Recently I read the following quotation in a book of daily spiritual readings: “The activity of God is like light touching darkness. It does not do anything whatsoever to darkness; it does not heal it, correct it, change it or remove it. It just reveals that there is none.”
This comment by Joel S. Goldsmith, an early twentieth-century spiritual teacher, initially struck me as interesting, even an exciting insight. After all, if creation, including humans, is good and not “fallen” (my current theological position), then it might be true that evil is an illusion created by us to explain “the bad things that happen to good people.”
But then my cerebral skepticism kicked in and my enthusiasm for this potential new insight began to fade. If darkness doesn’t exist, why does “the activity of God” need to “touch” it? And why are we so preoccupied with bad things if they don’t really exist?
It reminds me of a rhyme that my mother recited when I was young. It went something like this: “I saw him sitting on the stair, the little man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. Gee, I wish he’d go away.”
Of course, as a “progressive” or incarnational Christian, I do believe that God exists in everything and everything exists (somehow) in God, that is, contains some divinity. [See my post entitled “Imagining a New Way to be Christian”].
Richard Rohr, my favorite practical mystic and spiritual teacher, along with many mystical thinkers before him, sees the unity of creation as the ultimate reality. He deplores our dualistic, “either-or” way of looking at things, a western way of thought useful in science and engineering, but detrimental (and judgmental) when applied to things of the spirit.)
Rohr and others would see the activity of God expressed through us humans as that which transforms the darkness (or evil or sin) of all kinds into Light. We are most likely to see and have the ability to effect such a transformation only after we have experienced either great joy or great suffering. Only those experiences, Rohr would say, allow to let go of the ego forces that too often leads us into the darkness.
Rohr might even say that Joel Goldsmith is not exactly wrong; his view of this process is just incomplete.
And this reminds me of another rhyme on this subject (author unknown) that goes like this: “In the black, there is some white. In the wrong, there is some right. In the dark there is some light, In the blind there is some sight.”
How’s that for a glimpse of unity?