Serial Shining
One day, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton left the monastery to run errands in nearby Louisville, Kentucky. And there, between the dry cleaner’s and the grocery store, he had a religious experience.
He writes in his journal,
At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness…to take your place as a member of the human race…I have the immense joy of being…a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate…If only everybody could realize this!…There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
People, have you ever had an experience like that—of moving through the city, and seeing everyone else walking around shining like the sun? I alternate those days with the days in which I wish everyone would just get the bleep out of my way. Or days when I think that humans, as a species, are really significantly less attractive than, say, cats. Those are the days when my mind and ego have the upper hand.
But oh, for those days when I can see with something like God’s eyes; when I can see into the true nature of people, into my own true nature, when everyone is illuminated and we are all walking around shining like the sun!
Why can’t we stay in that place, that place of shining? Why does it seem like the light flickers on and off? Why is it that we can’t always, or even often, see the way that others are shining, and shine ourselves with that holy glow?
I know your stories. And one thing we have in common, that you may not know we have in common, is that many of us are recovering nerds. Recovering nerds, unite! Hands in the air, for the recovering nerds! Recovering nerds find it hard, sometimes, to forget what it was like for us in school, a long time ago. We haven’t forgotten, and we haven’t forgiven. We were cast in the role of nerds and misfits because we were smart, or because we were poor, or because we asked too many questions; or because of our color, or our size, or our sexual orientation, or some cocktail of the above.
And we might have been ok, except that there were a few other kids who shone so brightly and left the rest of us in the darkness. Some of those kids were kind to us and that helped; but some of them were beautiful, and mean. I know now that they were mean because they were afraid of losing their shine and had to protect their dominance, defend it fiercely by putting others down, but man, did it hurt the ones they put down. In my version of the story, Danielle Daniels was the villain. Tall (but not TOO tall), blond, beautiful, and the Godmother of the junior high social mafia. Her shine was so tight that she didn’t need to do the dirty work anymore—she had a whole cadre of flunkeys who ran the mean girl franchise, and she just directed it from above, with cool gazes and flicks of her hair. She made fifth period orchestra hell for me, and likely for others, but such was her expertise that her victims never found each other, to band together and rise up against her. Dani was untouchable. When she walked down the hall, crowds parted, and people stared admiringly after her, shining with the artificial light of perfect perm, perfect clothes, perfect human approbation.
Years later, when I was in college, I ran into Dani. I had come into my own by then, had shed my geeky shell and gained self-confidence. I spotted Dani working the bar at a club on Lansdowne Street. She was still beautiful, but there was a whiff of brittle desperation about her beauty. She was riding that manufactured glory too hard: tight pants, big hair, frosted lipstick. I remember thinking, unkindly, “Boy, Dani peaked too soon.” At that moment it seemed like there was really something to God’s justice: the justice that says the rich will be poor and the laughing will weep—to suddenly see Dani, who had enjoyed such favor early on, slinging Lite beers to frat boys.
I felt schadenfreude then. I feel sadness, now. Maybe by next decade I’ll feel what I ought to feel: non-judgmental holy love. In the meantime, God has managed to teach me one lesson: what a gift it was to have to wait, to wait what seemed like a long time, to shine myself, to shine with a better light. At that moment meeting Dani again, I thought it was my new clothes, my new hair, that turned the tables. I know now to be grateful to all the people who coached me to pay attention to the holy shine within myself, the people from church camp and other places who said, “I see a spark in you, and it’s so beautiful. Won’t you let that light shine brighter?” I am also grateful to Dani herself, and to all the forces that shaped me, even those that hurt at the time. Some pastor or other said, “I try not to provide too much relief to people. Sometimes, the pain they are in is God letting the pressure build up, and if you take the pressure off, they don’t go and do what they otherwise might have done. They don’t become the people they might have been.” If the pressure’s off, if we get used to living in the artificial glow of human praise, we don’t wait for the better light, the better light of God, we don’t learn to want that light more.
Have you ever been friends with an old person you think is very beautiful, and you wonder what they looked like when they were young—they must have been a stunner, you think? And one day they die, and you go to the collation after the memorial service, and you look at the picture montages on the easel near the egg salad sandwiches, and you stare hard, because the person in the photographs, your friend, you hardly recognize them. The person in the pictures is really quite ordinary-looking. Homely, even. That can’t be the luminous being you knew. And the opposite happens, too: the beautiful person becomes ugly, not because of what age does to them, but because of what character does, what their particular wanting does. I tell my son, who is just learning to judge people by outward appearances: whatever is in you, beauty or ugliness, will come out eventually in your face and form. Some people’s beautiful takes a long time to come out. It takes a lifetime.
Let me tell you what I know about this beautiful, about shining with this kind of light, God’s light. Here’s how you can tell the light of God’s glory apart from the artificial light that humans manufacture: First, God’s light doesn’t require me to be less for you to be more: dumber so you can be smarter, uglier so you can be prettier, nerdier so you can be cooler. When you shine with God’s light, I catch fire too. It is a Mardi Gras 80s prom where every one of us Prom Queen. And the paparazzi go wild!
The other thing I know about the light of God’s glory, is: it can’t be willed or faked. It can be waited for, and deeply desired, and expected, but it comes when it comes and it goes when it goes. I’ve never met anybody who shines with it all the time. You find yourself in the right place at the right time, and you get your ego out of the way, and let the glory of the Lord come through. You might be on stage, singing a song you wrote, when this happens. You might be crying in the 4th pew at church, embarrassed, and hoping no one notices, but they do, and what they see is shining, and they shine back. Sometimes you can feel it in yourself, that your skin or your eyes are on fire; sometimes you only see it reflected in someone else’s eyes. And then the moment comes to an end. I call it serial shining.
It happens like this for everyone. It wasn’t any different for Jesus. He went up the mountain to be transfigured with light, and Peter wanted to hold on to the moment, to enshrine it, but it came to an end, and he looked like an ordinary man again. This was the very child of God, and even he didn’t shine all the time, neither with God’s light nor the light the people shined on him. The way his life went shows just how fickle and troubling human praise is, how little the favor of the crowd is to be trusted. Sometimes, Jesus was the life of the party, the bomb. People laughed at his jokes, and celebrities invited him to dinner and hung on his every word. He packed the stadium. But other times, nobody showed up. Or worse, they showed up with a lynch mob, pushed him around the locker room, crucified him. He was their mascot one day, scapegoat the next. You just can’t rely on the good favor of the crowd. Wait for the better light. Make room for it. It will come and go.
So much depends on our letting that better light shine from us. Jesus’ little speech that Laura Ruth read for us is part of his Farewell Discourse. He is leaving. He is dying. Maybe to be resurrected, maybe not? Who knows at this point. And like anyone, he doesn’t want his work to unravel just because he’s gone. The disciples always change the subject when he starts talking about dying. They pretend they don’t know what he is talking about. Because they know, he expects them to take his place, to love one another like he loved them. And man, that work is hard.
This is the work that Thomas Merton achieved, for a split second, standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. He managed to love everyone as Jesus had loved him, as Jesus still loves him. This work is God saying, “You are to shine, not for your sake, but for MY sake. You need to show people I am alive and well and at work in the world.”
Peter Johnston, our former admin, and I are putting together a week of camp for junior high kids this summer. We’re going with a couple of other beautiful misfits from our congregation, nerds in recovery. The conference is about competition and cooperation, but what it’s really about is this business of shining with God’s light against the cold and fickle light of human praise. I wanted to call the conference “Winners and Losers,” but the camp directors thought that was too negative. “Why don’t we just call it Losers, then?” Peter suggested.
Because we’re not calling it Losers, I expect there will be at least a few Dani Daniels’s there, and I expect they have little to no idea of how much harm they’re doing. They’re just doing what everyone else who can does in junior high—posturing, self-protecting, trying to hold on to the little bit of light they’re standing in. But I hope they can learn something—I hope they learn to love someone who currently looks unlovely, and in so doing let God’s light shine through both of them. I also hope some kids who have never shined before, learn to shine, and are amazed by the light that is pouring out of them.
And, if we can’t give them that gift, at least we can say to all of them: “I see something in you. It’s something very beautiful. Trust in it. Wait for it. Wait for the better light.”
