Mirroring God's Light.

Today, I watched a video from the "#Lent 2015 It's time to...." series that I found on The Episcopal Church facebook page. This was the one:

What’s your identity? What are you to be about? Why don’t you be a lover: to presume that why God has extended your life into this day, is for the cause of love. To receive God’s love in every way into your being and then to reflect that love outward. Hildegard of Bingen, the great medieval abbess, said we should be mirrors. We should be mirrors, mirroring God’s light and God’s love with great generosity everywhere we go. Love: love is of our essence.

-Br. Curtis Almquist
http://ssje.org/word/?p=10787&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=love-3-identity

It reminded me of a story from Robert Fulghum that I read many years ago in his book, It Was On Fire When I Laid Down On It. (I found a portion of the story here.

What is the Meaning of Life?
by Robert Fulghum

A Greek philosopher and teacher ended a lecture asking, “Are there any questions?” In the audience was Robert Fulghum who asked, “Dr. Papaderos, what is the meaning of life?”

Fulghum relates: “The usual laughter followed, and people started to go. Papaderos held up his hand and stilled the room and looked at me for a long time, asking with his eyes if I was serious and seeing from my eyes that I was. ‘I will answer your question,’ he said. Then taking his wallet out of his hip pocket, he fished into it and brought out a very small, round mirror, about the size of a quarter. Then he said, ‘When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found several broken pieces of a mirror from a wrecked German motorcycle. I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone, I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would not shine – in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find. I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child’s game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of the light. But light – truth, understanding, knowledge – is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.

‘I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have, I can reflect light into the dark places of this world – into the black places in the hearts of men – and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life.’

“And then he took his small mirror and, holding it carefully, caught the bright rays of daylight streaming through the window and reflected them onto my face and onto my hands folded on the desk.”

I hope that I can be a mirror, shining the Light exactly where I'm supposed to, every single day.
♥ Melody