On light, darkness, and the thread we call faith that runs between them

I have carried a lot of conflict within my soul lately, until last night.

I went to see my son and his family yesterday. We talked for hours about my father, who recently passed away, the fun times, the things that defined him, and my mother, his soulmate. Together they built a life and arrived somewhere few people ever do. We even explored their contradictions with whimsical comedy, laughing at their idiosyncrasies. We raised a toast in glassware my father had passed down through generations to share. Then, tired, literally exhausted, with a little wine, emotionally, mentally, perhaps even spiritually, I could not find the bed fast enough.

Then came the dream.

The Dream

I dreamed of a place that could only be heaven, not because of streets of gold or palaces, but because of beautiful fields, fields of dreams. There I saw my mother see, for the first time in a long while, Anthony, a strong Black man with strength no longer of this world. As she ran to embrace him, all of him, she stopped short and stepped back because his power was now unworldly. He stood a giant among the saints in heaven.   Now I wonder if Anthony was the saint my father spoke of, the one he told me about from a dream he had of heaven in his final days.

I did not see my father in my dream, but I knew he was there, quietly savoring my mother's joy, a childlike innocence that loved beyond hurt and disappointment. And when I woke, I almost felt he had sent me the dream to help me find some peace.

In my dad's final days, he was always trying to tell me something through ordinary tasks, and within each one was a lesson to learn. I must be honest: I was often slow to get it. My anger, my disappointment, would get in the way, and I couldn't hear the message because I let the darkness crowd out the light of truth and love, the Christ Present in his eyes.  But in dreams, and in silence, when I allow myself to set that down, I can finally began to hear what Dad was really saying all along, and what the dream came to reveal.

It occurs to me now that the field itself was the message. Not a throne room, not a courtroom, not a city with walls, a field. Undefended, open, ordinary ground made extraordinary by who stood in it. The Elysian Fields of the old Greek imagination were reserved for the heroic and the blessed, a resting place set apart from the gray wandering of ordinary souls. But my field had no velvet rope. It simply had my mother, running, and a man transfigured by something greater than his own strength, the way Moses came down from the mountain with a face too bright to look at directly, not because he had earned the brightness, but because he had stood in its presence.

Sirens, and the Light That Wasn't Theirs

I have been blessed beyond measure. I had two people, my parents, who touched lives, individually, hundreds if not thousands of souls, not through some organization or 501(c) charity, but life to life, where people let themselves know and be known.  My parents possessed that ministry because it was given to them, not earned, not as a reward, simply because it was who God created them to be.  They did not do it perfectly; no one does, but they lived it. 

In some ways my parents' story was like a Greek myth, and the myth I keep returning to is the Sirens. Odysseus lashed himself to the mast because he knew the danger wasn't a monster with teeth; it was beauty and longing weaponized, calling exactly the things in him that wanted calling. My parents had a light, and like Odysseus's ship passing those rocks, that light drew things toward it that wanted to feed on it rather than reflect it. Some sirens came as flattery. Some came as need. Some came, cruelest of all, dressed as love. But the light survived the passage because, and this is the part the myth doesn't have language for, the light was never theirs to lose. It was on loan from on high, the way Prometheus's fire was stolen from a source no mortal owned in the first place. Prometheus paid an eternal price for carrying fire that wasn't his. My parents paid a human price, too, the ordinary chains of temptation and consequence, but the fire itself was never at risk, because the flame belonged to God, not to them.

Scripture says it plainer than any myth can: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5). That's not a claim that darkness doesn't come. It's a claim about who wins when it does.

The Twinkle and the Woman at the Well

In the final two months of my father's life, I saw a twinkle in his eye whenever people came to see him.

He saw the light in them, even when some of them could not see their own light and lived from darker places. He did not give up on people when I wanted to. He saw in them the ability to make the right decisions, even when they weren't making them, and he forgave them their greed and their dishonesty, though I think, privately, he grieved the hell they chose to live in, and in some ways, it broke his heart, but his heart did not depend on himself. 

I think of the woman at the well in John chapter four, five husbands behind her, a sixth man she wasn't even married to, coming to draw water at noon instead of dawn because noon meant no one else would be there to look at her sideways. Jesus didn't lecture her about the noon hour. He offered her water she'd never have to draw again. My father had something of that instinct. He didn't need people to arrive clean. He met them at the well, at whatever hour shame had driven them to.

And then there were those who came to see him whose light shone beyond any title or accomplishment. They had an inner glow, like Saint Francis preaching to the birds because they were God's first choir. In the old stories, it's Orpheus who could charm rocks and rivers and beasts with a lyre no one else could play, but Orpheus's music couldn't bring Eurydice back out of the dark; he looked back too soon and lost her a second time. Francis's music needed no looking back at all, because it wasn't charm; it was communion. The same light Francis saw in the birds was the light he had already found in himself, and he simply held up a mirror to it. That's what the ones with the inner glow did for my father: they weren't performing goodness at him. They were reflecting a light that had already found a home in them, the way Second Corinthians puts it, “we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7).

That light gives grace to those who don't deserve it.  None of us do. But it's always there, a gift, waiting for those with the courage to walk into the unknown, with faith, and with trust. Its rewards aren't always obvious, but they are the only rewards one can truly enjoy.

Worldly rewards rust and fade with time, and everyone eventually lies in a tomb, leaving behind a legacy: the lives you personally touched, the true friends (not the bought or charmed ones), the lives changed, or statues that birds poop on. Even Achilles, offered the choice between a long, forgettable life and a short one that would be sung forever, chose the song. But the songs the Greeks sang about their heroes always ended at the tomb. Ours doesn't have to. The stone gets rolled away.

Descent

There's a part of this I haven't said outright: that light doesn't only shine in open fields. Sometimes it must go down into the dark on purpose.

Orpheus went down into the underworld for someone he loved, and it cost him almost everything, and even then, he failed. Persephone goes down every year, and the world above goes gray and cold until she comes back up. The Greeks understood something true: that going into the dark for the sake of another person is dangerous, often doesn't work, and those who try it pay for it.

But Christ went down and did not fail. He descended into the lower parts of the earth; that's how Ephesians puts the strange, quiet claim buried in the middle of a letter about something else entirely (Ephesians 4:9), and He came back up, and the going-down was not the tragedy; it was the rescue. That is the difference between myth and gospel: the myths are honest about how dark the descent is, and they are honest that the descent usually costs the hero everything. The gospel agrees on the darkness but disagrees on the ending.

The Question

Who do you want to be?

That is the question, my mission in life, The Soulprint Project ultimately exists to explore. Who is God? Who am I, really? And how, then, shall I live my life? What does it mean to live by faith?

The Celtic Christians spoke of thin places, where the space between heaven and earth grows thin,  and I think that is the place we are all meant to learn to live in, the place my father hoped and prayed for in everyone he knew and loved. So, what was Dad teaching me? I think he was teaching me not to judge, but to love the unlovable, the way Jesus did from the cross: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. I am not sure I’ll get there.  But my soul wants that peace, the peace scripture calls “peace beyond understanding.”  This morning I am claiming it and enjoying its rest.

I hope I personally choose the light that stamps out darkness, knowing there will be times when I, too, must go down into the dark rooms of people's souls, the way the myths warned me it would cost something and the way the gospel promises it doesn't have to end there. I go in trusting that my God will provide a light that can shine anywhere, even underground, even at noon by a well no one else will visit, even in a field in a dream where a mother runs toward a man too bright now to hold.  And Dad, sitting somewhere in the distance, still a twinkle in his eye -  that twinkle, always, the light of Christ.    

Thank you, Lord. 

 

The Soulprint Project is an exploration of identity, faith, and legacy - the imprint each of us leaves on the souls we encounter.