Day: March 3, 2024

“Christ shall give thee light”

Quite the readings, it may seem. They are rather challenging and not a little disconcerting, and yet most appropriate to the pilgrimage of our souls to God. Why? Because we have to confront the darkness of our souls and know the potentiality and reality of evil. Only the light of Christ can help us to “walk in love,” “to be giving of thanks,” to “walk as the children of light,” “proving what is acceptable unto the Lord,” and thus “reprov[ing] the unfruitful works of darkness,” learning in our journey that “all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light,” to gather Paul’s remarkable words into a kind of summary. But meaning what exactly? That Christ makes known to us the nature of evil in making known and accomplishing the things that belong to the absolute goodness of God.

And what is the evil? The tempter, Satan, the deceiver, is at once the principle of what opposes God and is us in our betrayals of Christ. In this story, it is us in calling Christ’s good, his act of healing, evil, on the one hand, and demanding further signs, on the other hand. Christ’s response highlights these contradictions. Lent, especially in Holy Week, is the pageant of our betrayals of the love of God, but God, and God alone, makes light out of darkness, good out of our evil. Today’s readings are a sober and honest assessment of the human condition in self-presumption and pretension. It is a powerful indictment of human pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and one which arises from the illusions of the self.

The Gospel speaks profoundly to our current dilemmas of a polarized and divided world which witnesses to a deep loss of self and the crisis of meaning. It may be as the neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist along with John Vervaeke suggest, the problem of the dominance of left brain thinking which results in the loss of any sense of wholeness. We are as T.S. Eliot says, “the walking dead.” There lies in this the false assumption of our own abilities to solve all our problems through technique and praxis forgetting that such things cannot create heaven on earth but more often than not, hell.

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