By Kay Augustine

A few years ago, in the laundry room of my former apartment building, a young woman I’d never met asked me a great ice-breaking question: What is your favorite memory? I didn’t hesitate; it was a sunny day, and I was standing on the bench of a hill behind the two-car garage we were living in when I was three or four years old, looking out over the valley spread out around and beneath me, and feeling joyful and at peace with myself and the world. My questioner said she’d asked that question many times, but no one had ever gone back that far in their lives to answer it. I was a bit surprised myself, but I think my mind went that far back because once I began school at six, in the little town a mile from our farm, I began to feel like an outsider, as so many of us unfortunately do, and my joy was never again quite so pure.

Pondering also began in my childhood: I clearly remember standing on the concrete slab front porch of my one-room upper elementary school building, looking down the hill where I could see the steeple of our Congregational Church and thinking I’d like to believe in God, but if he really exists, why do we only speak of him in church?

These memories may seem unconnected, but there is this: The date for celebrating the birth of Jesus seems to have been chosen because those people who worshiped the sun celebrated the new sun’s virgin birth at the winter solstice; and Christianity’s other major celebration is Easter, some say named after Oestre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, dawn, and fertility honored at the vernal equinox. There has long been a connection between that which we call God and the light of the sun.

When I was a child, I sang “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” and did not wonder where the Light Jesus wanted me to shine would come from. Now I do.

Many years ago, I read a short story and was so moved by it that I shared it with my spiritual journey group. I still recall the intense reaction of this group of perhaps eight women. Some loved it, but I recall at least one who hated it. The story – I regret forgetting both the author and the title – told of an adolescent girl who was the only one home on their farm the night their heifer was about to deliver her first calf, so she helped with the birth, and spoke of “seeing the light come on” in the calf’s eyes. She was given it to raise, knowing that its eventual end would be at the slaughterhouse, and when that time came, she “saw the light go out.” I recently heard someone speak of seeing the same thing at the time of death of a family member. And I ponder just what it was they saw.

Some religions teach that until we take our first breath, we are matter; that we become human when life is breathed into us. The word for breath, in the Old Testament – in Hebrew ruah or ruakh – is the same word used there for spirit and wind, representing the force of God. Are the Spirit and the Light one and the same – God (the Light) within?

These are my ponderings. And they have led this old woman to hope that the Light is indeed born in us, is there with our first angry cry at being pulled from the security of the womb and is shared in our first reflective smile. But I also suspect that Light gets shaded–withdrawn?– by all the negative experiences which inevitably follow. Some of us, eventually, will choose to hide our Light – yes – under a bushel. Our fears will lead us to construct a bushel and perhaps protectively hide our Light under it most of the time for most of our lives.

This was what I was trying to put into words when I wrote this many years ago:

To a Monarch in Chrysalis

Suspended by spun silk
     you wait
          while a miracle evolves
               within your jeweled shell.

I wonder:
     In your green and golden slumber
          do you dream of wings?

If such perfection
     comes to be
          without a dream
How strangely primitive
     are we who
          know enough to wonder
yet 
     know too much
          to be.

The Gospel of Mary, portions of which were found in Egypt in 1896 but not published until 1955 and which we read recently in Friendly Bible Study, also suggests that we are born without the stain of original sin: “The Savior said, ‘There is no sin, but it is you who make sin… That is why the Good came into your midst, coming to the good which belongs to every nature, in order to restore it to its root.’ ”

The French scientist and writer Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin argued that evil, rather than being inherited from the sin of Adam and Eve, is the inevitable, necessary “shadow” of a universe in a state of development and unification, and that Christ is the Savior who, through the Holy Spirit, guides the universe toward its final goal, turning this cosmic struggle into a path toward redemption. For writing this Chardin was banned from publishing his writing on Original Sin by the Roman Catholic Church.

In his 1975 book Toward the Future, Chardin concludes his chapter on chastity with this: “The day will come when, after harnessing [space], the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, [we] shall have discovered fire.” (He wrote “ether” and “man;” various publishers have made without marking the substitutes I have bracketed.)

If we are to let our Light shine, where are we to find it when everything within and without seems dark? After writing that, I shut my eyes and two words appeared: meditation? medication? That second one made me smile, but… why not, if medication will help our Light break through the bushel staves our fears and discouragements have constructed around it? Maybe, with a little help – yes again – from our friends, we may find the courage to let our Light shine. To let it, day by day, become brighter and merge with the other Lights around us.

Many years ago, the Christmas card I chose for our family was one put out by the Congress Of Racial Equality picturing a sleeping child, with its inscription being the last sentence from this longer quote from James Baldwin’s 1979 novel, Just Above My Head: “For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

If and when enough of us let our Light shine, if and when we hold each other, if and when enough of us let our inner Light break through the barriers we have constructed to share caring Light and Love with each other, we may indeed once again discover fire, for it seems to me that our inner Light and the fire of Love are one and the same.

This is how I ended this piece when I began it several weeks ago, let it rest until this past week, and then revised it again yesterday. This morning I woke up in such a dark place, given both the world chaos and a surely bot-written piece defaming Michelle Obama (totally false) I came upon when researching those who use the David Attenborough Fan site to spew their own hate – such a foolish thing for me to give my power to – but there it is: my Light this March 12 morning is in hiding, and I thought about what I had written with disgust, thought it hypocritical. So I came back to it again, read it through just now making only a few revisions, and felt less disgusted with myself; I actually feel a bit lighter. A bit Lighter. I do believe what I have written is true for me, even though I can’t feel that truth in this moment. So I’ll trust my friends/Friends enough to send this on its way to Mike. Thank you, Mike, for making this means of Sharing available to us. And thanks to anyone who read all these ponderings and speculations and even this afterward. finis