There are so many metaphors for God and for the life lived with him and to him. But there's one particular metaphor that I question in its symbolic use:
"Walk in the light, for you are children of the light and in the light there can be no darkness"
Maybe it's just because I think in metaphor too often that I substitute it for reality, from time to time. But I swear I've seen the light in people, not as something else, but really, as light. Light and darkness are a necessary dichotomy, but it's unfortunate that modern dichotomistic thinking gets to think about this one, because it's only a dichotomy because it has to be. Most of the time, it seems we think about the light as the absence of darkness, and I think it ought to be the other way around. Darkness is the absence of light. Suddenly, walking in the light isn't just a righteous life, but something more glorious, something more than just not sinning...something more than what it's not.
But maybe I just confuse what I want to see for what I actually see, but I know there are those in whom I've seen something, some sort of brightness, some sort of effluvial joy and it's a lot more than simply not doing bad things. There is certainly merit to the pure life, or as pure a life as we can live, but the glory of the gospel isn't that it stops us from sinning, it's that we can live a life no longer bound by the chains of our ultimately flawed personal strivings, and feeling that freedom, breathing in the glory of truth and grace...that is the presence of light.
-Zack
"See the most important parts are the ones that are unseen; the wings don't make you fly and the crown don't make you king"
-Lupe Fiasco
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