the radiance of crosslight

 Blessed be God who animates our lives and irradiates them with the brilliance of holiness. AMEN

Today the brilliance of the burning bush intersects with the call to take up our cross. Light meets darkness. This causes me to think of a poem entitled In Crosslight Now which may, albeit unintentionally, express this scriptural non duality:

In Crosslight Now

In crosslight now all faces of my friends.

Every minute still so full, so precious,

A furious intensity of knowing it ends.

That everything happened just as it has,

A variation expanding the glory of a theme;

That I bear the mystery of my mistress jazz.

To fill with gratitude, even to soar.

That one swallow that shall not fall.

A caring less which means my caring more.

Each small gesture, every utterance,

The glances I hoard. Some love is mine,

And always mine. A peace. A radiance

I’ve wanted to word but can’t.

My part

My own variation shaping this history Of a theme as though one narrow heart

Contains the fractured voices of humanity

Rhythms chosen, riffs of light and dark.

Autumn seems so steeped in her eternity. 

Micheal O’Siadhail

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Each small gesture, every utterance, The glances I hoard. Some love is mine, And always mine. A peace. A radiance I’ve wanted to word but can’t……

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These are the words which come to my mind when I reflect on the burning bush or any images of the light of Christ penetrating the world. These are the words which inspire not only literature and poetry, and sermons, but art and music and prayer.

How many of us get glimpses or experience moments of divine glory? How many of us simply then feel incapable of fully or accurately expressing the revelation?

We try to put words to the brilliance in divine encounters. We often end up like Moses or peter falling back into our humanness instead of leaning into our holiness and recognizing we’ve but to take off our shoes and feel the holiness seep into our vulnerabilities. We often make excuses out of our insecurity and fear or try to capture the beauty and magnificence to use another day mistaking it as ours to control, instead of just being in the radiance of the Divine

These are the words which inspired Daniel Hardy as he articulated his theology before his untimely death. His was a devotion to the power of the Holy Spirit and the sacredness of the Eucharist in drawing all to that Oneness, the Goodness. His was a conviction that light shines in darkness and that light of Christ always, always, guides and embraces. His was a theology of hope.

It was after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis that the gifted theologian Daniel Hardy made his final pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was more than a check on the bucket list; it was a return to himself and his home in Jesus. It was in dying that he glimpsed eternal life.

His thoughts and his final interviews with his daughter and son-in law (also theologians) as well as Peter Ochs, were captured in the book Wording A Radiance. While there is so much in it, about theology and servanthood and faith, to commend its slow reading, I summon it today to put before you because it is for me a singular contemporary example of the powerful mysterious call which God makes, sometimes in words, but more often in radiance, brilliant glorious manifestations of divine revelation.

We humans then try to put words to this radiance, poets and preachers, storytellers and teachers. We humans also put musical notes to the brilliance, something which Emmanuel is so very gifted in doing. We humans paint and draw the glory in palettes which attempt the Beauty but as in all things of earth merely approach the always more than of God.

Today’s lectionary causes me to remember Hardy’s pilgrimage and more particularly to summon images of radiance, not so much to reproduce some beauty but to lean into the brilliance of God and what God might desire of us. 

It doesn’t take much to relate Hardy’s experience of radiance with Moses’ at the burning bush. Both suggest a brilliance which does not go out, an eternal flame. God was in the fire; God is in the fire. God appears to be calling us, like Moses, like Hardy on pilgrimage, to approach the flames and be not afraid. While there may be pain, there will also be a revelation and realization of God’s embrace and promise of redemption.

Peter’s encounter with Jesus is less obviously glowing but represents perhaps an internal light being kindled by Christ. Moreover, this fire is being tended by Jesus and is critical not only for the Church but for the model of discipleship. 

Peter, like Moses, is caught between full comprehension of the responsibility of discipleship and servant leadership and those all too human excuses and rationalizations which fall short of embracing the light which is Jesus and experiencing the Kindom (and I use the term Kingdom intentionally after Greg Boyle)  here on earth. Peter like Moses…like us…would like to follow Jesus or answer God’s call, his way retaining a semblance of control.

Hardy has surrendered to the Radiance and the Word made flesh. Hardy has come to the moment of abandonment of earthly desire and material stuff and come to the cross literally and figuratively, where taking off his shoes and remaining with utmost discomfort and distress, renders a peace of holy proportions.

To tie these encounters together I wonder whether all of us, including peter and moses and daniel, are in that process, that earthly pilgrimage really, of understanding what Messiahship, the identity which Peter has named, really means. 

The anointed one did not come on earth as expected; the anointed one is not wealthy or powerful in traditional ways. The anointed one is humble and gentle, merciful and kind, courageous and just. The anointed one is a servant and leader and subversive at that!

Moses was called to just this.

Peter was as well.

So might we be…

Much depends on the implications of the revelation of messiahship as God intends not as we do.

Messiahship like kinship like discipleship like all the ships is not what we humans think 

It is certainly not what we make it out to be

It is a construction of Gods

And it may not be about royal leadership as history has lauded

It may be about servanthood

Messiahship is not above it is within and alongside

It is not more mighty and forceful

It is gentle and humble

Messiahship of which Jesus speaks and embodies requires a yes to our participation and witness not mere observation

Messiahship is the radiance itself

The beauty

The divine force field of unity

And that Radiance calls to us always to reorient, to remember and to recommit to kindness, humility, gentleness, justice and mercy. 

Jesus calls to us from this Radiance to take up our cross. And riffing on the initial poem to walk on the holy ground of crosslight. This call is both burdensome and beautiful, heavy and hopeful. Nevertheless, we are invited to take off our shoes and follow the Light on this most holy ground of life.

I invite us to embrace the light of Christ which shines in and through all creation, in and through all creatures great and small. Rest and be restored by the beauty and brilliance and if words come so be it, if music comes so be it, if images are reflected so be it. And continue in that crosslight, that light of the cross, inspired by the eternal flames, to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly through the world.

May we have the discernment to recognize the beauty and brilliance in unexpected, yes, ordinary, situations and to be transformed by the radiance and power of Love and Light.