Light and Darkness

On Christmas Day I attended the 11:00 AM Mass at my parish. This Christmas, at this Mass, I felt much more intensely the joy of the service. Everyone was happy, of course, but I think this was more like joy - something deeper, stronger, and more permanent than mere happiness. Joy is what we feel as Christians. Joy distinguishes the Christian from the secularist, who only feels pleasure.

If you have read my Friendship with God post you will not be surprised at my reaction to this rare feeling of joy, communion, and friendship with my fellow parishioners, the priests and deacons, and the Child Jesus. I turned back to hedonism, pleasure seeking, and self-absorption.

So what is it that is happening with me? Some force deep within me is opposed to all that is good for me. Within the past year or two I've become intensely aware that this force is more than natural pleasure seeking, more than a reaction to my parents' divorce, more than simple blindness or hardness of heart, though all these certainly play a part. But what is this force, fundamentally?

The clue is in the Gospel reading for the Mass on Christmas Day, from the famous introduction to the Gospel According to St. John (Douay-Rheims translation):

In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.... That was the true light, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.

And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. The darkness fears the light, flies from it, and tries to overcome it. The darkness tries to convince me that the darkness itself is light, and that those who live in darkness are the smart people who understand we are all just bags of protein and genes, and that those who live in the true light are fools that believe in love and friendship and communion.

So I will put a name to what has tormented me through the years; or more precisely, how I have tormented and enslaved myself, and bound myself in chains. This name is darkness. It's not ignorance, or pleasure-seeking, or the flesh, or freedom from other people, or the cold light of the intellectual life; these are all only tools of darkness.

And I will put a name to what has tried to call me out of darkness, drawing me out of myself, pulling me to other people, making me aware of my limitations, making me aware of my radical dependence on a transcendent, wholly holy Other. This name is light. The Way, the Truth, and the Life; Jesus Christ, a man born in Nazareth 2,000 years ago, source of all life, the light of the world, reborn in my heart on Christmas morning.

The preamble to St. John's gospel is not just poetic language, not just high flying words that don't have anything to do with real life. Like so much else in the Bible, it is rock hard, bonecrushing, totally solid reality. The light shineth in the darkness. My task is to flee the darkness and run to the light.