I am guessing a few of you might remember a couple years back when Bill had us sing along with him, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!” I thought of that today, as Bill talked about the light of stars being ever-present, though unseen unless in the presence of the dark. I thought about our grandest star, the sun, and how nothing, no thing would exist on this planet unless for the power of the sun. At any moment, the sun emits about 3.86 x 1026 watts of energy. So add 24 zeros to the end of that number, and you'll get an idea of how unimaginably large an amount of energy that is! Most of that goes off into space, but about 1.74 x 1017 watts strikes the earth. Let me say it another way. One billionth of the sun’s energy reaches earth. One billionth. That’s how powerful it is. It keeps everything on earth alive with one billionth of its power.
Light sustains us.
And this! This fact is even more amazing. Has anyone read Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss? (Bill recommends the Archbishop of Canterbury and I...well, I recommend children’s books.) Anyway, if you’ve read it do you remember the spec? The teeny tiny spec teeming with a whole village of micro life forms? Something smaller than that spec, smaller still than the period at the end of this sentence, burst all of life into being. Something smaller than (.) ultimately created dinosaurs, galaxies, and symphonies!! When it burst, the first thing it did was become photon waves. These photon waves differentiated, reassembled, and became all the DNA ever needed to create an entire universe...an infinite cosmos. It is our structural core.
What is the origin of this light?
I think the light is itself the origin.
Tikkun Olam, my favorite mystical Jewish teaching, maintains that when the original light broke into millions if not trillions of tiny pieces, that each shard contained a soul. In order to return to the source, to the whole if you will, we must perform acts of love. Ergo, love and light are synonymous at best and cousins at least. I have a friend who, as he smokes and talks, asks, “Who is the authority on light? Tell me. Who?” I don’t know what he’s trying to get me to say or if he already knows the answer but try this: the light is its own authority. The light is in us. Draw your own conclusions about whether the word is authority or co-participation.
Let your light shine bright. It sustains you, it keeps you, it is you. The first light of the first moment pours through you. And you. And you and you and you and you. Sing it now: “This little light of mine...I’m gonna let it shine...Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!”
