Tonight it's not just been a flicker--it's lasted for hours. For the first hour or so I had an emergency lamp, but that died. I pulled out my trusty candle in its improvised cardboard holder and lit it with matches that smelled like my birthday. As I pen my blog thoughts cross-legged on the couch bathed in the ambiance of candle glow, I am struck by the irony--I am resting my lit candle on my dead laptop. How amazing! When all our power fails we rely on the simplest and most beautiful of lights.
Here in Bangalore with its multiple frustrations and surprising colors it is nevertheless sometimes easy to forget I am in a still-developing country. It is only when the utter darkness hits that I am reminded again of how tenuous a hold modernity has taken here. Sans other stimuli, as my ears attune to the ever-present night sounds, the Hindu temple and Moslem mosque criers call the faithful to prayer on back-up generators.
Isn't that all there is, in the end? There may be an absence of technology, power and efficiency for the time being, but my candle flame warms as a reminder of all that's beautiful, honest and true. In the end, there is only faith; that simplicity of the soul facing God, palms upturned in expectation and surrender.
In the necessity of the present moment, I recall when all other lights are gone, I must know who to turn to; God becomes so much more apparent in darkness when there is no other light pollution to mar the view.
I feel an urgency tonight to adjust my sights. The scripture has strongly come to mind:
The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
Matthew 6: 22-23
I want to view God with my "good eye," unclouded with irrelevancies and distractions. Our eye makes the choice. When all is dark without, we had better gaze on God within, so our whole self becomes full of light.
