Another Light
The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the LORD shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.
Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the LORD shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.
Isaiah 60:19,20
Dear Friends,
In the darkness of our times, it is all the more urgent for us to find and radiate light. Not the light of lightbulbs and fires, or even the natural lights of sun and moon and bioluminescence. There is another light, or other lights, referred to for instance in the book of Isaiah. This includes the all-but-unbearable light of being itself (referred to as "the LORD" by the traditions of the Hebrew Bible).
We encounter this light in stepped-down form in every experience of meaning. As soon as you read this sentence, you turn it from darkness to light. It morphs from marks on the page, meaningless ink, into living meaning. This non-physical light of meaning also shines toward us from everything called "matter" -- only in the case of rock, tree, starling, the earth as a whole, we normally experience it not as light, not as meaning, but as a thing. We even do this with our normal take on the sun, the moon and the stars. They are things for us, not light. Our spiritual ecological project is to increase the true light of the world: first, by perceiving the world as light, but then also by becoming ourselves transmitters of light.
In our oft-repeated three-part exercise, based on a story about the Baal Shem Tov, we notice that when the Baal Shem read the Torah for its own sake, he was brought into a "world of light," and that gave him practical ways to operate in daily life. Today, we'll perform this three-part exercise using the Isaiah verses above in the center.
So here are the three parts:
1. We each silently bring to mind a personal problem of whatever kind -- it could be ecological or political, too. (1 minute)
2. We meditate together on the central theme -- today, from Isaiah. (15-20 minutes)
3. At the sound of the gong, we each return in our minds briefly to the original problem, noticing any changes in how it appears as compared with our first approach.
Along the way, we'll find out more about what we are mourning, and about the promised end of mourning: morning.
with love,
Michael
