Daily Light: Reflections for Holy Times - Light All Around Me

Light All Around Me

“…in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”

- John 1:4

I have always found the prologue of John deeply moving. Whenever I read it, I feel it in my core. There is a timelessness, a rootedness to it. It speaks both to my spirit and to my body, and to the mysterious connection between the two.

Although I generally read the prologue as a whole, today I am reflecting on just thirteen words. It does not come easily to me to separate these thirteen words from the rest. But as I try to do so, the words begin to speak to me as another creation story.

“...in him was life…” I imagine God, the Creator, once again speaking Himself into the human world, only this time sending His Word to us in flesh to live among us. We are told earlier in the prologue that this spirit of life He is sending in this flesh is as ancient as “the beginning.” It is hard for my finite mind to understand “the beginning,” but I know in my body it is older than finite human Kronos time. It feels more like a glimmer of God’s Kairos time.

As I reflect, these four words become for me a different way of describing the birth story we usually turn to during Advent. The birth stories in Matthew and Luke seem to concentrate more on the flesh and the body. We are told of the babe in the manger, Mary and Joseph, Wise Men, shepherds, and the animals, bodies all of them.

But today it strikes me that the new life described in John and present in the babe in the manger is also the wind described in Genesis that swept over the waters. I am in awe at being given these different ways to understand the depth and breadth of God’s presence in the world.

And then, there are the remaining eight words of today’s verse: “…and the life was the light of all people.” Ah, light. In Genesis we have light on the first day; in Luke we have the angel and the glory of the Lord shining; and in Matthew we have the light of a star that illuminates a path for the Wise Men to the Word made flesh. This is no ordinary light the author of John is describing. This light is light from God. We are told that it is the light of all people and, in the next verse, that it is the kind of light that the darkness has not overcome.

As I continue to reflect, I am drawn singularly to profound praise and thanksgiving. I am thankful for all the ways in which God speaks Himself into our world trying to help us understand His presence; for His gift of life in the babe in the manger, an example in the flesh, of a perfect embodiment of what God’s spirit manifest fully in a human being looks like; for His call to each of us to more fully embody that same spirit.

I am also reminded of God’s role in my creation and in my birth, so beautifully described in Psalm 139. He has carefully formed my inward parts, and promises that I cannot escape this spirit, this wind, this breath, that has existed since the beginning, and that we all share.

And so, this Advent, I commit to watching anew for God breaking into my world, for the life and light He shares with His people, for His communications to me. He is all around me, I know, inviting me to notice.

Diane Bricker
Spiritual Director
Author