When We Enter the Darkness

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Sometimes it happens this way.
Sometimes when you are closest to God, you feel as though you are farthest away.
It seems to happen that when you are a new Christian, God speaks clearly, you feel His presence solidly, light is all around you.
New
Fresh
As you progress in your faith, God’s voice gets fainter, His presence is harder to grasp, the clouds begin to form around you.Old
Dry
This is how it was for Mother Theresa who began her life full of fire and certainty and spent the last fifty years of her life full of darkness and silence. She continued to obey, even when the dry times outnumbered the rich times.
As a baby, you need God to discernibly carry you. When you become more mature, you need to trust that God is still carrying you.
When God first showed Himself to Moses, it was in the light.
Light
In a miracle of a fiery bush that did not become ash, He revealed Himself to a man who did not yet know Him.
Later, God showed Himself to Moses in a cloud.
Cloud
In the middle of the cloudy dimness of a pillar of cloud, God spoke to a man who was learning to trust Him.
Once Moses became more perfected, he saw God in the darkness.
Dark
In the darkness on the top of a mountain, God gave His Word to a man who knew Him.
We should not think that this is unusual. We should not despair when we must enter the darkness. We should not give up on God when we can no longer see Him.
Rather, we should continue to obey, continue to trust, continue to speak and to listen.
What you discovered about God in the fiery light does not disappear once He cloaks Himself in darkness.
He is still there, He still loves you, and He is still working to perfect you.
Perfect
Especially in the darkness.

Ideas in this post come from St. Gregory of Nissa (335-395 AD)

Art Credits: God Appears to Moses from Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg; Pillar of Cloud is a Bible card published by the Providence Lithograph Company; Promulgation of the Law by Gerard Hoet; all other photographs copyright Made Sacred 2018

I have three papers to write this week for my Master’s course, so this post is edited from the archives. I hope you enjoyed it!

Ruminating On Light

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I sit in a space filled with light.
Light
The sunlight streams in through the trees in a way that completely surrounds me with its warmth and illumination.
The light is intimately close to me on all sides, yet I cannot truly see the light itself.
Light
All I can see are the objects, both large and small, off of which the light reflects.
The light reveals what is there. It reveals the world that is around me and makes the objects near me able to be known by me.
If I were capable of looking away from the objects that reflect the light, I would not be able to see the light anymore.
Light
I can only see the light by its reflection.
The light surrounds me, intimately close, revealing the reality in which I sit, yet the light itself remains invisible.
Light
I am the light of the world.

Art credits: all photographs by Kirk Sewell

A Prayer to the Light of the World

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My Lord, sometimes the words You speak seem cryptic.
You said that You are the light of the world.
light of the world
I don’t know what that means.
Does it mean that You show me the way to live or that You show me my sin?
Perhaps it means that You help me not to fall flat on my face as I stumble through life.
The king who fell flat on his face for a woman and yet still was Your king said that Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
O Word of God, show me the way I should walk and I will follow that path.
lamp to my feet
Master, You said that whoever follows You will not walk in darkness.
This world is full of darkness. Sometimes it is hard to believe that You can keep all of it at bay.
Hard to believe, that is, with all of my heart.
The darkness feels so weighty. Perhaps if I could ever truly follow you I would find that all darkness had been banished to my peripheral vision.
O King, show me how to follow and I will not stray to the right or to the left.
light to my path
Giver, You said that whoever follows You will have the light of life.
I don’t know what that means.
If it is a gift from You, however, I know that I desperately desire to have it.
Your blessed brother said that through You the Father is able to keep me from stumbling and to present me blameless before the presence of God’s glory with great joy.
O Sacrifice, if this blessed assurance is what it means to follow You, my eyes will remain fixed.
O Light, if being the Light of the world means that I have a way to walk through life, that the darkness of this world is defeated, that I will make it safely to the end of all things in Your care,
follow the Light
I will step full into the Light and never again glance back into the shadows.
my Savior and my Lord.

A reflection on John 8.12

Art Credits: final photograph is by Kirk Sewell; all other photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2018

The Eclipse of God

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One dark night, God the Son pleaded with God the Father
and was answered by silence.
silence
cries
One dark afternoon, God the Son cried out to God the Father
and was answered by the turning of His back.
rejection
The Father rejected the Son and the Son experienced “the dark night of the soul, in which everything that makes life something living withers away, and in which hope vanishes.” (Jurgen Moltmann)
For the parents who have just lost their child
For the girl who has just been raped
For the man who has just lost his job
For the woman who is drowning in loneliness
the only answer to your cry of Why? Why, oh God, why? is not a because
it is an experience.
Lent
The reality of whatever makes you feel what Martin Buber calls the eclipse of God can only be answered by the reality experienced by Jesus.
“‘For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you.'” (Jurgen Moltmann)
The Jesus whose cry was met with silence, the Jesus who was rejected by God, He is the friend to whom we can confide everything because He has suffered everything that has happened to us.
And more.
eclipse of God
reality of Christ
For into our unanswered cry to God, He came.
He came and entered into the darkness and the suffering to be with us.
He came as a brother to sit with us in our fears, our weeping, our brokenness.
He came as a mother to reclaim His own. “Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you.
“He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn His face from us, however much we turn our face from Him.” (Peter Kreeft)
It is the truth Corrie ten Boom spoke from the hell of a Nazi death camp, “No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still.”
And because He came, He can answer our cry with His reality.
after the eclipse
reality of the resurrection
He can answer our reality with the experience of His reality that no matter how dark the eclipse of God, it is always followed by the blinding dawn of the resurrection.

Art Credits: The Three Crosses by Rembrandt; Resurrection by Luca Giordano; Der Engel öffnet das Grab Christi by Benjamin Gerrisz Cuyp; all photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2018

Shaken Awake

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We are a drowsed and sleep-walking people.
Asleep
We are lulled by false comfort, by the false distance of God.
We are deceived into believing that we can avert danger, can assert control over the forces around us.
We have no such power, and some have been shaken to their core by that realization.
 They have woken up.
Awake
Wake Up
We must wake up.
Only if we awaken from this sleep that claims us will we be able to truly live.
Only when we do not cling to false securities can we raise our eyes to Him who is our only security.
God allows our world to fall into difficulties and ugliness so that we may awaken to God’s healing presence in our world.
God is Here
It is time to wake up and get to work.
It is time to put things to rights, time to work to restore our world, to bring God’s kingdom rule to bear in our world.
Those who have experienced an awakening know that it is time to repent, time to change.
Those who have been roused by the quaking of their world become unshakable in their decision to stay alert.
Stay Alert
We who remain asleep build our imaginary worlds in which we dream presumptuous dreams of comfort and security.
We must be shaken.
We must be shattered so that the light of God’s coming pours through every crack.
Light of the World
Only when we awake to our own frailty and failings can the Light of the World reach us and give us a taste of the glory and abundance that can be ours,
the abundance and joy we can have in Christ if we will only remain awake to His presence in our lives and alert to His work through us in our world.
Awake
We must wake up, we must watch with readiness and work with fervor for the coming of our God to put things right and banish the night.

Art credits: photograph of light streaming through the trees by Kirk Sewell; all other photographs copyright Made Sacred 2018

Our Prayer for the New Year

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We live in a weary world.
Our world searches for light, searches for hope.
img_0766
We who have the light and hope to offer…
…do we?
Our world behaves foolishly as it clutches after joy, looks frantically for peace.
img_0741
We who have knowledge to share of joy and peace in desperate circumstances…
…do we?
Do we shine out the light of the world in rejoicing or shutter it in fear?
Why would we do that? How selfish must we be to withhold life from a dying friend out of fear for ourselves?
Yet we do.
I do.
As we begin a new year, as we close out the old, could we who are light bearers join together in prayer?
img_0731
Could we pray together that God would give us boldness and courage, that He would give us words to say and opportunities to say them, that He would help us to behave wisely and to love well?
Oh, Lord, our God. We are yours. We say to you along with Mary, Behold, we are the servants of the Lord. Do with us what you will.
Amen.

Living in the Dark

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Christmas begins in the dark.
Dark
Advent, this season leading up to Christmas, is for us. It is for we who live in the dark.
This season seems to amplify pain. Those who are lonely feel more lonely, those who are grieving feel their grief more deeply, those who are hurting seem to suffer more.
And that’s okay.
It’s okay not to feel happy this time of year.
After all, Christmas doesn’t mean much if we don’t need it.
Mary
Mary understood. Her angel visitation led to a rift between her and her beloved, a painful journey on a donkey, and giving birth next to a chicken.
Even as she clutched her newborn son, she heard the prophecy of a sword piercing her heart and wondered.
Even after her Christmas, her beloved son grew farther and farther away from her, uttering such things as Why would you look for me? Don’t you know I must be about my Father’s business? and, when she came through the crowds to see him, My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.
Yet Mary stayed close. She trusted and held on to her faith in her son no matter how distant he seemed, even when he died. She stayed close. Everywhere we look in the gospels we see Mary, hovering on the outskirts, still showing up, still coming back to her son again and again.
Stay Close
Can we do the same?
Can we hold on to our faith in the Son no matter how distant He seems, even if He seems to be dead?
Light
This world is dark and we live in a continual Advent.
Don’t run away from the bitter-sweetness of this Advent season. You don’t have to pretend to feel joyful.
Colors
Tinsel
Don’t hide behind the tinsel and lights. Neither should you ignore the colors completely.
Linger as you abide with the sorrow and the joy, the hurt and the hope that are woven together in this season. Stay close to the Son however far away He may seem.
Christ
Settle into the knowing of how desperately we need Christmas, how desperately we need God-with-us.
Our Father promised that Christmas would come
Christmas
and it will be all the more beautiful for having lived through the darkness of Advent.

Art credit: Pieta by Michelangelo; all other photographs copyrighted by Elizabeth Giger

Longing and Hoping He Will Come

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Advent is a time of waiting. A time of light and of dark, a holy season of expectancy.
Come
Come
Advent means arrival and we are waiting for your arrival, oh Light of the world.
We sing our beautiful songs of longing and of hope and we pray that you will come.
Come
Come
Kings and prophets of old prayed, Come!
All my life, I have prayed, Come!
Yet has humanity gotten any closer to you in these thousands of years of our existence?
Have I gotten any closer to you in my few decades of life?
Or is the distance to you always the same no matter how far we travel?
When our bleeding feet have apparently covered a part of the distance to your eternity, don’t you always retreat twice as far away from us, into the immense reaches filled only by your infinite being?
You tell us that you have already come, once upon a time, as a baby in the straw. You tell us that you have come, have settled in among us and shared our drab and ordinary lives, but to be honest, it is hard to see you in this place.
Come
Come
To be honest, your arrival often feels more like a departure.
You came as you promised, but you did not change our poor and finite sort of life as you lived it. Instead, you became like us in every regard.
You lived every moment carefully, not letting any sort of torment slip from your cupped hands. You felt deeply every drop of this life and suffered it all, right to the bleeding end.
You, too, felt death coming for you, steadily, relentlessly. You, too, when you looked up to the One who is called Father, begging for comfort in your pain and dread, were met with deafening silence.
Is this why you came? Is this birth in Bethlehem and death on Golgotha the coming that is to redeem all of us from our human misery? Are we to be comforted simply because you also wept and met your end?
Come
No, now I begin to understand that we sing and pray this Come of hope and longing because you are still in the process of your coming. Your appearance as part of the very dirt you created was only the beginning of your coming.
You chose to rescue us from our misery by taking on our very misery and bringing it to the triumphant ending we could not have found. You alone are able to take the cross we all bear and change it into a triumphant banner of victory.
It is said you will come again, but again is misleading. It is said that you will appear again, and perhaps this is a better way of understanding because you have never really gone away. In all of our human existence you have never left us.
Come
Behold, you come. Now it is still the one single hour of your Advent, at the end of which we too shall have found out that you have really come. O God who is to come, grant me the grace to live now, in the hour of your Advent, in such a way that I may merit to live in your forever, in the blissful hour of your eternity.

~ all quotes are from Karl Rahner (1904-1984), German Jesuit priest and theologian. Many of the ideas in this essay are also from him.

Lift Up Your Head

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The deep darkness in this world can sometimes weigh our heads down. Our eyes remain fixed on our next step, our minds focused on not stumbling, not falling flat on our faces.
It is easy to become mired in the muck of a broken world. We struggle and strive, our backs bent under the bulk of all that is upon us.
Yet God is here.
Right here.
Closer than your breath.
The evidence is all around you. So lift up your head just for a moment.
Beauty 1

 

Beauty 2

 

Beauty 3

 

Beauty 4

 

Beauty 5
You who are bowed down with physical pain, lift up your head.
Beauty 6

 

Beauty 7

 

Beauty 8

 

Beauty 9
You who dwell under the weight of loneliness or depression, lift up your head.
Beauty 10

 

Beauty 11

 

Beauty 12

 

Beauty 13

 

Beauty 14
You who are crushed by a grief that prevents you from even getting out of bed in the morning, lift up your head.
Beauty 15

 

Beauty 16

 

Beauty 17

 

Beauty 18
You who are burdened by the venom between fellow countrymen and fellow Christ followers, lift up your head.
Beauty 19

 

Beauty 20

 

Beauty 21

 

Beauty 22

 

Beauty 23
You who plead with God to do something, to rescue you, to save you, for God’s sake doesn’t He even care,
lift up your head.
Beauty 24

 

Beauty 25

 

Beauty 26

 

Beauty 27

 

Beauty 28

 

Beauty 29
Lift up your head and take a breath of wonder. He is all around you. This beauty is for you.
It doesn’t fully dispel the darkness, at least not yet, but it will give you the strength to keep shining your own light for another day.
And that’s all you need. Just one more day.
Lift up your head.

Art credits: Mountain photos and tulip photo by Kirk Sewell; Space photos by NASAElk photo by Kevin Tuck; Elephant photo by Stella Bogdanic; all other photos are mine

God in the Darkness

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Sometimes it happens this way.
Sometimes when you are closest to God, you feel as though you are farthest away.
It seems to happen that when you are a new Christian, God speaks clearly, you feel His presence solidly, light is all around you.
New
Fresh
As you progress in your faith, God’s voice gets fainter, His presence is harder to grasp, the clouds begin to form around you.Old
Dry
This is how it was for Mother Theresa who began her life full of fire and certainty and spent the last fifty years of her life full of darkness and silence. She continued to obey, even when the dry times outnumbered the rich times.
As a baby, you need God to discernibly carry you. When you become more mature, you need to trust that God is still carrying you.
When God first showed Himself to Moses, it was in the light.
Light
In a miracle of a fiery bush that did not become ash, He revealed Himself to a man who did not yet know Him.
Later, God showed Himself to Moses in a cloud.
Cloud
In the middle of the cloudy dimness of a pillar of cloud, God spoke to a man who was learning to trust Him.
Once Moses became more perfected, he saw God in the darkness.
Dark
In the darkness on the top of a mountain, God gave His Word to a man who knew Him.
We should not think that this is unusual. We should not despair when we must enter the darkness. We should not give up on God when we can no longer see Him.
Rather, we should continue to obey, continue to trust, continue to speak and to listen.
What you discovered about God in the fiery light does not disappear once He cloaks Himself in darkness.
He is still there, He still loves you, and He is still working to perfect you.
Becoming
Perfect
Especially in the darkness.

Ideas in this post come from St. Gregory of Nissa (335-395 AD)

Art Credits: God Appears to Moses from Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg; Pillar of Cloud is a Bible card published by the Providence Lithograph Company; Promulgation of the Law by Gerard Hoet