Sons of Light

The Cross and the Becoming of the Heart

“While you still have the light, believe in the light, and you will become sons of light.”

— John 12:36

There is a difference between seeing the light and becoming light.

We can spend much of our lives standing near holy things without allowing them to change us. We can speak of Christ, defend Christ, teach Christ, even suffer in the name of Christ, while still guarding some hidden territory of the heart from Him.

But the Gospel speaks of something more.

“Believe in the light and you will become sons of light.”

Become.

The word contains an entire spiritual life.

The Fathers understood salvation in precisely this way. Christ did not come merely to tell us something about God. He came to draw us into the life of God. The Christian life is therefore not simply the correction of behavior or the acquisition of religious knowledge. It is transfiguration. What Christ is by nature, we are invited to receive by grace.

And on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the Church places before us the strange and terrible place where this transformation occurs.

The Light is lifted upon the Cross.

The One through whom all things were made hangs in darkness.

And He says:

“When I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself.”

We often imagine that Christ draws us to Himself by consolation, beauty, certainty, spiritual sweetness. And indeed He does. There are moments when God comes like sunlight through the leaves, when the heart recognizes Him almost without effort and wonder rises naturally within us.

But eventually the Light leads us somewhere else.

It leads us to the Cross.

There the illusions by which we have lived begin to fall away.

Our need to control.

Our need to be understood.

Our need to justify ourselves.

Our need to preserve the identity we have constructed.

Our need to know what comes next.

Perhaps this is why the elders speak so relentlessly of self-emptying. They knew that the deepest darkness is not the absence of God but the refusal to relinquish ourselves to Him. We cling to what is passing and then wonder why peace eludes us.

The Cross opens the hand.

Sometimes willingly.

Sometimes through suffering.

Sometimes simply because life gradually takes from us what we once believed indispensable.

Plans disappear. Roles change. Relationships are altered. Strength diminishes. Certainties become less certain. Even the spiritual life can be stripped of the forms by which we once recognized ourselves.

And something in us asks:

What remains?

Christ.

Only Christ.

Perhaps becoming a son of light begins there.

Not in possessing more light, but in consenting to lose everything that prevents His light from passing through us.

The desert was filled with men and women who understood this. They went into solitude not because creation was evil but because they wanted nothing between themselves and God. They discovered how many shadows the heart contains: judgment, resentment, vanity, fear, memory, ambition, the desire to be vindicated.

And they remained.

That word has become increasingly precious to me.

Remain.

Remain before God when nothing is resolved.

Remain when prayer has become little more than the Name of Jesus whispered into silence.

Remain when the future cannot be seen.

Remain when one can no longer repair everything that has been broken.

Remain when there is nothing left to accomplish except love.

This too is the Cross.

And strangely, it is there that light begins to appear.

Not necessarily the light of answers.

Something quieter.

The light of mercy.

The light that allows us to look upon another human being without needing to judge him.

The light that allows us to remember wounds without allowing them to become our identity.

The light that permits us to forgive because we have finally understood how much we ourselves have been forgiven.

The light that teaches us that another person’s weakness is not an interruption of our spiritual life but may be precisely the place where Christ waits for us.

The light that makes it possible to sit beside someone who is frail, confused, suffering, or dying and understand that nothing more important is happening anywhere in the world.

This is not spectacular holiness.

It is hidden holiness.

And perhaps that is why it resembles Christ so closely.

The world seeks illumination by rising above weakness. Christ reveals divine glory by descending into it.

The world tells us to establish ourselves. Christ empties Himself.

The world tells us to preserve our lives. Christ gives His away.

And the Cross, raised before us today, overturns the whole order of things.

“Now the prince of this world is to be overthrown.”

How is he overthrown?

By Love refusing to cease being Love.

Christ does not descend from the Cross to prove who He is.

He remains.

He loves.

He forgives.

He entrusts Himself to the Father.

And darkness cannot comprehend Him.

This is what it means to become sons of light.

It is not to become impressive.

It is to become transparent.

To allow mercy to pass through us without obstruction.

To allow Christ to love through wounds that once made us defensive.

To cease demanding that life conform itself to our expectations.

To stand before God with empty hands and discover that empty hands are finally capable of receiving everything.

The elders sometimes seem severe because they continually call us toward death to self. But beneath their severity is an astonishing tenderness. They know what waits on the other side of surrender.

Freedom.

The freedom of having nothing left to defend.

The freedom of not needing to be seen.

The freedom of no longer asking the world to tell us who we are.

The freedom simply to be before God.

God is.

I am before Him.

He knows me.

That is enough.

Perhaps this is why the Gospel gives the warning such urgency:

“Walk while you have the light.”

Do not postpone love.

Do not postpone forgiveness.

Do not postpone repentance.

Do not wait until everything has been resolved before giving yourself to God.

The path is already beneath our feet.

The person before us is already the place of obedience.

The wound we carry may already be the doorway.

The silence we fear may already contain the Kingdom.

And the Cross we would rather escape may already be drawing us into the Light.

There comes a point when we understand that the Christian life is not about constructing something magnificent for God.

It is about consenting to His work within us.

Sometimes that work feels like loss.

Sometimes like obscurity.

Sometimes like being reduced to very little.

But the seed disappears into the earth before it becomes what it was created to be.

So too the heart.

Christ is lifted up.

We look upon Him.

And slowly, painfully, beautifully, the things that are not love begin to fall away.

Until perhaps there is nothing left to say.

Nothing left to prove.

Nothing left to possess.

Only Christ.

Only the Cross.

Only the quiet radiance of a heart learning to love as it has been loved.

And then, without knowing when it happened, we discover that we are no longer merely standing before the Light.

We have begun, by grace, to become its children.

Sons of Light.