L: LIGHT

Nothing toggles between the visible and the invisible quite like light does. It is simultaneously common and extraordinary. The light that bathed the countryside of Europe inspiring Claude Monet to paint, paint, paint is the same mystery that sparked an entire quantum thought revolution in the brain of the Western world. While the Impressionists were capturing it in their unique form of instantaneous realism, scientists were discovering a reality that seemed to them quite surreal. The study of light, especially from Einstein on, led us into a real-life Narnia, full of wild behavior, counterintuitive logic, and glorious mystery. Science itself was being washed in light like the landscapes on the canvases painted by their artistic brothers! At the base of all this is something called duality, which is simply a way of saying that light has two natures, or rather, two manifestations. Light can act as a wave—a pulsing forth of energy in broad bands—a rhythmical rippling outward. Or, it can act as a particle. It can be transmitted and arrive at a source as a stream of individual “dots” or “packets” appropriately, from the Greek, called photons. Light itself seems to have the “choice” of form and it seems to “make the choice” depending on how we try to observe it, and by “we”, I mean physicists in the lab! For 200 years, scientists have been forcing light through slits and setting up increasingly clever ways of investigating the wave-particle duality toggle. There is even a class of experiments called “delayed choice” in which the researcher tries to “fool” the light into thinking it is not being observed (I know we’re talking crazy here—I told you it was counter-intuitive)! In these cases, guess what? The light seems to retroactively change its choice of behavior once the delayed observation appears! (Since the painter in the field does not CARE whether the light he sees is particle or wave, it probably exists there as both and does a happy dance knowing that the painter is “observing” with altogether different purpose. But that’s another entry for another day.) In many, many cultures, and in the culture of my own heart, LIGHT is the quintessential metaphor for TRUTH, not just distant, sterile theoretical truth, but truth with work clothes on—truth that shoots like a fractal through every iteration of experience—truth that gets you out of bed in the morning when circumstances might have burrowed you into deeper hiding! LIGHT reminds us that REAL TRUTH is not content just to shine in the distance, but rather wants to get involved with the common things of living! Light is uncontainable and it makes us SEE, and it is the same on the inside when we speak of spiritual things. I believe that truth, like light, can exhibit a wave-particle duality in our lives, and I would like to use two words in the supple Greek language to consider that possibility. They are not words for truth or light, however. They are words for “word”. The first is logos, which means the divine wisdom in its entirety. Logos is the matrix of universal truth, broad, over-arching—THE meta-narrative that covers it all. This huge dynamo of networked reality must be the greatest wave of energy imaginable, rippling throughout the very universe giving meaning and coherence to it all. Logos is the wave-form of truth. Another Greek word for “word”, however, is rhema, and it refers to a specific spoken word in a moment. When the wave-like logos is too big and overwhelming, a “photon” of truth comes to us in a packaging we can digest--a very specific realization of truth appropriate to the heart-need that is stretched across our personal landscape—our real-time wash of LIGHT! In its amazing wave-particle duality, the logos can change its form and becomes rhema—piercing through our local darkness like a laser! The Logos chooses to fit itself to our understanding rather than remain high and lofty and unattainable from our GPS coordinates! Sometimes, all we see before us is stubborn matter and our eyes have grown dim in their search for the energy that will change it! Even the best of spiritual thinkers and unlimited possibility dreamers go through periods where the sheer MASS of living seems extra massive! At those moments, we can’t relate to a wave—we need a particle! It’s the same light, but it must come with our name on it—some indicator that the end of our particular tunnel is not the proverbial oncoming train! “God made the world and it is good,” doesn’t help us necessarily when our local microcosm is falling apart. We need a photon of light, a specific EXPERIENCE of truth in the moment, to light up that conflicted landscape. I cannot tell you what your truth will be—that landscape stretches across your own heart and must be explored there. But I can promise you that truth has a wave-particle duality such can meet your quest and give you a very personal manifestation—a Eureka moment—where the big truth dons the clothing of your own inner world! All it takes is proper observation. And, as the researchers have shown, the wave-particle choice can even be retroactive. Even situations long past can actually be bathed in light long after the damage is done. You don’t get a redo of the situation per se, but you do get something more important: an overhaul of your inner world that recreates the masterpiece originally intended. You get LIGHT, both pure and applied. There is a curious promise in the Biblical book of Revelation that says, “I will give to each one a white stone, and on the stone will be engraved a new name that no one understands except the one who receives it.” (2:17) Whatever else this passage means, it has always spoken to me of PERSONALIZED TRUTH—deeply personal truth, with my name on it, but not even my “known” name, but an even deeper version of my essence that resonates on an inner frequency that is my personal bandwidth. My “name” (my identity) comes from a place where LIGHT has bathed me and awakened me and given me the courage to roll out my own view of reality, knowing that I too have a voice in the big composite picture emerging from the landscape of life. You don’t have to make Truth personal—it is in its nature to personalize itself to you. Just let it.