Shine: A Wordless Sermon
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February 9, 2020“You are the light of the world…. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others.” (Mt 5:14-16)
This Sunday’s gospel echoes our celebration of the feast of the Presentation of the Lord last Sunday, when we carried lighted candles in procession through the cloisters. On that day, because the ceremony did not allow for a chapter talk, I was reflecting on how carrying a candle can be a wordless sermon. In our technology-saturated society, the Church’s retention of the wax candle as an irreplaceable sacramental sign offers us palpable contact with the untamable Spirit of God in the world. That flickering flame, the light and heat it generates is a source of primal fascination. Of course, all this presupposes that we can get past the challenge to our coordination presented by the need to juggle a sheaf of papers at the same time as a lighted candle. My meditation at that moment has sometimes drifted to whether setting fire to my music, or my cowl, or my neighbor would signal the beginning of the fire that Jesus came to cast upon the earth, or whether spilling wax on the floor or on my person would inaugurate the wrath that is to come.
Back to the wordless sermon. On the day called Candlemas, we each carry a candle to express our participation in bringing the light of Christ to the nations.
Thomas Merton puts the wordless sermon into poetic form:
“Our lives, like candles, spell this simple symbol;
Weep like our bodily life, sweet work of bees,
Sweeten the world with your slow sacrifice.”
Merton draws together the Paschal candle, “sweet work of bees” that burns with the light of Christ, and the procession candles that stand for our lives, bearers of this light, which are consumed for the life of the world.
Guerric of Igny also puts words to the wordless sermon of the candle:
“Come to him and be enlightened, so as to be not merely carrying lamps but to be very lamps yourselves, shining inside and out, for yourselves and for your neighbors. Be a lamp. In heart, in hand, in lips. The lamp in your heart will shine for you; the lamp in your hand or on your lips will shine out for your neighbors. The lamp in the heart is loving faith; the lamp in the hand is the example of good works; the lamp on the lips is edifying speech…. Our lamp before the angels is the purity of our devotion when…we chant the psalms with care or pray with burning ardor; our lamp before God is the honesty of our intention to please him only.”
(Guerric of Igny, First Sermon for the Purification, 3)
To let our light shine before others is to become a wordless sermon. Guerric is inviting us to live in integrity before ourselves, before others and before God, in faith, in self-gift to those around us, in prayer and praise, good zeal and good example. There are moments when fervor overtakes us unexpectedly and without effort, and we can feel ourselves glowing with the light of Christ. These are precious moments to be treasured and revisited in thought and desire, moments in which our affect and our intention are one. But there is also the dogged, day-by-day experience of faith that makes the choice to live the life and provide what light we can even when we may not feel like it, when our affect does not accord with our deepest intention. Like wise virgins, we need oil to feed our lamp with when its flame begins to waver. And it is natural that it should waver, sometimes burning bright and at other times a dimly burning wick. A friend wrote to me recently: “It’s hard to get out of bed in the morning even for a job you love.” I for one can identify with that. Where is the oil we need? The oil is there for the taking: the oil of returning to our heart to find God there, the oil of going out to meet another’s need in cheerful service, the oil of offering a word of kindness and encouragement, the oil of refraining from complaint or overlooking another’s fault, the oil of giving ourselves in body and voice and mind to our common prayer, the oil of choosing to remember why we get out of bed in the morning, the oil of approaching God’s Word and Body in faith, hope and love. Jesus says: You are the light of the world. You do not shine for yourself alone, but for all in the house. We need each other’s light.
Guerric continues: “Now, child of light, aflame with all these burning lamps, you will no longer be wandering in the dark of night nor have reason to fear…that…the comfort of this light shall fade away and darkest night come shrouding in from every side, covering the surface and entering deep down to the inmost depths. There are many lamps to glow with ardor in these inmost depths of yours, that when this life’s lamp is extinguished, there will arise a life’s light which can never be extinguished, a shimmering, noonday light, arising as it were at the evening of your life; and at the very moment when you think you are burnt out, your wick’s flame will arise again and darkest night for you will be as noonday. No more need of the sun’s rays by day nor of the brilliance of the moon to light your way at night: the Lord will be for you and everlasting light, for the Lamb it is who is the lamp of the new Jerusalem, he who is the All-Blessed and Crystal-Clear, throughout endless ages. Amen.”
(Guerric of Igny, First Sermon for the Purification, 5)
Guerric’s conclusion indicates that he has in mind the final dying of the light at death and its rekindling in eternity. But I think we experience what he describes even in daily dyings of the light. As St Paul puts it, we die daily, and are raised again. Disappointments, difficulties, failures in oneself or others, sickness or tragedy in the lives of those we love, the state of the world, boredom and lack of motivation or simply the gloom and chill of February days – any of these can cause the comfort of our light to fade away and darkness to come shrouding in. This is the moment of the foolish virgin, who says, quite honestly: I have no more oil. It is you, Lord of light, who must provide it. And we are never left without recourse. Something is there in the darkness, a steadying hand, a source of peace beyond understanding, Someone whose light unseen has power to overcome the night: “when this life’s lamp is extinguished, there will arise a life’s light which can never be extinguished… at the very moment when you think you are burnt out, your wick’s flame will arise again.” Christ burns within.
To conclude, I would like to offer you a poem – just because. Because the unexpected discovery of this meditation on a monk’s life by Fr Simeon of Spencer helped to replenish the oil of my lamp, perhaps it will brighten your flame also.
“To rejoice without purpose in the darkness
To plunge beneath the earth and retrieve shades
To await the emergence of the light
from the bosom of night
To be astounded at each day’s rebirth
To love the piercing light
To be gladdened by the least leaf’s tremor
in the first breeze of dawn
To hear with kindred thrill the merry racket
of warbling summer songsters
To make your whole chest gape as a wide window
for all the sky’s swift traffic to flow through
To thank for the invention of all flowers
by scattering your life’s bouquet
To feel in your veins melt down the rigid
border between eternity and time
To sense future and past embrace in one fond kiss
in the keen breath of Now
To have your heart play host to a new fire
that frightens as it burns
and brightens as it yearns
To jolt at midnight pierced by another’s pain
To bear about the ocean in your heart
To hurl past loves into the Heart of God
To see all the world’s faces focus into One Face
To sit in empty silence and so await the fullness
To smile at nothing in particular
To work as if you played and pray as if you flew
To watch as if you slept and fast as if you ate
To know that you are I am you are I am we
To be as if you weren’t:
… a monk’s life.”
Fr Simeon Leiva-Merikakis, OCSO
