Darkness and Light

Lord, awareness of your love can slip away from my heart so easily, whenever there’s a disaster I begin to doubt it. My small mind starts whirling, and I ask, ‘How could you do this to me?’ or ‘How could you let that happen to someone else?’ The dark side of things can so quickly eclipse the light. I say – excuse me for this! – ‘Where the hell are you gone?’ My demons then have a field day. Let me instead watch out for your way of going about things. At the beginning, you tell us, darkness lay over the face of the earth then, first of all your works, you created light. Why did you let darkness have its place; why not obliterate it? But light and darkness both have their place in your scheme of things. This helps me! It makes me less surprised at the darkness that is around and focuses me on the fact that the light will come back. I should not expect a world without some darkness. Because you come into the world as divine light, darkness is pushed back and can’t eclipse it. I should focus on you as light, holding the darkness at bay, dealing resourcefully with suffering and evil. In another world perpetual light will shine on us all, but for now help me to live in the light myself and to battle the darkness as you do. After all I am infinitely loved and you need me to be ‘the light of the world’. May I believe that patient endurance illuminates what is dark from the inside. So it was on Calvary and can be in my life too.

Excerpted from I Am Infinitely Loved by Brian Grogan SJ