Let There Be Light

This year, following a late Easter, Trinity Sunday fell very close to the longest day. We celebrated God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, just as we enjoy the time of most light and least darkness. In church we sang the great hymn to the Trinity – ‘Thou, whose Almighty word chaos and darkness heard, and took their flight….’. Every verse ends with the stirring refrain, ‘Let there be light’.

C.S. Lewis wrote: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else’. We have no problem believing in the sun, even though we dare not look at it straight – our eyes can’t cope with its enormity and power, any more than our minds can cope with God’s limitlessness. And yet, every day, we delight in all that the sun enables us to see – the natural world, the faces of loved ones, beauty and variety all around us.

Our faith should be like that, says Lewis; being Christian should change and magnify how we look at the world – how we perceive ourselves and others, how we live life, how we face death. We can never rationalise or fully comprehend God, and yet faith in our endlessly loving God sheds light on all everything else. Faith has the capacity to change our view of the whole of human existence – filling it with purpose and meaning and hope.

The 3rd verse of that Trinity hymn seemed particularly significant this year;

Spirit of truth and love,
life-giving, holy Dove
move on the water's face,
bearing the lamp of grace,
and in Earth's darkest place
let there be light.

God’s Spirit brings the ‘lamp of grace’ a light of truth and love; perhaps it calls to mind that famous Holman Hunt painting of Christ, The Light of the World; standing at a darkened, shadowed door and knocking, lantern held aloft. It’s a life-giving light which has the power to penetrate ‘earth’s darkest place’, the worst situations of our troubled world. It is a light, vitally, that also means no injustice goes unnoticed by God; no suffering is hidden; no tears unseen.

This year as we experience the long daylight hours of summer, may they be a reminder of our light-giving God, and may our heartfelt prayer, for all our world, repeat that refrain; ‘Let there be light.’

Revd Kate McFarlane