Light of God

"Next door to us lived Dan and Betsy Hoopes, and their four kids, who were my playmates. The fall of my sixth-grade year, Dan Hoopes’s kidneys began to fail—gradually at first, then with alarming rapidity. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital and moved directly into intensive care. Soon afterward my parents called my brother and me into their bedroom and sadly told us that Dan was dying. As a young Christian Scientist, this created a crisis for me, because I had been working hard with my Christian Science, as best as I could understand it as a child, trying to do the proper “knowing”that Dan’s illness was just simply an unreal claim of mortal mind and that all would be well. But now he was dying anyway, and it all seemed futile.

I slipped outside to ponder the situation, taking refuge in the park across the street from my house. It was a snowy evening, late November or early December. I raged at God. “What’s wrong here? Is there something wrong with me or with you? Why isn’t this working? How can this happen?”All of a sudden I felt myself suffused in golden light, very much like I’d experienced in those Quaker meetings, and I heard a voice distinctly saying, “Shhh. Dan will die . . . and all will be well.” While I certainly couldn’t understand the message itself, I understood that warm, golden light and somehow relaxed and rested. I discovered in that moment that there was something in me that knew. It didn’t know what it knew, exactly, but it knew that it knew. Deeper than all the precepts that had been drilled into me in my childhood religious training, it simply recognized the voice of truth when it heard it and let go into its presence...

"The knowledge of Jesus Christ is a unitive knowledge; it is the luminosity of my own true and eternal being.” In other words, to quote Psalm 36, “in your light we see light.”Jesus Christ standing before the Samaritan woman becomes the mirror in which she sees not only the face of God but her own true face.

In the gospels, all the people who encountered Jesus only by hearsay, by what somebody else believed about him, by what they’d been told, by what they hoped to get out of him: all those people left. They still leave today. The ones that remained—and still remain—are the ones who have met him in the moment: in the instantaneous, mutual recognition of hearts and in the ultimate energy that is always pouring forth from this encounter. It is indeed the wellspring." -- Cynthia Bourgeault