Damaris Zehner: What a Difference an “S” Makes

Posted byChaplainmikePosted inDamaris Zehner

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What a Difference an “S” Makes
by Damaris Zehner

There’s a phrase that strikes me whenever I hear it.  It appears every week in the Orthodox liturgy and occasionally in the Catholic one:  it is “Father of lights,” as in “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.”

After a lifetime of reading and hearing the Bible, I accept without question and even without thought that God is light.  He is the light that we see, and he is the light by which we see.  It’s a good image and illustrates God’s nature well.  But still, light is abstract, vast, a physical conundrum of molecular particles hurtling through space, composed of all colors or none – I don’t understand it.  It blinds me as often as it helps me see.

But the “s” in the phrase “Father of lights” changes the image of God in my mind.  Lights – plural – are not vast and incomprehensible but domestic and cozy.  Light is something that only Einstein and the great mystics could look at directly; lights, on the other hand, are all around me.  They are the uncreated light of God coming down as candle flames, reading lamps, and headlights on the highway.

That little “s” unites the ineffable immensities with our daily experience.  It refutes Gnosticism and other dualistic misunderstandings.  God is vast and distant, yes, but he is also intimately among us.  His brilliance is not lost or tempered in this fallen world.  The blessing of light is the same whether in the sun or in a flashlight.  As Dante described so beautifully in Paradiso, our capacities to reflect light may vary, but light itself is perfect, the ultimate good thing coming down from above.

If God is the Father of lights, then I see his hand everywhere.  It is by his will that water, ruffled by wind, casts reflections of light on the underside of leaves.  He ordains that on summer evenings fireflies hover above the farm fields, flickering like phosphorescence on the surface of the sea.  He sets the dust motes spinning in the sunbeam and causes the light from evening windows to make a path across the snow.  He is in every spider web spangled with dew and every puddle lit by the reflections of neon signs.

He must also have been in this scene:  My five-year-old daughter and I were walking home from the bazaar in Kyrgyzstan with our groceries.  Our path led us through a field behind an abandoned hotel where the alcoholics hung out at night.  The ground was covered in shards of glass from broken vodka bottles.  I was picking my way distastefully through the garbage when I heard my daughter gasp, “Look how pretty it is!”  I looked up and saw through her eyes the hundreds of lights where the sun caught the broken glass, sparkling like jewels.  I had to beat back the impulse to explain to her that no, it wasn’t pretty, it was disgusting.  She was right – the Father of lights had created beauty out of trash.

18 thoughts on “Damaris Zehner: What a Difference an “S” Makes”

  1. Well, here’s a kicker: the word used in James 1:17 for “lights” is ????? (ph?t?n), which is the same spelling as the English word describing the abstract, fundamental quantum of electromagnetic radiation. This is the only place in the New Testament where that word is used. In the Greek, it is the plural of ??? (phós – Strongs5457), which is the word used in 1 John 1:15 (God is phós).

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  4. Great post! Thank you. God is light. And God is the “Father of Lights.” Could this also be a reference to us being created in God’s image? Perhaps we are the lights?

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  6. DAMARIS, thank you for this beautiful post

    I often take comfort in the beautiful words of the hymn Phos Hilaron
    —the ‘gentle light’ that remains among the faithful even after night has fallen . . . a peaceful light, calming and as reassuring as the love of a parent towards a sleeping child who will not be abandoned in the darkness

    ‘Phos Hilaron’ is one of the oldest hymns in all of Christianity, and is still sung among the Eastern Orthodox:

    “Gentle Light of the Holy Glory
    of the Immortal and Heavenly Father
    Holy and Blessed O Jesus Christ

    Having come to the setting of the sun
    Beholding the Light of evening
    We sing to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
    God

    Thou art worthy at every moment
    To be praised in hymns by reverent voices
    O Son of God, Giver of Life
    All the world glorifies Thee”

    There is a story of an early Christian devotion where at sunset, the faithful gathered for prayer at the tomb where Christ rose from the dead. And there, they lit a candle at the moment of sunset to symbolize the rising of Christ from the dead. Then they would exit the tomb, and use that candle to light all the candles and lamps of all who had come to pray at the tomb that evening. These lights would be carried in procession back to their homes to remain lit during the night as a testament that Christ with them through the night’s darkness. Perhaps it was there at the tomb where He arose that this hymn was first sung, as it’s lyrics especially mention ‘having come to the setting of the Sun and beholding the Light of evening’

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  7. “…..because darkness is the same as light to you.” Ps 139:12.
    There’s the pain and the mystery and the glory. Your daughter represented that mystery in the unaffected way that children do. Light in the midst of darkness.

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  8. What a beautiful counterpoint to yesterday’s darkness of sorts. In the end it’s all one and the same. Here are the lyrics to a song called Fascist Architecure. I love the “billion facets of freedom turning in the light”. Look it up on YouTube . It’s a great song.

    Fascist architecture of my own design
    Too long been keeping my love confined
    You tore me out of myself alive

    Those fingers drawing out blood like sweat
    While the magnificent facades crumble and burn
    The billion facets of brilliant love
    The billion facets of freedom turning in the light

    Bloody nose and burning eyes
    Raised in laughter to the skies
    I’ve been in trouble but I’m ok
    Been through the wringer but I’m ok
    Walls are falling and I’m ok
    Under the mercy and I’m ok

    Gonna tell my old lady
    Gonna tell my little girl
    There isn’t anything in the world
    That can lock up my love again

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  9. He doesn’t sell his seaglass creations, but he has given some to the local congregational church, and to friends. He does sell his paintings though, and his children’s books are in demand worldwide.

    He’ll be 91 next month but his energy and creativity haven’t slowed down. Some of his friends have been plotting an “Ashley Bryan Center” and that’s getting established this summer.

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  10. Damaris, this is lovely. It makes me think of also of the word “heaven” that in most cases in the N.T. is really “heavens” in the Greek.

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  11. Love this, Damaris. As a writer, I love when folks pick up on nuances and subtleties in language and words such as you have here in “light” vs. “lights.” Bravo!!

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  14. Ah, but you are, oscar, you are. I have also always taken it to mean God is Father of the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars in the sky. What could be more poetic, or more profound, than that?

    First-century readers could not possibly have thought it meant headlights on the highwayor the reflection of neon signs in puddles, although they may have thought of fireflies and the phosphorescence on the surface of the ocean.

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  18. And here I always took it to mean Father of Stars in the Sky. I guess I’m just not a poetic soul…

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