Thought for the Week: An ocean of light
Judy Clinton reflects on whether we can inwardly open ourselves in whatever ways we can find to God’s light
I am lying on my back in the garden, looking up through a froth of plum blossom to the piercing blue sky above. A field mouse perches confidently on a twig beside the bird feeder, takes his fill of peanuts, and quickly scampers down the tree and into the undergrowth. The undersides of four gulls gleam white as they fly above me; and are gone. A series of bubbles wafts over the fence from the children next door, and happy shrieking follows. My feet and legs are warm in the sunshine; a breeze caresses my face. After many months of darkness, rain and cold this sudden arrival of full-blown spring feels to me like heaven.
Added to all this delight, I listen to Lesley Garrett’s exquisite voice coming from my CD player. I feel the joy of what human giftedness and sheer hard work combined can produce. My spirit soars skywards. After a pause between tracks, Nigel Kennedy starts to play ‘The Unknown Soldier’, a piece of intense beauty and heart-wrenching sadness. Nigel’s magnificent playing pulls my heartstrings and I feel an aching melancholy as I connect now with the worst of what humans can do to one another, captured in the theme of the piece. There’s no denying the horror and suffering that being human can entail.
Yet, held in the beauty of the nearest to human perfection that composer and the musicians can muster, I feel a heart-opening sorrow, a deep existential sadness – not the gnawing, conflict-ridden, fear-wracked experience of what my thinking mind can do with the fact of human suffering. Such deep sorrow feels cleansing and healing: in this place is comfort and the possibility of new beginnings.
This awareness comes like an answer to my prayer of recent times: Oh God, how can I keep my heart open in the hell of human suffering? We live in a war-torn world, with terrorism breaking out unpredictably and other violence occurring worldwide. Confusion reigns, as a result of Brexit and other changes elsewhere in the world. Poverty makes life difficult, if not downright impossible, for vast numbers of people. Illness and disease claim lives on a minute-to-minute basis, and our nearest and dearest are not immune. Grief abounds. How can we retain an attitude of optimism and act constructively amongst such monumental suffering?
As the sun and the longer days of light stimulate the burgeoning of nature in springtime, can we inwardly open ourselves in whatever ways we can find to God’s light? Can we allow into our lives a burgeoning of joy, life, possibility, beauty, goodwill, talent and other great human attributes so that we can come to feel as George Fox expressed it: ‘I saw… that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.’
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