The Light in Your Eyes
By Bethany Kaldas
‘The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.’ – Matthew 6:22
It is easy to look at the world and grimace. I mean, look around—what do you see?
Disaster after disaster, fire, flood and plague. Starvation and famine in one region while obesity and obsession reign in another. Not to mention our own evils—greed, violence, anger, lust, lies…the world looks broken, destructive and morally compromised. It’s enough to make one want to throw it all out, to succumb to the notion that what we have here is nothing but a lost cause. To simply wait, gaze down your nose at a world gone bad, until it finally dissolves away. After all, it seems like this world is a Godless one, one without hope. There is nothing left for us here, right?
But before you ride off on your high horse, let me ask you this: How much of this is your fault?
No, no, I’m not saying you caused every natural disaster or human evil out there (that’s a different discussion for another day). I’m talking about that feeling you get when you look at the shattered world around you. That sense of despair, of disgust, that feeling that all that remains is darkness and that God has abandoned this world. Is that feeling coming from what you see? Or is it something else?
‘Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.’
St Augustine of Hippo
We don’t tend to think about this much, but although we have very little control indeed over what is going on around us, we can control something. We can control ourselves. If we cannot decide what it is we see, at the very least, we can decide how we see it. My father has told me for many years now an old Stoic phrase: it’s not what happens to you, but what you do with it.
But aren’t some things just…bad? How can we look at the torment of a dying world and do anything but weep?
‘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.’
C.S. Lewis
It is important to remember that, although our hope is in ‘the life of the coming age’, it is still true that ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is within’ (Luke 17:21). Heaven is not meant to be a distant thing that we strive towards, in the same way that Christ has not really left this world—because He is right here. Right now. In you.
And when you realise that God resides in you, you realise something else. Something so wonderful it might seem, at first, too good to be true.
‘For, indeed, everything about is marvellous, and wherever a man turns his gaze he sees the Godhead of the Word and is smitten with awe.’
St Athanasius of Alexandria
…You realise that He is everywhere else too.
But how can God be present in a world so plagued by evils? How can you think there is any Light in a world shrouded in shadow? When disaster strikes and the night falls…where is He?
‘God is everywhere. There is no place God is not…You cry out to Him, ‘Where art Thou, my God?’ And He answers, “I am present, my child! I am always beside you.’ Both inside and outside, above and below, wherever you turn, everything shouts, ‘God!’ In Him we live and move. We breathe God, we eat God, we clothe ourselves with God. Everything praises and blesses God. All of creation shouts His praise. Everything animate and inanimate speaks wondrously and glorifies the Creator. Let every breath praise the Lord!’
Elder Joseph the Hesychast
But you see, it could never for a moment have been otherwise. God never left us. God is all-good and all-present—there is nowhere He is not. If you have closed your eyes, how can you blame the Light for all the darkness you see?
I want you to look again. Look again at this weary and broken world, but this time remember that He is within—within you, within all of it. Remember that He has not forsaken it. It’s not a lost cause to Him. There is hope, not because there is no bad in the world—but because there is no bad in Him. And He never left.
Believe it or not, the Light is all around you—there is nowhere it cannot reach, no place it cannot find you. The only question that remains is, will you let it in?
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God.’ – Matthew 5:8