In your light we see light

“No destructive action…can ever corrode the substance of Creation . . . there is a divinely guaranteed Goodness of being which no amount of mischief can undermine.” — Josef Pieper, In Tune With the World

I saw as in letters of gold this word Goodness, which I repeated for a long while with an indescribable sweetness. I saw it, I say, written on all creatures, animate and inanimate, rational or not, all bore this name of goodness. I saw it even on the chair I was using as a kneeler. I understood then that all that these creatures have of good and all the services and helps that we receive from each of them are a blessing that we owe to the goodness of our God, who has communicated to them something of his infinite goodness, so that we may meet it in everything and everywhere. — St. Therese Couderc

“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.”
— Thomas Merton

Have you ever had one of those moments? That fast-passing illumination where suddenly there is something more than light — everywhere — and everything around you seems ablaze in glory, and for just a lightning-fast instant, you get this overwhelming notion that everything is good, everything is loved, everything is perfectly known, and that the indescribable and unknowable mercy and the love that upholds the world and everything in it is as wide as the universe and as tiny as the space between moving atoms, and it is all as unyielding as water.

We swim in it, toward the source, and are meant to help others swim there, too.

In you is the source of life
and in your light we see light, itself
— Psalm 36

If the moving atoms of the world cease to move, we cease to be — talk about “something” from “nothing” and the world of illusions; talk about all we do not know.

It is like this. Those who can see with the eyes of their bodies are aware of what is happening in this life on earth. They get to know things that are different from each other. They distinguish light and darkness, black and white, ugliness and beauty, elegance and inelegance, proportion and lack of proportion, excess and defect. The same is true of the sounds we hear: high or low or pleasant. So it is with the ears of our heart and the eyes of our mind in their capacity to hear or see God.

God is seen by those who have the capacity to see him, provided that they keep the eyes of their mind open. All have eyes, but some have eyes that are shrouded in darkness, unable to see the light of the sun. Because the blind cannot see it, it does not follow that the sun does not shine. The blind must trace the cause back to themselves and their eyes. In the same way, you have eyes in your mind that are shrouded in darkness because of your sins and evil deeds. — From the book addressed to Autolycus by Saint Theophilus of Antioch, bishop (from today’s Office of Readings)

I think my morning work stops here, for some oratory time.