image of an eclipse

Let There Be Light

By: Sr Timothy Marie, O.C.D.

During my morning meditation, the day following the solar eclipse, I kept thinking about it.  My daily 30-minute meditation time isn’t always so filled with ideas. It’s early. We Sisters arise at 4:50 a.m. in our convent here in Douglas, Arizona. That’s pretty early. Still, on this particular morning, I seemed more attentive, more alert, more receptive to the Holy Spirit.

So I thought of sharing this meditation with all of you, our faithful facebook friends.

Here is my meditation, more or less, as I recall it now.

We all learned about our sun very early in our lives, didn’t we?  We became aware as little tykes of the rhythmic rising and setting, the joy of warming up on a cold day, the mystery of watching the daily sunset.

At the same time, very early on, we experienced darkness, didn’t we? Many of us were afraid of the dark. We couldn’t see. We’d trip over things. We’d fall down. We didn’t have as much control. Darkness was scary.

The solar eclipse brought to the fore some basic spiritual principles of light and darkness.

The sun is too bright for us to see directly.  The same goes for God. We cannot see Him as He really is. We don’t have the capacity.

God, knowing this, came to us in the Person of Jesus Christ,  an fathomable mystery of itself.  Then God, in his great, faithful, immense love, became a little wafer of bread for us. He did (and daily continues) to be present—His body, blood, soul and divinity in each and every host that has been consecrated at Mass by a Catholic priest.  He did this so we could communicate with Him easily. To be near him in spiritual intimacy To have Him close enough to run to Him anytime we needed to. This is huge!

During the solar eclipse, little by little, the sun became less and less visible. The moon, a separate entity, stopped the light from reaching us, or to say it another way, it obscured our view. And this happened slowly, oh so slowly and steadily, didn’t it?

That happens to us, also, in a spiritual sense.  Little by little, other things obscure our view and our spiritual landscape darkens, slowly but surely, until there is no more light. We have all probably experienced this darkness.  Whether we remain in that darkness is our choice.  We can stop and just stay there, or we can continue moving on and allow the divine Light to reappear again.

This is the pattern of life, the spiritual, inner life of our souls, the interplay and yes I’ll just come out and say it straight – the spiritual war, the battles of light vs. darkness, the “Battle for Our Souls.”

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