"All These Things"

I had never experienced darkness, true material darkness, until I was a young adult. It was not until I moved away from seacoast New Jersey, away from that vast plume of light stretching from Boston to Washington, that I could begin to understand darkness.

I visited a friend in Franconia Notch in the White Mountains of Northern New Hampshire. I drove up to his remote cabin, itself in darkness, and stepped out of the car. And there it was .... or wasn't. For everything had disappeared .... completely. I could not see the hand in front of my face. It was a profound lesson: without light is nothing. Absolute nothingness.

Our scientific knowledge teaches that nothing can live without light. The sun engenders all life, and without it there is no life whatsoever, no plant life, no animal life, no microbes: only a cold, lifeless void. You see, our God has fashioned a meditation for us to be lived every day. Every day we are to experience the world without God, Whose element is light (especially on moonless nights).

He has handed each of us a constant lesson in life, death, and resurrection, to be repeated every twenty-four hours. Now, why is it that we should imitate death each night? God might have created us such that we do not need sleep. Dolphins do not sleep. Half of their central nervous system sleeps while the other half operates bodily functions .... swimmingly. But we humans must lay down each night to imitate death. I have been so still in my sleep that people have wakened me anxiously because they thought I was dead. God has tethered each of us to this little drama — of life, death, and resurrection. No exceptions, for sleep researchers have found that few people can stray from eight hours of sleep for very long. God has framed these three eight-hour periods pegged to high noon. For each of us, life begins at the sun's zenith. It ends at sunset. We enter a death state. And our resurrection is celebrated at glorious dawn. (Talk about facing Easter!) That is, our lives are fundamentally "resurrection lives."

So there I stood for the first time, on a cold, moonless, night in the New Hampshire wilderness experiencing the utter absence of light. If I should venture to walk, I might hurt myself, even step into a sudden fall-off or a high cliff. All safety and certainty had disappeared.

If the darkness remained undisturbed, all life on earth would also disappear. What do we call this? It is called death, the death of everything. And I realized in that moment how unfortunate are those who live "civilized" life, for they have been robbed of these daily lessons, deprived of a cornerstone of their spiritual formation.

How profound then is the singularity of light, which is the genesis of all: the first verb in the Scriptures is to create; the first subject is God; the first act is speech, God's Word, God said; and the first thing created is light.

Small wonder, then, that God's Word should be the Light of the World, the Φώς του κόσμου / Phós tou kósmou :

The light of life — that incommensurable equation: light is life. And what is the only alternative? Chaos. Barrenness. Arctic cold. Death. We say "death in a cold grave" .... "the everlasting darkness." And we recall Dante's insight that the inmost core of Hell is a blasted world of bitter cold (La Commedia Divina). The center of Hell is frozen. St. Basil the Great also saw that any place away from the light is moral chaos, where evil life is lived in darkness, in secret, and darkness begets evil life (On the Holy Spirit). We go to that secret place where we commit our sins, and going to that place makes us long to sin.

The urgency of this is affirmed from the first verse of Genesis all the way through to the Book of Revelation, which is filled with lampstands and light. The Psalmist writes:

And again:

The Book of Proverbs considers this from the opposite direction:

And again:

What exactly is this evil that snuffs out our light and deprives us of our God-given lamp? This is the matter of our Gospel lesson this morning, which is a poem beginning with a riddle:

"The light which is darkness" .... what is that? You see, this is not the darkness of the unsighted, like that of the man born blind. This is created light that has been corrupted into darkness: first there is the light within, "which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (Jn 1:9). But this pure, original light is then transmuted into darkness. What is the alchemy here? It is commonly known: you must depart from the light in order to attain darkness. You cannot have darkness unless you flee from the light.

What, then, is meant by the bad eye? What is this bad? The answer comes in the next verse:

And exactly who are the two masters? The answer comes immediately:

Mammon was understood by medieval writers to be a demon's name, but it is simply a Hebrew word meaning "riches or wealth." The basic choice, therefore, confronting those who love God is this, either live simply that others might simply live, living in the light of God's command, or depart from this light, entering darkness and its follow-on of death and inner chaos.

Come to think of it, serving Mammon is the very thing that has deprived us of our daily spiritual lessons as satellite pictures have revealed. The vast, artificially lighted bubbles we see across the United States, by and large, are "Mammon" bubbles. People outside these bubbles must live simply for they have embraced a kind of intentional poverty, wary of cities, accepting sustenance living, with many tending barely profitable farms. Truly, the riches of Croesus are required to generate the electrically-powered day for the city that never sleeps.

One of our clients, a brew company to whom we sell two of our harvests, called the other day. We spoke to the CEO for roughly a half-hour, who told us that his electric bill is $35,000 dollars per month to power this electrically-powered day.

And here we are presented with the a latter-day Tower of Babel as our Mammon bubbles, which expand apace, seek to supplant God's light. We are mesmerized by the light of our smart phones (our children cannot avert their gazes from it), our computers, and our spellbinding televisions .... ever more spellbinding with each new generation. We have made our own day and our own night and .... before long, our own rules. But man-made day is not life-giving. Far from it! It is a kind of darkness that tricks itself out to be light. Or as Jesus puts it in our poem this morning: "the light in you that is darkness .... how great is that darkness!" How great the danger when you do not know that you are in danger!

In this, our modern world has entered spiritual poverty. We have departed from the God-given riches that lie all around us, God's lesson plan. We have imposed an electronic veil between ourselves and God. And our meditations have become formed (or should I say, deformed) in this electronic earth and sky.

Whenever we draw back this veil, we begin to return to health. Ask any family that goes off camping for the weekend. They report that they begin to feel right again. We might depart from our Mammon bubble and acquaint ourselves with God's artful Creation at any time. We might sit midst true darkness seeing nothing, being in vacancy. and meditate on our profound need of God, our never-departing Friend, our Provider of all things, our sure Defense. His light is life-giving, a cosmic power, enveloping the earth, which we shall never imitate. He alone is able to sustain us. He alone is able to guide us. We are completely dependent upon Him:

This is the subject of the poem: trusting God, depending upon God, committing our mind and soul to the truth that He alone is the only real, the only good, the only dependable.

The rest of the poem is to console those who are anxious about this life in Him: "Do not worry about your life, what you shall eat or drink."

This reminds me of the Exodus — taken away from the fleshpots of sensual Egypt, baptized in the Red Sea, ascetically purged in the wilderness — where you learn the great lesson: God alone is our Provider, our Providence. To sin is to complain about "What shall we eat?" .... "What shall we drink?" To live in peace is to trust in Him.

And then follows some of the most beautiful verses to be found in Scripture. Let us not neglect them:

When I was Vicar of the Diocese of Quincy I visited an architect of the Frank Lloyd Wright School. He had studied in Chicago and was on a train bound for California. He got off the train in Peoria and met a girl and never left. He built a beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home out on the prairie. I went out to visit him. He and his wife had a son, who later was diagnosed with Multiple Scleroris. He got to the point where he could not walk. He would lay down in the prairie with his camera and take the most beautiful pictures of a world that I have neglected. Have you ever seen a wildflower captured through the clearest lens of a wonderful camera, and then blown up? God's artwork touches the tiniest details. The colors are inimitable. The freshness of color, the immediacy! His world had become the beauty of God.

The intricate weave of the lily touched by God's finest paint brush, the grace and song of the birds that dance about us in mid air .... See the love God has lavished on these humble creatures of His hand! And how much more does He love the incomparable creatures on whom He has set His Holy Image! ..... the beauty of the human person, the beauty that inspires us most!

The poem concludes with a riddle just as it had opened with a riddle:

"The Kingdom of God?" His audience would have asked. What is that .... for this phrase appears not even once in the Holy Scriptures. Jesus commands us, seek first this enchanting and mysterious Kingdom .... but what is it?

Next, we are to seek God's righteousness. This was well understood. Righteousness is to be found blameless before the Law. To be just (which me meditated on in our Epistle lesson) is to be attuned to the Law like a trued wheel, gliding without resistance through life. No wobble.

But the underlying premise — that God will bless those who love Him and protect those Who embrace His ways — is famously a difficult one for atheists. Nonetheless, we do not shy away from saying that this is the bedrock of Jesus' teaching. God is to be trusted. God is to be relied upon. He is our Teacher. We do not stray from the Master. Do not be distracted, for that is the path of death. In the previous chapter in St. Matthew's Gospel, He had said,

Seeking God's righteousness .... this is the first condition of life in the Kingdom.

But the atheist objects! Why should God bless this person but not another?! This question falls under the category of fairness or unfairness. "Not fair!"

Yet, the answer to this riddle is as near as any family .... known to every mother's son and daughter. Mother and Father dearly wish to bless all their children, but they cannot bless each and every thing that their children do unless it be right and good. Our parents do not bless our strayings. They do not bless our shames. They do not give thanks to God for a shameful child. The parent's part is to await the return of the child and to receive his regret and contrition with love and understanding as Jesus' Parable of the Prodigal Son teaches.

This we know: to love God and to seek His righteousness will lead us into unending blessing. God cannot guarantee that we will not suffer at the hands of the world and its demons, for their freedom is inviolable. But He has promised that He will be with us. He will be our sure defense. And, yes, He will supply our needs. This has been the long story of the hermits at Na Pua Li'i Hermitage: in miracle after miracle after miracle, God's blessing and abundance has rained down so thickly upon us that we can scarcely keep up with it! And all this in a "woke world" that does not love us (Jn 15:18). For the ruler of this world is inseparable from Mammon .... and all the materialist world.

Our poem this morning ends with a final riddle:

All my life I have asked myself, "What are all these things?" Surely it is as mysterious as it is expansive: "all these things." As we cast our minds back to the empty and dangerous darkness with which we began this meditation, does not "all" mean all? Is not each thing, are not all things, the gift of God? And is this not what St. John meant when He wrote,

Darkness indeed is a void, a vacancy of incomprehension.

Following God is the last great adventure (and the first). As with any adventure, it unfolds before us with an air of mystery. Perhaps the answer to this riddle points to another, which goes to the heart of all godly life and marks the invitation into the journey:

"The Kingdom of God." "The Kingdom of Heaven." These are luminous phrases never before heard. For "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light"   (Isa 9:2).