Wellbeing

Psalm 27:1 “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

Sigmund Freud tells the story of a three-year-old boy crying in a dark room of a home he was visiting one evening. “Auntie,” the boy cried, “talk to me! I’m frightened because it is so dark.” His aunt answered him from another room: “What good would that do? You can’t see me.” “That doesn’t matter,” replied the child. “When you talk, it gets light.”

This child was not afraid of the dark but of the absence of someone he loved. What he needed to feel secure was presence. We all need the same; knowing presence is the ground of this basic sense of safety for all of us.

From a different perspective, C S Lewis recalls how, he was standing  in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where he stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place.

He recalls, “Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

“Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”

Well might we sing Bernadette Farrell‘s words.

Longing for light, we wait in darkness.

Longing for truth, we turn to you.

Make us your own, your holy people,

light for the world to see.

Christ be our light! Shine in our hearts. Shine through the darkness.

Christ, be our light! Shine in your church gathered today. Amen