Brother Son and the Children of Light
Preacher: Professor Sabine Hyland, Professor of World Religions, University of St Andrews
Readings: 1 Thessalonians 5:4-11; John 8:12-20
“I am the Light of the World. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life”.
We have all heard these famous words, and they’re especially appropriate at this time of year, as the Sun shines longer very day, bringing us out of the darkness of deep December. Images of light and of God as light suffuse the Scriptures. This passage from John always reminds me of the famous Canticle of St Francis, in which the saint celebrates how God’s providential love is expressed in and through all creatures and all creation, beginning with “Brother Sun and Sister Moon”. As Francis wrote:
“Most High, all-powerful, good Lord, All praise is Yours, all Glory, all honour and all blessings.
Praised be You, my Lord, through all Your Creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun,
Who brings the day, and you give us Light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his magnificent splendour,
Of You, Most High, he bears the likeness.
Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon, and the stars,
In the heavens you have made them bright, precious, and fair.”
So, St Francis tells us that the Sun in the sky bears the likeness of God. For Francis, God demonstrates His love for humanity by the splendour of heavenly light, by the beauty of a forest, by the love of animals. The natural world around him was a display of divine love, and within this display the Sun, upon which life on earth depends, held a special place. Given how much people today seek solace and meaning in nature, it’s no surprise that Francis’s vision continues to resonate with Christians and non-Christians alike.
This devotion to and celebration of the natural world around us is something that I experience when I go to the rural Andes to do fieldwork. The indigenous people in the Andean highlands are Christian, yet they retain their ancestors’ deep love of and reverence for the mountains (Apukuna), for the Sea (Mama Cocha), for the earth, (Pachamama), and for the Sun (Tayta Inti). In the 15th century, during Inka rule, the Sun was worshipped as a God. Today, in the Andes, many Christians offer prayers to the Sun every morning, often while holding a trio of green coca leaves, the sacred herb that facilitates communication between humans and the heavens. On important religious holidays, communities bring out their sacred wooden cups – here is an example that dates to the 1600s – that are decorated with ancient Andean signs, such as a concentric diamond that represents an eye that sees all and has all knowledge. (“Eye”, ñawi, is also the word for the hole into which seeds are placed).
Figure 1. Andean kero c. 1600. (Private collection)
These cups are a colonial continuation of the Inca beakers which were used for Sun offerings. They are filled with alcohol and lifted up in honour of the Sun while the community leader intones a prayer:
“Taytay Inti, noqanchis churikin!
My Father Sun, we are your children!
Kusikuywanmi napaykukiku,
With joy we salute you,
Kamariychis tukuy imapas tak nisqalla kananpaq
May all things be at peace,
Hinan kanqa!
Let it be so!”
Then the officiant sprinkles some drops up toward the Sun and down toward the Mother Earth, and then drinks the contents in one very long draught. The Sun, the Earth, the mountains, the moon, the stars, and other natural phenomena are believed to have their own personhood, and so they are treated with respect. Bolivian law even recognises the rights of non-human beings such as mountains out of respect for the Andean cosmo-vision, a cosmology that its practitioners say is in harmony with their Christian faith.
This ceremony with the cup, in honour of the Sun, Taytay Inti, may seem somewhat pagan, but within Christian mysticism, metaphors of light are often used to express the fundamental unity of all peoples and all faiths. We see this, for example, in the mystical vision of the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, that he famously experienced on the corner of Fourth and Walnut St in Louisville, Kentucky. He described it thus:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . ..
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . .. I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Merton believed that a great unity pervaded all world religions, an original unity “beyond words… beyond speech… beyond concept” which can only be experienced. As he wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “The more I am able to affirm others, to say ‘yes’ to them in myself… the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says yes to everyone”. And later in the same work, he said, “If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc, in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic, and certainly no breathe of spirit with which to affirm it.”
In his poetry, Merton would develop the metaphor that the purpose of the spiritual life is to become one with light, and this is the true journey of all religious, and the heritage of all humanity. Here is an excerpt of one of his poems:
“Wind and a bobwhite
And the afternoon sun.
By ceasing to question the sun
I have become light.
Bird and wind.
My leaves sing.
I am earth, earth.
All these lighted things grow from my heart…
When I had a spirit
When I was on fire
When this valley was
Made out of fresh air,
You, God, spoke my name.
Naming Your silence”.
By ceasing to question the Sun, I have become light.
In Merton’s imagery, we can feel the beauty of the Kentucky countryside, hear the song of the wind, and of the bobwhites (also known as Virginia quails). His poem seems to be very much in the spirit of St Francis and his love of Creation as the expression of God’s love for all of us. Nature is seen as something that follows the divine will by uniting all the different peoples across the globe.
Yet we find another expression of the religious life in terms of light in the other New Testament reading for today – the famous passage in Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians. Now I must confess that the Pauline Epistles are not my first choice for readings from the New Testament. Give me the Gospel of John, or the stories of women in Luke, or even the wild imagery of Revelations, where the angels carry our prayers like smoke to the Lord. Paul’s letters are often challenging, but thanks to the lectionary, we hear his words regularly throughout the Christian year. And when I least expect it, Paul will have a passage that’s so stirring and beautiful that it knocks me out of my seat. The passage we read today is one of those:
“You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet.”
This is a beautiful and inspiring exhortation to be our best selves and one expects Paul to then describe how Christ is on the side of those who follow in the light and not for those who fail at this. But that’s not what Paul goes on to say. Instead, he points out that Christ is as much there for those of us who fail to live up to these ideals as for those who do: “He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him”. And then, instead of focusing on whether one is asleep or awake, he turns this metaphor of light – that we are Children of Light – into something very tender. “Therefore”, he concludes, “encourage each other and build each other up, as in fact you are doing”. This is not fire and brimstone. It’s turning the metaphor of light inward, into supporting and encouraging each other’s feelings, of “building each other up”. Each one of us has a light inside of us, a divine light that shares in the beauty of the sun and the stars. As Merton said, he wished that he could go around telling people “that they are all walking around shining like the sun”. We’re living in an epidemic of low self-esteem and insecurity, one that hits university aged students particularly hard. We have so much negative self-talk, have so many self-doubts about our appearance, our abilities, our likeability – many psychologists consider self-hatred to be the scourge of the modern age. We’re all vulnerable — I remember when I was at university, I worried a lot more about my weight and my appearance than I did about my marks. Marks were easy for me, but getting to the weight I thought I needed to be successful and to be able to do the things I wanted to do seemed impossible. How could I be an anthropologist, traipsing around the Andes, if I wasn’t thin and beautiful like Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey? It seems so silly now, but that despair felt very real when I was 20. And that was long before the days of Instagram and social media, where the visual aspect of our self-presentation is amplified. Some observers claim we are now devouring ourselves in an ever accelerating aesthetic consumerism of images on the internet.
St Paul’s use of the metaphor of light provides a way for us to encourage and to support each other, to build each other up. His passage resonates with the Quaker notion of the Inner Light – the idea that God exists in each one of us as a divine light, a beautiful light that is our ultimate reality. This understanding of the Inner Light implies that “all persons have inherent worth, independent of their gender, race, age, nationality, religion, and sexual orientation” (Quaker declaration). St Paul’s exhortation to “build each other up” includes the need to love ourselves, to practice self-compassion, even when, or especially when, we can’t live up to our ideals. We need to see that light in ourselves, to practice self-compassion for ourselves and to remember that Christ is with us always, every step of the way, just as our inner light shines inside of us, no matter how ugly and broken we may feel.
George Fox, the founder of the Friends, also known as the Quakers, counselled us to walk cheerfully over the world, seeking the Light of God in everyone. The thought that I would leave you with today is to seek the Light in yourself and to remember that it is there, glowing and beautiful, whether you are awake or asleep, at every moment of your day and night. That light is your true self.