Oneness: To be at one with the light

One of the highlights of every week is, for me, the Wednesday evening meeting in our local branch church. People come together in the middle of the week to meet, to sing and pray, to share healing experiences - and to listen to a reading prepared by what we call the reader.

Yesterday the topic was one of my favorites: Oneness. Our reader had posed this question: God and man are one - seriously?

After the reading individual share healings and insights. One individual shared insights about oneness in terms of an analogy. If you watch a sunset, the horizon is always no less than 3.1 miles away. Physical oneness can not be point (not to mention the distance between you and the sun), but we definitely feel and understand something about the grandeur, holiness, glory of Life. We are one with the sunlight. Oneness in this analogy is not so much about quantity, but about quality. 

Oneness is a thought, but even more so a feel. It is all about the onliness and omnipresence of Spirit. Oneness is completeness, belonging, safety. God and man are as inseparable as a consciousness and the ideas it thinks or remembers. God is infinite good and constitutes All. Can we ever be outside good? Try to take a starship and fly as far as you can: You will be surrounded by good and will encounter good. Man is not disconnected from good, ever, praying to God to be rejoined or even seen. God and man are one. Oneness.

For me one of the most powerful analogies of the oneness of God and man is the oneness of light with, well, light. It is impossible to perceive light without a source. Light always points to a source and emanates from it: "Ye are the light of the world", Jesus description and mandate for each single one of us (as recorded in Matthew 5: 14) points to the fact that we all are humble, powerful expressions of God, no exception. John, without any further ado, writes in such a direct way that this truth is at the same time self-evident - and most profound: "God is light..." (I John 1:5). 

I am sharing with you a beautiful poem which has been inspiring me ever since I found it. I trust it will inspire you as well.


Ye are the light of the world
​Matthew 5: 14

Man is no dreamer, waiting for the dawn,
Slow twilight or sudden uprush of the sun.
Man is forever the individual radiance
Of God, the Father of lights, the unsleeping One.

Man is no strayed sheep, yearning for the fold,
No prodigal son, remembering his father's house,
No traveler journeying to distant gates of heaven,
No voyager tossed on oceans perilous.

Man is unshadowed noon that wakes the dreamer,
Outshining the dark and all the dark contains.
Dreamer and dream are one; in hour of waking
These are found nothingness. The light remains.

Man is the pure, the innocent, the unstraying,
The unblemished lamb, the flawless image of God,
The son forever in his Father's mansion,
Citizen within heaven's gates, not on the road.

Man does not dream. It is his eternal nature
From glory unto glory to unfold.
This is the Christly fact that wakes the dreamer,
That, steadfastly acknowledged, breaks the hold
​
Of that dull slumbering sense which calls man mortal,
Dreamer, strayed sheep, sick, storm-tossed, wastrel son.
As full expression of light, we find man's wholeness,
For light with the source of light is always one.
​
(Peter Henniker-Heaton. February 1954. CSJ)

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