Shining Like the Sun

On Saturday, I had the privilege of attending a conference at Bishop Miege High School at which Fr. Ron Rolheiser spoke about “Fear and Her Many Children.” He identified three healthy religious fears (fear of God’s holiness/magnitude, fear of the moral order of life, and fear of God inbreaking into our comfortable lives) and seven unhealthy religious fears, one of which was fear of being condemned for believing that God wants us to let our light shine, leading us to be too inhibited to do great things. This fear reminded me of a statement by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” I was also reminded of the following meditation by Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Fr. Rolheiser said that the only way to remove people’s fear of shining like the sun is by blessing them, both by showing through our own actions that it is okay to shine and by confirming their own giftedness. The world’s problems are overwhelming, and we can’t begin to address them by ourselves, but we can help unlock the immense energy for good that resides in others by blessing them with our attention and our belief that they contain light and it is meant to shine.