Today’s find: Radiance

You might say the church basement has seen its better days…especially the space next to the fellowship hall where we’ve had our Kairos team meetings for the past several years.

It’s a classroom, I guess…but also a storeroom of sorts…one that’s lighted harshly by two banks of overhead fluorescent tubes, and bearing more than a few coats of institutional beige-green paint on its concrete walls.

As my Kairos teammates and I gathered in the room yesterday afternoon for a spiritual meditation, my expectations weren’t especially high that our spirits could be moved in that space. But then, the lights were dimmed…and the leader of our meditation took the cover off a little shrine he had fashioned from some favorite devotional items.

Much to my surprise, the room’s dinginess made way for a measure of radiance. And we were invited to reflect briefly on an unimaginable, uncontainable beauty – the Lord of the Cosmos.

Humble spaces cannot dim the radiance of Jesus, it would seem.

And perhaps we should not find this especially surprising. For as St. James notes in the passage we heard proclaimed today at Mass,

All good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no alteration or shadow caused by change.

Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy One.

IHS