Arise, shine; for your light...
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"Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you." Those are revelatory words, words of energizing insight and empowering experience. Moments like those described in these words from Isaiah do not come to us every day or every month or, for that matter, every year. But they don't have to. A moment like that has staying power within us. A moment like this is related in John Cheever's novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems. Cheever has a character named Sears awake to a morning described in this fashion:
The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed! (p. 105)
The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed! (p. 105)
