"Our Light and Our Salvation"

Monday, April 14, 2014

4-14-14!

Part of me wants to find some way to talk about the featured psalm about the Lord as our light and our salvation through the metaphor of stage lighting -- how it holds you secure and visible, bravely out in front of people.  How actors trust it to make them look good and come on so that they can hit their cues. How there are people moving in the shadows who fear being caught out in the light.

Of course, it doesn't really work.  The lights of the theatre are controlled and manipulative and they flash on and off all the time.  The stage hands are doing everything in service of a higher purpose -- one for which they will receive considerably less credit in the final bow.

It makes me think of all the different ways I have heard the theory proposed that we need a balance in Dark and Light -- that we need to have those who work in darkness to keep our world going just as much as we need people who walk in the light.  That we need Gray Hats as well as White Hats and Dark Hats, just as we need night to go alongside day and twilight in between.

And I just can't help thinking: no we don't.

Sure, the sun and moon mark the passage of days, I'm fine with that.  But why do we convince ourselves we need to walk awhile in darkness?  That we need to understand it to truly show compassion for those trapped in the dark?

And above all, why do we shrug our shoulders and say that must be the way it has to be when we see so many caught by the darkness -- not descending to it willingly, not fleeing the light, but fighting for a glimpse of the sun only to be pulled into a darker and darker situation.

Why?  Why do we act like the world must be this way?

Every Hell is man-made.  And man can unmake them again.  And no, I don't think we need the Black and Gray Hats to do it.  We just need to remember that our hats started out white and can be clean again.  And for that, we do need Jesus.  Our light and our salvation -- from ourselves.  From our silly idea that we need the darkness to run our world, at the very least in partnership with the light.  That this is the way the world is so it must be because the world has no other option.

Poppycock.  Shine a light on it.  Let's entertain a radical new idea.  What if there is nothing that does more good in the darkness, in secret, that it could in the light?