Let there be light

 The challenge of today's gospel seems more acute in our current age. We must not hold our light under a bushel, a bowl, or a bed! We would like to speak openly about our faith, but oftentimes the ground around us seems as stony as that field in the parable where the seeds took root only to wither away. We struggle to shake off the stereotypes around us.  It sometimes seems we cannot escape the pre-set ideas that so many of our contemporaries have about religion. They see faith as a kind of placard announcing doom, or like the kind of carry all tray from which people used to sell ice creams in cinemas. If one talks openly about religion, it is thought one must be trying to sell it, with all the self-interest of any salesman. This is not a new problem. Catholics in Great Britain had centuries of trying to keep their faith under wraps, but as one of the characters in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited says, “They try to keep it secret, but it comes out in so many ways,” or words to that effect.

                It might ease our anxieties about this to consider that being such a light is not primarily an exercise in communication, but a response to the vocation we all have to be faithful to God. To be such a light in a world that seems to strangle truth at every turn, fidelity to what we are meant to be is eloquent witness. We do not have to be the clever barrister who convinces the court that they are hearing the truth, but rather the honest witness he speaks out of the fullness of belief that what they have known and loved is true.

Maybe it is useful to remember that people cannot hear the answer to a question they are not asking, and they are more likely to ask such a question - the necessary question that all human beings must consider - if they are given the chance to be curious. There is all the difference in the world between not hiding our light underneath a bushel and shining it in someone's eyes directly. Discretion without zeal leads to indifference; if we hide our light, we salt the fields of the gospel. Zeal without discretion, on the other hand, leads to repugnance; if we blaze away enthusiastically, we rely too much on ourselves, putting our capacities front and centre. But why should anyone buy ‘us’?

Then comes the mysterious line at the end of the gospel: to he who has, more will be given; to he who has not, even the little he thing he has will be taken away. This, if anything, should be a warning to us, that the fullness of our light does not come from a sophisticated or robust communication strategy that aims to ensure people hear the Word. The fullness of our light comes from the fullness of our hearts when they relish wisdom, and which – because they relish wisdom – can overflow (when the Holy Spirit guides us) with the sureness that comes not from self-confidence but confidence in God. In this sense the measure of our ability to take that light out to others will be the distance that we travel inwardly towards God.