‘Most people know what it is to feel the sun has set.’
‘Light at eventide’, from the Friend, 28 Nov, 1919
[Biblical] writers speak of a light which is not artificial, neither is it the light of the sun or stars; [they] associate its manifestation with God… To Zechariah, the departure of the sunlight conditions, and prepares, the way for its appearance. Perhaps it is especially upon the latter thought that we need to dwell today.
Take the nightfall of personal loss or pain. Most people know what it is to feel the sun has set, that even the lamp is broken, and that they are left in blank darkness. The experience comes in different ways… to some of us it comes through physical suffering, or the defeat of a cherished ambition. It may even come through the consciousness of moral failure. However that may be, and whether we blame God, or ourselves, or other people, for the darkness, we know that it is very terrible. Yet if the old prophet could speak to us, he would say something like this: ‘Yes, the lamp is broken; the sun is set. Now is your time to see!’ It is no mere paradox, but simple fact. When the heart is whelmed in grief, or the mind in perplexity, when the presence that made our earthly sunshine has gone from us, or the lamp of our old belief is in fragments – then is the soul’s lighting up time. The heart’s extremity, if one may adapt the old saying, is the soul’s opportunity. When the mind can grapple no longer with apparent chaos, comes the spirit’s hour of insight. Even with regard to moral failure, there are people who only come to see the meaning and the glory of love, and truth, and purity, when the light of their little conventional virtues has gone out. That is why Christ came ‘not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance’.
Once again, we have needed the hope embodied in the old prophet’s words very sorely in the last few years. Even now the world seems to be journeying through a very dark night of perplexity, misunderstanding, disillusionment and fear. It is almost, at times, as if the sun of human progress, that once promised such a glorious noon, had gone down. Yet the war has taught men something that they cannot entirely forget, even in the doubt and the reaction that follow upon a peace that does not go deep enough. For we think of lads – in the very dawn of life, facing the night of death, who wrote home: ‘It’s all right, whatever happens’ or ‘I shall never be afraid of anything again!’ They had found the light beyond the light. As for others, those left behind at home – the friend of a man and woman whose only son had just died in France wrote of them in these words: ‘They seem to have got right through to the truth of things. Pain is present, but not as pain, as spiritual activity!’ The sun of all their hopes for the lad they had loved, of all their fellowship on the level of space and time, had set. But on the darkness there had risen a vaster hope, a more perfect communion, and the very light of God, the light that redeems the world, shadowless and abiding.
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