“With all your science can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?”
—Henry David Thoreau
Inside the Basilica, as Italy continues a nationwide shutdown, Pope Francis' Easter Message challenged the city of Rome and the world-at-large to spread the “contagion” of hope guided by a victory of love that is transmitted “from heart to heart.” This victory doesn’t make “problems vanish,” or “by-pass suffering and death, but passes through them, opening a path in the abyss, transforming,” the darkness affecting so many as a result of the coronavirus that has overwhelmed us—into light.
I offer the following poem by Jan Richardson, an artist and ordained minister in the United Methodist Church called "How The Light Comes" that appears in Roger Housden book: “Ten Poems for Difficult Times.”
I cannot tell you how the light comes.
What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining..
That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us.
That it loves searching out what is hidden, what is lost,
What is forgotten or in peril or in pain.
That it has a fondness for the body,
For finding its way toward the flesh,
For tracing the edges of form,
For shining forth, through the eye, the hand, the heart.
I cannot tell you how the light comes, but it does, that it will.
That it works its way into the deepest dark that enfolds you,
Though it may seem long ages in coming or
Arrive in a shape you did not foresee.
And so may we this day turn ourselves toward it.
May we lift our faces to let it find us.
May we bend our bodies to follow the arc it makes.
May we open more and open still the blessed light that comes.
Speaking about Richardson’s poem, Housden writes, “This poem reaches down so deeply into the essence
of spiritual reality that it lifts our gaze beyond any religious identity to what is always and ever present, always and
ever true, however difficult life may seem and how ever engulfed the world is in chaos. The light serves as a metaphor for consciousness, which illuminates everything and is neither inside nor outside but everywhere. It is at the heart of every religious tradition, and union with it is the goal of all mystical paths.
HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!
Postscript: The photo of the Easter bunny and Easter eggs were taken in front of our neighbor’s home on the lake. She said, “I did it for the kids, and for me too." Even in the midst of this crisis she has been able too stay in the light.
