Jubilee 2021: Light of the Church
As human beings, we gain knowledge through our senses.[1] Hearing, tasting, touching: these are the ways we perceive the physical world around us. Even the spiritual world is thought of in images we can picture in our minds – which is why we often conceive of God the Father as a kindly old man with a beard, or of the Angel Gabriel as a dashing young one with wings. The most powerful of these senses, St. Thomas Aquinas says, is the sense of sight, which is echoed throughout scripture in the fact that man’s consistent desire is to ‘see’ God, face to face. While this is not to be reduced to a literal seeing of God with our physical sense of sight, it does point us to the fact that a kind of sight stands at the pinnacle of our purpose in God’s creative plan. As St. John says in his first letter: “when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”[2] This is why we refer to our ultimate, heavenly communion with God as the ‘Beatific Vision’.
Now, I know we promised reflections on the Dominican Antiphon ‘O Lumen Ecclesiae’ and I can hear you saying, “Uh, Sister… it’s Light of the Church, not sight of the Church.”
I’m coming to it, I promise.
The fact is that light and sight are inextricably linked. Without light, it is impossible to see.
We are so used to this fact that it is quite easy to forget all about it, but just imagine living life in the dark for a moment! Light is so necessary to us that we pass it by, like the air that we breathe, and as it is in our physical life, so it is in our spiritual life. In order to ‘see’ spiritually, we need spiritual light – and since spiritual sight is central to our purpose and potential in God, spiritual light is absolutely non-negotiable.
It is in this sense that Our Lord says: “I am the Light of the world.” [3] Jesus Christ came that we might see. After generations of waiting and at times stumbling around in the dark, He came to bring total illumination – and what is it that we see in Him? What does He reveal to us? Rather, it is a ‘Who’. Jesus came that we might see and know God the Father. As He said to Philip and the other disciples, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”[4]
It is Christ’s light which we so desperately need, and it is His light we refer to when we speak of St. Dominic as the ‘Light of the Church'. When St. Dominic was travelling with the Bishop of Osma, he was grief-stricken by the number of people he saw living in the darkness of heresy. So, in humble participation in the mission of Jesus, St. Dominic was given special graces to illuminate, to reveal and shine the Light of Christ into the lives of those who were lost. When he was still in her womb, Bl. Jane of Aza had a dream of her son as a hound with a flame in its mouth leaping forth from her to set the world on fire. This is why St. Dominic is so often pictured with a radiant star above his head (and with a little dog trotting alongside with a flaming torch!). As Christ came to illuminate the heavens and the earth, St. Dominic was sent to carry this light deeper into the Church and, through his many sons and daughters, into her farthest corners.
But what is this ‘light’ that Dominic carried? It is Christ’s Light, and as with Jesus’ own mission, it is the light of true knowledge of God the Father – Who He is, how He loves us, and how He desires for us to love Him in return. Nowhere was this light brought forth in Dominic more so than in his preaching, and the divine Truth that he labored to share with any and all.
Join us in a fortnight when we’ll reflect on St. Dominic as the ‘Teacher of Truth’.
Blessed St. Dominic, Light of the Church, pray for us!
[1] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-I, Q. 84, Art. 6.
[2] 1 John 3;2 (RSVCE)
[3] Matt 8:12
[4] John 14:9
