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Opening Prayer
Shine into our hearts, O loving Master, by the pure light of the knowledge of Yourself, and open the eyes of our mind to the contemplation of Your teaching, and put into us the awed reverence of Your blessed commandments; that leaving all that is worldly, we may follow a spiritual life, thinking and doing all things according to Your good pleasure. For You are our sanctification and illumination, and to You we give honor, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. AMEN.
*Prayers of the Early Church. Ed. J. Manning Potts. Adapted for modern readers.
Wisdom Quote
Souls wherein the Spirit dwells, illuminated by the Spirit, themselves become spiritual, and send forth their grace to others. Hence comes . . . abiding in God, the being made like to God, and, highest of all, the being made God.
*St. Basil the Great, On the Spirit. See Union with God: Theosis ~ Divinization ~ Deification; www.frimmin.com/faith/theosis .
Wisdom Story
The late Catholic Contemplative, who wrote the seminal book Centering Prayer, Basil Pennington, in that book shared the following story ...
One of my confreres shared this little story with me: His little niece used to go to Mass each Sunday with her mother and father, brothers and sisters. As a little one, she was full of questions, and her mother sought to find answers that would satisfy the little inquirer and help her grow in her faith.
The little girl pointed up to the stained-glass windows with their many saintly figures and asked: "Who are they?" "They are the saints," her mother replied.
Some time later, when the child was in the nursery school, Sister asked, "Who are the saints?" A little hand shot up. "Well," said Sister, "who are the saints?" With excited pride the little one responded, "They are the ones who let God's light shine through."
Comments
Each Christian is to be a spiritual luminary in the world. For the spiritual Christian, through union with God the Father in Christ the Word and by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is a means of the Divine Light enfolding and infusing the world with healing grace. This healing is another way of speaking of salvation and the process of divinization.
And each Christian is in himself or herself a particular and personal expression of the Light. His or her True Self is the perfect luminary of the Light of all lives. The spiritually blessed man or woman contributes exactly by fidelity to the shape of his or her self. So, the Light touches others through that self in a manner unlike how It touches the world through others.
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Hence, we are to pass through the True Self ~ our essence in God and apart from phenomenal attributes ~ on our way to union with our Source and being a means of sharing the grace of contemplation with others. I am to come into contact, by Grace, with the I that speaks of "I" as my self. This I is the Subject who is Subject for being in the Subject of that I, the Word that speaks that I in the Father eternally.
This means a being divinized Christian discovers the Self as Self in God, by God, and for God, before and following its being spoken forth in space~time. This person discovers Self as word being Worded, moment~by~moment, and in space~time, by Christ, the Word.
Scripture shows us Jesus referring to himself as the light of the world ~ not a light of the world ~ offering to all the light of life: "Then Jesus spoke to them again: 'I am the light of the world. Anyone who follows Me will never walk in the darkness but will have the light of life'" (John 8.12, HCSB). This fact no Christian can rightly deny, for this truth is the essence of the living fact of Christ. Christianity is no longer Christianity if such a bold and somewhat exclusive, though including, claim is not taken seriously. Thus, we affirm that, though not defining precisely the meaning or ramifications of this claim: Jesus Christ is the Light of the world, and in Christ we receive the light of life.
Scripture has Jesus extending the image of Light of the world to all who follow Him: "You are the light of the world. A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but rather on a lampstand, and it gives light for all who are in the house" (Matthew 5.14-15, HCSB).
St. Paul writes to the Church of Philippi, and he addresses the luminance of the Christians, but he does so in the context of urging avoidance of communal attitudes and behavior what would dim the witness of such luminance: "Do everything without grumbling and arguing, so that you may be blameless and pure, children of God who are faultless in a crooked and perverted generation, among whom you shine like stars in the world" (Philippians 2.14-15, HCSB).
This leads us back to the opening story. What is a saint? Practically, a saint is a Light of the world. He or she is the Light of the world as participating, through his or her distinctiveness and integrated by universal Love in the collective of distinctivenesses of all other spiritual persons and by Grace, in the Light of the World ~ Christ. The child put it more simply and, yet, truly: "They are the ones who let God's light shine through."
The word "let" is key. Surrender is essential. But how do I position myself for and in surrender to God? Basil Pennington wrote...
It is difficult to see, in our frenetic society, how we can keep from losing ourselves and being totally dissipated and fragmented if we do not get in touch with our deeper selves, if we are not in touch with the ground of our being and find our true selves in the unifying Source of Being.
*Centering Prayer
Again, we note the unity between touching our deeper selves and God. To live in living contact with one, either the Self or God, is to be in living contact with the other, for they are unified eternally in God, in the singularity in God that is the Fontal Source of the diversity of creatures.
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