St. John the Apostle wrote, “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

Questions of a caller

So just as we can all see the sun, why can’t we all perceive God and believe? Why can’t all of us receive His love and go to heaven?

And why do people go to hell? Isn’t that cruel of God to allow something like that to happen?

Doesn’t that liken God to an abusive husband who commands, then punishes if we don’t “fall in line” (as a caller recently asked on a Catholic radio program)?

Well, the answer to all these questions goes back to two definitive things: our gift of free will and the world’s definition of love vs. God’s divine love. (Hint: one of them is not really love.)

The only way we can truly experience authentic love is when we are completely free–that is, free to choose. And God has given us that freedom, which is “the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, […] to perform deliberate actions on [our] own responsibility” (CCC 1731).

So the question for us really becomes: free to choose … what exactly?

The answer is really very simple: Darkness or light…good or evil…love or selfishness…life or death. These essentially all mean the same thing. The point is, the choice is ours.

Love and self-love

The world’s version of love is not authentic because it is self-love, which does not will the good of the other. It is in fact incapable of giving or receiving love because it cannot move beyond the “self” and the fulfillment of it’s own desires.

It’s bitter fruits are jealousy, resentment, oppression, shame, alienation, fear, cowardice, deception, lust, anger, manipulation, violence and domination. It always takes, and does not give without expecting payment in return.

There is another spirit who propagates this worldly version of love, and it is not the Holy Spirit.

Yet Jesus made it clear to Nicodemis in St. John’s Gospel that with our human freedom, we can actually prefer the darkness of evil to the light of truth:

“And this is the verdict,
that the light came into the world,
but people preferred darkness to light,
because their works were evil.
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light
and does not come toward the light,
so that his works might not be exposed.
But whoever lives the truth comes to the light,
so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”

In this context, Jesus is referring to Himself as “the light”.

So, if God “the light” is everywhere, how is it that we can live in darkness?

With our free will we have the ability to reject Him, and our intellect then becomes darkened (Eph 4:18). It is like closing the shutters of a house to block out the sunlight. The sun remains, but the house is dark.

But because we have a loving God, He can free us from our darkness no matter how much we’ve rejected Him–even up until our last breath.

Deception to misconception

Let’s go back to the radio caller. The person’s assumption that God is a jerk for wanting us to follow Him “or else” presupposes itself on an error–that every human interaction and action is acceptable (or should be acceptable).

Namely, that there is no distinction between good and evil acts. Yet this is the grand deception.

This is the core lie that is prominent in Western society, and it likens us to the mentality of a three-year-old who screams when his mother tells him he cannot eat all five candy bars or to brush his teeth.

There really is good and evil. And there really are things that are bad for us.

The punishment is the sin

In fact, evil acts, by their very nature, alienate us from God. There is often no need for God to “punish” us; the punishment lies in the act itself, and the natural consequences that flow thereafter.

To blame God for not “being aloud” to commit evil without repentance and be admitted into the kingdom of heaven is like killing someone who offers a sumptuous feast of prime rib, mashed potatoes, homemade buttered rolls, and cherry pie because they did not serve cigarette butts, saw dust, horse manure and gravel dust to eat.

It’s laughable really. Which one is really the jerk? Who is really to blame? Who is really the crazy one, (especially to turn down rolls)?

God wants us to be in heaven, but He cannot want what’s bad for us any more than He can force us to love Him back.

Darkness and light

It’s an interesting thing about light… is has a “positive” quality about it that expels the darkness, and without it we are left unable to perceive much.

That’s why we say, “Turn on the lights” when we’re in the dark, or “enlighten me” when we want to learn something. One illuminates a physical reality and the other, a conceptual one.

Darkness has a negative quality–a deficiency or emptiness to it. There are things about light that darkness just can’t do. Darkness hides, while light reveals. It has a brightness that enables us to perceive depth and width, color and contour, shape, and texture. It enables us to see the truth.

The Shroud of Turin

Have you ever studied of the Shroud of Turin (the linen burial cloth of Jesus Christ mentioned by John in his Gospel)? If not, I highly recommend it; it’s very interesting! Father Robert Spitzer, PhD and physicist, has synthesized the scientific research better (in my humble opinion) than anyone alive today. He has spoken internationally about it for over a decade, and written extensively on it at Magiscenter.com. You can watch one of his presentations on the Shroud here:

Not only is it the most studied relic in the world, the Shroud of Turin is also the primary piece of evidence (along with the Face Cloth of Oviedo) we have that confirms the historical resurrection of Jesus. This is a great example of being “enlightened” through scientific investigation! (Sorry, I get a little excited about these things.)

Though there are many unexplainable mysteries to the Shroud, the most astounding one is that scientists can’t figure out how the image got there in the first place. Much like the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on St. Juan Diego’s Tilma, it hovers just on the surface of the linen cloth.

After years of study, the only conclusion they could deduce was light. Yep. A huge “explosion” of light caused the negative image of a man to imprint itself–6-8 billion watts of light energy to be exact–which, according to Father Spitzer, far surpasses every laser beam in the world that we could produce even today. That’s a powerful blast of light!

As the good priest quipped in the video, “Dead bodies normally don’t do that–so you’re gonna have to have a supernatural cause!” That being said, even if a flash of lightening struck the cloth and somehow produced the image onto it, it would have burned it, and completely destroyed the linen fibers in the process.

There is so much more to the Shroud that lends to it’s credibility as a historical artifact that I won’t cover here (including various corroborating dating methods, pollen grain tests, the blood stains from a crown of thorns etc.), but the emission of light is one of the many supernatural components that is instrumental in confirming the historical accuracy of the Gospels, and of the Resurrection itself.

God does everything for our benefit; He knew we would need tangible evidence in this “scientific age”.

Gray

The problem is, we live in a world where we are told by those in positions of power and influence that things are less clear. In other words, we live, not in a time of enlightenment, but when concepts are increasingly “gray”.

The result is the extinguishing of the two extremes of darkness and light–that is, the destruction of good and evil.

This, of course, can never be done; just as God cannot be extinguished, neither can evil. Yet it’s the blurring of the perception of the sacred and the profane that is the end-goal: the acceptance of the “gray”, of mediocrity, of substandard living, of confusion and murky thinking, of suspicion and doubt, of apathy and indifference, of the lack of purpose and cowardice, of the lack of conviction and weakness and, finally, of total and complete submission.

We may not always perceive the sacred, but we can know it still exists–even in a “grayed” society.

How do we know this?

The opposition to the sacred becomes more ruthless, relentless and more filled with malice and, unwittingly, the profane reveals the sacred once again.

These onslaughts now happen every day in our society, with little recourse to justice. They are direct attacks on the sacredness of marriage (through dissension and divorce) on children (through the abortion, human trafficking and pornography industries), on the fruitfulness of families (through homosexual and transgender ideologies, sterilization, freezing human embryos and IVF) and finally, on the human person (through increased rejection of marriage and children, medical and chemical mutilation of the body, the errors of perceived sexual fluidity, chimeric ideology, A.I. technologies replacing human beings and the manipulation of human embryos).

All these have one thing in common: They destroy human life and our ability to reproduce (whether through hormonal, chemical or physical mutilation).

The good news? Letting the “light” of Jesus into your family breaks the spell of the “gray” of confusion and indifference. It allows clarity and life-giving peace back into your home.

Christ came to our world for that very reason–to dispel the darkness of confusion, sin and oppression of evil, and bring light to the world, one person at a time.

Facing the east

Every Catholic church around the world was (historically) and is built facing the east. Facing Christ in the tabernacle, is therefore, synonymous with facing the rising sun, which never fails to rise, bathing the world in its light.

When Jesus died, it was said that darkness covered all the land. We can therefore, deduce there was a total solar eclipse that day–not just in one place but everywhere–covering the entire earth in a blanket of darkness.

Just as God can manipulate the stars to point a way towards His newborn Son, He can supernaturally provide a such a dramatic scene: The sun could not, and would not shine at the time of death of the Son of God; for the Son–the true Light of the world–had been temporarily snuffed out.

During this Easter season I pray that you allow yourself to be loved by Jesus–to let His warmth and light penetrate the darkness of your sins and fears.

And that He takes you by the hand and moves you from the darkness, and into the light.

“Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness” (Gen 1:3-4).