Discerning God’s Light

I spoke in church today (for the second time in as many months; my family moved to a new ward and my wife and I were asked to speak very soon). Here is what I had to say.

I want to begin my talk by asking you to conduct a thought experiment. I want you to imagine being in this chapel in pitch darkness. Imagine that we’ve turned out the lights, closed the doors, and blacked out the windows. There is absolutely no light in here at all. Now imagine that way up here on the stand, I light a candle. Wherever you are sitting, I hope that you are imaging that you can see it, because even though our imaginary candle would a very small light, everyone in this chapel would be able to see it through the darkness. Now, here comes the experiment: ask yourself, how far away from the candle you would need to be before you would not be able to see it anymore.

In preparation for this talk, I did some Googling on that question. Interestingly, there is no scientific consensus on this seemingly simple issue. Some scientists estimate that we would lose sight of the candle a little over a mile and a half away. Others posit that we could see the candle up to thirty miles away.  Needless to say, this chapel would have to be much, much larger before anyone in it would be unable to see our tiny, flickering candle.

But one thing that everyone agrees on is that wherever we are—a mile and a half or thirty miles away—the candle’s light would reach us. The only question is whether our eyes would be able to discern it. Because light is infinite. It will keep going forever until it runs into something. If that something happens to be our retinas, and our retinas are sensitive enough to detect it, then we see light. If the light reaches our retinas, but they are not sensitive enough to detect it, then all we see is darkness.

That thought experiment illustrates some of the most interesting characteristics of light and darkness. While darkness can feel gloomy, oppressive, and overwhelming, it is merely the absence of light. Once light enters a dark space, the darkness must retreat. And the light, even a tiny little light like a candle, pierces the darkness for great distances, in fact, an infinite distance.

With that understanding, I would like to read a few verses from Doctrine and Covenants section 50.

“. . . that which doth not edify is not of God, and is darkness.

That which is of God is light; and he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day.” (D&C 50:23–24)

Like light, that which is of God stands in stark contrast to everything that is not of God. It pierces through all else and shines forever and ever.

But that raises a question in my mind. If that which is of God is light and that which is not of God is darkness, and even the smallest light can be seen for miles around, why does anyone get lost in the darkness? Why does anyone turn their back to God’s light? Why do we sometimes lose our way and stray into the darkness?

The problem, of course, is not with the light. God’s light is perfect, eternal, and infinite. The light is there. The problem is with us, with our ability to discern God’s light. If we can but discern God’s light, there is no limit to what we can see and understand.

To illustrate that point, let me tell you about the Hubble Space Telescope. A telescope is essentially a light-gathering device. The aperture — or, the opening that lets in light — is much larger than our pupils, so it can capture much more light than our eyes. Then, through a system of lenses and mirrors, it focuses that light so that we can see it, allowing us to see far off objects in greater detail. But still, ground-based telescopes are limited by the distorting effects of our atmosphere. So astronomers came up with the idea of putting a telescope in orbit high above Earth’s atmosphere.

The Hubble was launched into orbit in April of 1990, but it had a rocky beginning. After a few weeks of operation, scientists noticed that the images it was sending back were a little more blurry than expected. They were so blurry, in fact, that some of the telescope’s original mission could not be fulfilled. An investigation revealed a spherical aberration in Hubble’s primary mirror, which was caused by a miscalibrated measuring instrument. Essentially, the edges of the telescope’s mirror were just a little too flat.

There was no easy fix to the problem. A space telescope isn’t something that you can just bring back into the shop and tinker with. NASA developed a new camera that would compensate for the problem, but it would have to install it while the it was still in orbit. To repair it, two teams of astronauts had to embark on five back-to-back spacewalks, using new tools that had never been used in space before. But after all of that, the Hubble was fixed.

With its 10-foot aperture, the space telescope started sending back to Earth spectacular images of stars, galaxies, nebulae and other deep space objects that humans had never been able to see before. One such image is particularly noteworthy. In December of 1995, the Hubble tooks a series of images of a tiny region in the constellation Ursa Major that were stitched together into the Hubble Deep Field. The image covers about 2.6 arcminutes on a side, or about one 24-millionth of the whole sky — a tiny, tiny speck from our vantage point here on Earth. But in that tiny area of our sky are about 3,000 galaxies, each with millions upon millions of stars, which are each about as bright as our sun.

To our eyes, that area of sky appears dark, but in reality, it is filled with light. We just needed the right instruments and we needed those instruments to be as finely tuned as possible to see it.

Like the Hubble when it first went into orbit, our instruments to discern God’s light are faulty. As Paul taught the Corinthians, in this life, we “see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). We read in the scriptures that since the fall, our natures have been “carnal, sensual, [and] devilish,” (Mosiah 16:3) and that the “natural man is an enemy to God” (Mosiah 3:19). This fallen nature clouds our discernment and prevents us from detecting God’s light.

So how do we repair these flaws in our instruments? How do we overcome our fallen natures to discern God’s light? King Benjamin taught us how. He said that we must “yield[] to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and put[] off the natural man and become[] a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and become[] as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon [us], even as a child doth submit to his father.”

I want to emphasize that word “inflict.” I believe that that word was chosen carefully, and purposefully. To inflict is to cause something unpleasant or painful to be suffered by or to impose something unwelcome on someone. When we usually think of our loving Heavenly Father, we don’t normally imagine him doing such things to his children, but King Benjamin taught if he doesn’t, we will be his enemy “forever and ever.” Why? Why does putting off the natural man require being inflicted with trials, troubles, pains, sicknesses, and everything else we have to suffer in this life?

I think that C. S. Lewis explained why exceptionally well. He said:

My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God's grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless. (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 612-13)

If God still has hope in us, he will inflict us. If he didn’t, we would never take our eyes away from our toys. We would never try to discern his light. We would never realize that there are flaws in our instruments to discern his light, so we would never make any effort to repair them.

Like repairing the Hubble, repairing our instruments to detect God’s light requires great effort. It requires abandoning sinful habits, even the ones we enjoy; it requires answering a call to serve, even when we’d rather stay home and decompress in front of the TV; and it requires reshaping ourselves into Christ’s image, even when we are perfectly happy with who we are, thank you very much. It’s a process that can be tiring, frustrating, and even painful.

But in this effort, we are not alone. Christ is with us to pick us up and dust us off when we have failed once again, to carry us when we can’t carry on ourselves, and to relieve our pain when we think that we can’t possibly bear it any more. He can give us the strength to endure all that God sees fit to inflict upon us, because God also saw fit to inflict it all upon him. “He [was] despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief . . . . Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows . . . . [H]e was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:3–5).

As Elder Jeffrey R. Holland has taught, this process of repairing our flawed instruments is the same process that redeems us. He said:

In striving for some peace and understanding in these difficult matters, it is crucial to remember that we are living—and chose to live—in a fallen world where for divine purposes our pursuit of godliness will be tested and tried again and again. Of greatest assurance in God’s plan is that a Savior was promised, a Redeemer, who through our faith in Him would lift us triumphantly over those tests and trials, even though the cost to do so would be unfathomable for both the Father who sent Him and the Son who came. It is only an appreciation of this divine love that will make our own lesser suffering first bearable, then understandable, and finally redemptive. (Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, “Like a Broken Vessel,” Ensign Nov 2013, 40)

Let us not forget that we cannot fulfil God’s purposes for us without our trials, troubles, pains, sicknesses, and everything else we have to suffer in this life. This life was never meant to be time of ease. As the philosopher John Fiske once wrote, “Clearly, for strong and resolute men and women an Eden would be but a fool’s paradise. How could anything fit to be called character have ever been produced there?...We can at least begin to realize distinctly that unless our eyes had been opened at some time, so that we might come to know the good and the evil, we should never have become fashioned in God’s image. We should have been the denizens of a world of puppets, where neither morality nor religion could have found place or meaning” (John Fiske, Studies in Religion, 252, 266, quoted in Tad R. Callister, The Infinite Atonement, 32)

We read in the scriptures that Adam understood this very concept. “And in that day Adam blessed God and was filled, and began to prophesy concerning all the families of the earth, saying: Blessed be the name of God, for because of my transgression my eyes are opened, and in this life I shall have joy, and again in the flesh I shall see God” (Moses 5:10). I think that Henry David Thoreau put it rather poignantly when he wrote: “If I wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the most favorable auspices, I would go to it in foul weather, so as to be there when it cleared up; we are then in the most suitable mood, and nature is most fresh and inspiring. There is no serenity so fair as that which is just established in a tearful eye” (Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, 239-240).

In closing, I want us to return to the thought experiment that we started with. Imagine again the tiny candle and the dark, cavernous room. Imagine you are as far away from the candle as you can possibly be while still being able to see it. From where you are, it is a tiny pinprick of light in the darkness, fainter than most of the stars in the night sky. Now imagine that you start moving closer to it. It gets easier for you to see it, but the light is still just a tiny yellow dot in a sea of blackness. After a while, you come right up to the candle, so that you are face to face with the light. Now, thanks to the light of the candle, you can see other things near the candle, like the candlestick, the table it’s sitting on, and even your own hands and arms. Because light doesn’t simply reveal itself, but, through reflection, it reveals all that is around it.

To quote C. S. Lewis again, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else” (C.S. Lewis, “They Asked For A Paper,” in Is Theology Poetry? (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1962), 164-165).

The scripture says that God’s light “groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day.” I’m going to venture a guess that that isn’t due to any change in God’s light, but to a change in our position relative to it. As we get closer to God’s light, it appears brighter, and we can see more. And seeing will help us understand our trials, troubles, pains, sicknesses, and everything else we have to suffer in this life. The closer we get, the more we will be able to see as God sees and understand as God understands. And when his light envelopes us — on that perfect day — we will see and understand all as he does.