Light and dark are the colors of life. No life is ever all of one or all of the other. On the contrary. Life is the interplay, the dialogue, the interpreter between the two.

But being able to read the languages of light and dark around us, knowing which we’re seeing when, is a cultivated spiritual art. It is the difference between being spiritually mature and being a spiritual child, between being wholly alive and only partially alive.

It was the mystics, lost in the presence of God, who could say “alleluia” in the midst of great sufferings of the soul—the sense of rejection that came with desolation or the public ridicule that came with official rejection of all kinds. It was the mystics who could see the light of God in the middle of periods others would have called dark.

It was a sense of Divine Light in all things that kept the Jewish convert Edith Stein strong in the face of death at the hands of the Nazis; and Joan of Arc unyielding to the churchmen who condemned her for following her conscience rather than being obedient to them; and Galileo faithful even in the midst of rejection by a church intent on smothering modern science in the name of faith; and Dorothy Day implacable in her pursuit of peace in a country that called her “communist” for doing it.

Spiritual leaders like these remember what so many of us far too often forget.

Christians are not people of the cross. Christians are people of the empty tomb, the ones who know that every step on the way to the Light is Light.

—from Journey Into Light by Joan Chittister (Benetvision)