Light

To lead a spiritual life does not mean you are always in the light. – Gay Luce

After an unusually wet, gray winter, the sun has once again returned to the South. And with the recent onset of Daylight Savings Time, I’m really enjoying the added light.

As I’ve journeyed through the country (and through life), I’ve grown more and more grateful for light. And I’m partial to both its literal and figurative glow.

Wanda Battle is one of many people who’ve illumined the South for me. An African-American woman who grew up in the heat of the civil rights era, Wanda now conducts tours of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—where Martin Luther King served as pastor during the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. I visited the church in mid February.

Shepherding a group of a dozen whites (mostly from northern states), Wanda began by asking us to hold hands and join her in singing, “This Little Light of Mine.” An hour later, she concluded with a request that we link hands again, this time for “We Shall Overcome” (during which a guy from Minnesota added amazing harmony). Her final words were both a tribute to God and a challenge to us: “Lord, we are your hands now,” she prayed reverently, “we are your heart, we are your presence in the world…”

That same evening, I encountered—for the first time—what everyone said to expect in the South: the unwavering insistence on a single path to God—through Jesus. “The only way to the Father is through me,” the woman professed, citing her King James Bible.  And because the words were in red, she maintained, they came straight from Jesus.

Sensing the futility of a Biblical debate, yet still wishing to engage the woman, I told her about a Hindu man I met in Bali, and his observation that God has many names and takes many forms.

“God bless him,” she said, with a hint of sarcasm. “But good luck gettin’ to heaven.”

Swallowing hard, but not ready to end what was a genuine and civil dialogue, I asked if she had children. “Two,” she said proudly.

Pointing to a door in the room where we were sitting, I asked, “Would you ever tell your children that the only way they could get to you was through that door? That they couldn’t reach you any other way?”

“No,” she replied, not batting an eye.

“And even though you,” I continued, “a mere human, would offer your children any number of entries to you, you mean to tell me that God would restrict us to but one approach?”

“That’s what I believe,” she repeated, apparently unable to get around the red print. This time, however, her tone was softer—more childlike than smug.

By contrast, I stayed for a night in Opelika with Jennifer and Tyler Monday. I’d met them three years ago, when my daughter, Kate, and son-in-law, Will, were living in Alabama. They attend a non-denominational Christian church—and faith is central to their lives.

As Jennifer shared, “Our faith gives us a sense of being loved unconditionally—that we don’t have to earn it. We don’t have to feel ashamed about slipping; God pursues us harder than we pursue God.”

Like many Southerners, both Jennifer and Tyler speak openly of a “personal relationship with God through Jesus.” Yet they also experience God most vividly in nature. And while they take their Bible studies seriously, they sense that God’s unconditional love isn’t restricted to Christians.

Why, I wondered, do people like Wanda, Jennifer, and Tyler glow so radiantly, while others so confidently assert that our access to “Divine Light” is limited to a single door?

I can’t answer that. I just know what rings true for me. And what doesn’t.

Most people, I’ve found, desire a spiritual practice for life. Unfortunately, what many accept is a prescription for behavior that’s more focused on guaranteeing the after-life. And while such belief systems satisfy an urge for certainty, they make it considerably harder to appreciate the Eternal Light that envelops us right here on earth—whether or not the sun is shining.

I’m savoring a book of daily reflections by Jeff Brown called, Love it Forward.  “Every path,” Brown concludes, “is a path to God. We just have to remember to open our hearts again, and again…”

If one acknowledges God, then God’s light must be perpetual. As Gay Luce so wisely observes, not even the most spiritual among us always abide in its glow. But the opening of our hearts to that light, again and again, remains both an opportunity—and choice—every moment, every day.

(Austin, TX)