The Fruit of the Light

As the hours of sunlight spread like a slowly rising tide, green and growing things are waking up. The grass is waking, tufts stirring here and there in the yard after a long and surprisingly normal winter. The trees are all in bud, as are the scraggly blueberry bushes outside of my bedroom window.

It feels, some days, like spring is fully here. And other days, it most certainly does not, because March is a liar. “It’s summer,” March shouts to the world, “finally shorts weather!” And the next day, it’s winter again.

So even though the day for planting is nearly upon us, that temptation to put seeds in the ground must be resisted, because the only sure place to do that is indoors.

For the last few years, I’ve been using a converted section of shelving in my laundry room to start seeds. I lined the interior of the shelves with repurposed reflective insulation from an Amazon package, with access doors made of cardboard and attached with duct tape. For lights, I found the cheapest possible LED grow lamps on Amazon, and there you go. It worked. Mostly.

The problem, I discovered last year, was that the integrated timer on the grow lights metes out light only if the power is uninterrupted. If you lose power for ten seconds in a windstorm, the lights go off and then they stay off.

Which, if you forget to check on your seedlings for a couple of days? That’s not a good thing. Without light, there is no growth, or rather, no growth of anything but mold.

This isn’t exactly the optimal solution.

It’s easy to have those bunker places in our lives, where we hide away from the light and from the reality of our relationships with God and with other people. We feel safe there, secure from having to challenge ourselves, sheltered away from coming to terms with things that are undermining our integrity and our personhood.

But that sense of security is a false one.

We’re still clinging to an illusion about ourselves, one that doesn’t speak into the reality around us. If we have any interest at all in living as children of light, we need to be sure that our source of light is trustworthy and fosters the good growth that we need.

We have, these last few years, seen what the powers of this world do when they feel that nothing can hold them to account. They believe that there is no light, that everything but our own will to power is emptiness, that a person can do whatever they can get away with under the cover of the deadly shadow of moral entropy.

It’s easy, for example, to place our trust in lesser lights of the world, in wealth and power and social position. But Christian faith teaches that this just ain’t so.  

Those ersatz suns are less trustworthy than a no-name grow lamp.  

The light they cast isn’t light at all, but its own form of shadow. You can have all the gold in the world, all of the fame, and all of the influence, and all that means is that you live in an ever deeper world of shadow and shame and moral horror. That always, always, always comes to ruin. The probability that Andrew Mountbatten will read this is one in four point seven billion, but if he is, buddy, do you hear what I’m talking about?

The light of God’s justice is always present in the world, and it is the task of the disciple of Jesus to be sure that we are living in it.