scraps of worldly debris, driven on by darting minds. It exhilarates them. They seem to exalt in it. And so do we covered with debris in our incessant pursuit of worldly stimulations. For so many of us are full of their kind of food.

What is this food for which we would forsake the Friendship of God? What are these pleasures for which we would allow the Divine Light within us to be polluted and finally to die?

We don't want the chattering birds to come near to us, much less to become chattering birds ourselves. What we really want is the ineffable and beautiful stillness which is inside us. As Merton wrote, "It was there all along."

This emptying of ourselves is called kenósis. It is the first thing Jesus did in His Self-denying love in order to enter our lifeworld (Phil 2:7). To follow Him, we must do the same, crucifying the "old man" that the "new man" might be born (Eph 4:22):

He did not mean service (though certainly we serve). He meant, "Deny your self, and follow Me." Inevitably, His Me is the replacement for your self.

When I went to Haiti, I met many, many people who had denied themselves and who did indeed follow Him hour-by-hour, day-after-day. For example, I met a priest-monk from Italy of the Order of St. Camillus, a healing order. He was intelligent and strikingly handsome and winning. People were drawn to him. He would have succeeded very well in worldly ways. He seemed to be possessed of supernatural powers as he took on one impossible task after another: rector of a seminary, provincial superior of a religious order, president of a public health ministry, founder of a large and impressive hospital (with himself as general contractor), and a medical practitioner himself. He was also a day-laborer who drove a dump truck back and forth to distant Port-au-Prince, so he could run the hospital there, too. He drove this heavy vehicle over dirt roads through high mountains that were slick with clay in the rain and did not have guard rails to protect him from a thousand-foot drop. At any time, he could be killed or robbed on the roadways or fall victim to predators, even the police who prowled the roads demanding extortion money.

Many times I sat in the seminary chapel for his celebrations of the Eucharist. One might reasonably expect to find an exhausted, withdrawn man whose face was wan and dimming. But that is not what you saw. His Masses were luminous and bespoke an impossible lightness of being. Each word he said was replete with grace. And, yes, he himself shone with unmistakable radiance in those celebrations which began before dawn.

Some years ago, I attended a fund-raiser in New England that culminated in a slideshow depicting the past twenty-five year history of a ministry in Haiti. Nearly all of the pictures were of a nun who had built up this ministry for a quarter-century as its administrator. She was this apostolate's animating spirit. She is the reason people gave money (and gave and gave and gave) and even traveled to a remote corner of Haiti to be near to her. And in the dark during the slideshow I heard them: "She's radiant!" they whispered to each other. "Beautiful! Her face gives off light!" Even the camera had captured it.

And it was true. The radiance that shone off of her face after forty years of spiritual life through China, India, and Haiti was vivid and obvious.

Exactly, what had happened to this woman over a lifetime? In 1962, the American culture was about to enter a path of more and more and more lifestyle permissions, more and more and more personal liberties, and more and more and more stimulations of every kind, until it has reached a point of the scarcely-to-be-believed .... she chose a path of less and less. She rid herself of every chattering bird. Through vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, she cut off the passions before they could take hold and form her. Like the Italian priest and so many others, she had become a saint, a light-bearer, and a disciple of the shining Son of God. For she had read the Scripture, and she believed its truth:

Encountering the face of God on top of Mt. Sinai, Moses' face shone with a radiance so great that no one could look upon him. Atop the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus unveiled His true Self in the greatest Theophany of the New Testament:

And He enjoins us to let our light so shine upon men that even God the Father feels its glory (Mt 5:16). Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He is our path into light. God made the world by first ordaining light, and He made us to see that same brilliant light when we leave that world. Light is our essence, our deepest nature, and our only true home. All else is darkness, which devilishly yearns to snuff out the light.

Spiritual life. It begins by fixing your gaze upon light as Moses had in the Midian Wilderness. And it culminates on the heights of Sinai and thence to the Mount of Transfiguration until we become all light, Uncreated Light, like unto Him, Who bids us follow.

My brothers an sisters, as we prepare ourselves for the Nativity Fast, let this season be our deeply committed journey into light. For He again is born unto us. And we even now can discern that the darkness is beginning to loose its hold and disperse:

Come! Let us greet that dawn! let us draw near to Him! For He has been waiting for you and for me. And He will wait until the last, until the very last.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.