EATING AND DRNKING LIGHT

Did you have orange juice this morning? You were drinking light. Did you eat toast or cereal? You were eating light. The oranges and the grain depended upon the leaves of the tree or stalk. And the leaves were tiny mills of God ingesting light into chlorophyll to produce living leaves which in turn produced oranges or wheat.

In his book, Vision of Glory, John Stewart Collis says, "the whole vegetable world may be considered as a vast Mill receiving its motor power from the sun." (p. 18) And, he says, the vegetable cell of the leaf is the supreme artist, taking carbon from the air and mixing it with oxygen. "Chlorophyll is the agent and sunlight is the source" and the orange juice and toast we had this morning are the result. We were ingesting light.

No one knows for sure what light is. Isaac Newton, in 1704, thought it might be tiny "corpuscles" like tiny bullets shot from a gun. A contemporary Dutch astronomer, Huygens, thought it might be waves.

Albert Einstein thought light was photons traveling as waves at 186,000 miles per second. Thus, a light year is the distance light travels in one year. The light from our sun, about 93 million miles away, takes about eight minutes to get here. The brightest star our sky, Antares, is more than one thousand light years away, so the light we see from it now started 1000 years ago. Light is a messenger telling us what is going on millions of miles away and years ago. Yet, Einstein adds, "the actual mechanism by which the atom radiates light, and by which light propagates through space remains one of nature's supreme mysteries." (The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Barnett, p. 9)

Nonetheless, light from our sun pumps power into our material world, indeed, "creates" it. As Huston Smith says in his book, Why Religion Matters, "...light produces the physical universe...." (p. 139) Light took the various gases of early creation, transformed some into oxygen by way of photosynthesis, and eventually produced a green carpet of vegetation over the surface of the earth. As Smith says, "the exchange of light maintains our universe from the level of atoms on up." (p. 140) He then adds, "Every interaction in the material world is dictated by light; light penetrates and interconnects the entire cosmos." (p. 266)

So, the whole vegetable world is a vast Mill of God getting its motor power from the sun, and by the miracle of photosynthesis, the immaterial, "spiritual" light is turned into living tissue in an inexhaustible act of creation, says Collis.

And so, this morning we could have our orange juice and cereal, and our bacon and eggs, for that matter, all products of light. Light creates the vegetable world, and we consume it, so that in an almost literal sense, we can say with the Bible, "all flesh is grass" (Isaiah 40.6), and all "grass" is light transformed.

The Bible also says, "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all." (First John 1.5) So we are dependent upon the light of God for our very existence, and for that matter, for our very enlightenment. But more about that later. In the meantime, enjoy your orange juice and toast as transformed light! In that sense, we all are "children of light!"