The weight of light

As long as I can remember I have struggled to put words to what I have seen - what I have come to know - inwardly.

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I'd known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought, mostly, but fertile with becoming.

But there was no way to speak of this time, no way to ask anyone what it was I had come to know. It was many years before I read anything I could connect with those days, and with the moments of often unsought stillness and illumination that recurred throughout my early years. And despite reading TS Eliot and CS Lewis and RS Thomas, it wasn't until I learned the Jesus Prayer from Fr Francis Horner SSM at the age of nearly 30 that I came to realise that it was God I had found in the silence. 

Now, it is always hard to write, even to think, of these experiences. Prose is not built to carry such things: it buckles under the weight of light. Truth cannot be set out in static, logical propositions: definitions and categories are parched and rotted through by the actinic light of what merely is.

All we can do, it seems to me, is point out what it is not. Not structured, not hierarchical, normative, dogmatic. It is not the object of sentences. Thought fails. 

It is only in Christ that the light becomes human enough to touch; and even then, on the Mount of Transfiguration the light undid the three disciples (Luke 9:28ff). It will undo us if we stay still long enough, unknowing. These times outside time are perhaps our little models of the Cross; our "white martyrdom" of prayer that draws us inexorably back, even when we try to turn away. Christ is faithful, even when we are not. 

Paul wrote, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:20 NIV)