Let there be Light

 I cannot recall a time when I didn't believe that the material world was caused, and indeed kept in existence, by a mysterious and much greater reality than we can normally perceive.  I remember walking during my primary school years down Rattray Street beside a green corrugated-iron fence and feeling that if you just scratched its surface you might see the glory beneath which enabled the fence to exist in the first place.

This kind of insight was not a feature of my Sunday School education.  Fences green, corrugated or otherwise, had no part to play in that.  Instead, there was a picture on the wall of a blond blue-eyed Jesus sitting in a well-tended garden in the midst of a group of well-brought up children.  But I'm afraid that I didn't trust the central character.  

Jesus was the Saviour, of course, but he apparently had conditions, and it seemed that not everyone was likely to meet them. Not Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, nor unbelievers, nor anyone who had never heard of him.  They had not been washed in the Blood of the Lamb, an so they were all going to spend eternity burning merrily down below.

It was a fate which I found impossible to reconcile with the wonders of nature, let alone the nature of God.  I was sure that if even one conscious being was destined for everlasting agony, God should have called the whole thing off before it began.  How could eternal agony, even for a mere earthworm (let alone a human being) be a part of the divine dispensation? 

Some years later I received a most unexpected answer.  The room in which I was standing suddenly disappeared, and all I could see was a great golden light which surrounded and enveloped me. As I remember it this light was present only for a split second.  There were no greetings, no profound revelations, no messages for me or for  anyone else.  The Light did not even identify itself. But this almost instantaneous event was, and has remained, the most important experience of my life. 

I spent the next thirty minutes or so in a kind of bliss, slowly becoming aware the the Light I had experienced so briefly was the Ultimate Reality, unchanging and eternal.  It was the source of all life, wisdom, power, beauty and love.  And it was entirely free from anger and wrath - righteous or otherwise.

I surmised then that the purpose of death and the meaning of life belong together.  Death is the gateway to an eternal and wonderful life with God and his creatures, probably including (as John Wesley had hoped, and as many Orthodox believe) the Lesser Brethren of the animal kingdom, raised to a higher level than they had known in this life - just as many human beings hope and believe that we shall be.

Here the crucifixion of God seemed to make sense. You cannot defeat evil by evil means without sharing in the evil yourself.  The sacrifice of the cross showed the infernal powers that they could not corrupt the Incarnate God even although he had deliberately made himself defenceless.  They could not make Christ embittered, vengeful and despairing like themselves.  Thus they were defeated - and thus we are saved.

If our human evil could not be overcome without our destruction there would be no hope for us.  Hence the unconditional love of God can be our only assurance.  Only such a love can turn us around and remake us, however long it takes, either in this world or the next.  This seems to me to be the only faith worth having.