O SON OF SPIRIT! Noble have I created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then unto that for which thou wast created.

There seems to be a darkness in each of us, a shadow at our cores. A dangerous mix of desires and deceptions that has no source other than our common heritage of humanity continually haunts us, goads us. Occasionally, it consumes us entirely, and we find ourselves possessed by some demon, unable to divine our way out of the trap. At this extreme, exorcism and phychopharmacology play equal partner in dispelling the spirits. For we know that our co-equal inheritance, the Light, has been forced into abeyance at these moments, and we struggle almost desperately to regain it. This struggle is in fact the great theme and meme of our world, pervading our science, our religion, our public policy, and our private dreams.

As much as we are drawn towards the Light, I think we are more effectively motivated by fear of the dark. The rallying cry of politicians is unerringly that we must stop the bad, not that we must strive to create good. We have a word for nightmares, but no convenient way to describe those occasional dreams of bliss. Visions perhaps, but those are reflexively relegated to madness, dismissed as phantoms of a different kind of darkness. Cosmology and psychology both operate in the darkness, describing in excruciating detail all the ways in which the twin universes – the stars and ourselves – arose from darkness, exist in chaos, and will inevitably return to darkness. Only religion offers a different tale.

But I don’t think we’ve heard it properly.

The one constant in all religious teaching is simply that the Light Is. However it’s named, whatever its meaning to humanity, religion alone holds aloft the banner of that Beacon, and enjoins us to follow It. In fact, it is only by identifying that glorious Light that we can even know what darkness is.

And yet, desire, danger, and depression are all at the core of our religious thought today. We hear the same story we tell everywhere else, that the darkness is us, that human nature lies in the cracks of the universe, buried in the back of Plato’s cave. Many traditions are quite explicit about this reading, going to great lengths to emphasize the “sinfulness” of Man, a practice that makes followers of these traditions hateful and angry. Many more traditions are more subtle, promising various forms of union with the Light, illuminating their manuscripts with eloquent images and laying out an enticing repast for the soul. If never stated directly, however, our moral poverty is implied by the proffered wealth. The conviction that humanity’s fundamental nature resides in darkness is essential to all these offers of Light.

The arc of this understanding is such a part of us, that we tell it to ourselves. We have become convinced of our own degradation. We hold on to this as a badge of identity, a badge of our humanity. (Human nature is always invoked to explain our animal behavior.) For the majority, there’s nothing exceptional about this. We accept that we are in the back of the cave, casually affirming that those demons are a part of life, allowing the darkness its run, neglecting the erosion it creates. For some of us, the pain of the darkness goads us to seek the Light, and those religions that appeal to our various sensibilities welcome us into their fold.

Faith, of course, isn’t so simple.

The story of our Original Sin, however it’s told, is so profound, and so pervasive, that even within the bosom of the cultural repository of the Light, we are gripped by the darkness. We constantly remind ourselves of our past misjudgments, our animal passions, our selfishness and our ignorance, applying the prod to our own flanks so that we may flee further from them all. These reminders live in pleas for forgiveness, in acts of penitence, in confessions public and private. We wrap ourselves into a co-dependent relationship with our own faith: we must believe because we feel bad, and we feel bad so we must believe.

But that’s not very satisfying. That unhealthy relationship with ourselves leaves a sour aftertaste, and it exudes a musk that other people can smell for miles. I’d rather propose an alternative, a reading that our culture is loathe to approach. What if we actually are creatures of light? What if the darkness truly didn’t exist? What would faith look like if we all knew that we were created noble, and didn’t simply believe it?

Even asking those questions lifts my spirit. It would, of course, be presumptuous of me to even attempt to answer them, but I don’t believe I have to. Throughout the world, the stories of Paradise, of the Abha Kingdom, of Elysium, and so on, all share alike an image of people who know that they are illuminated beings. For how maligned and mistreated these stories are, for how often they are used as bludgeons against the so-called unfaithful, they remain the purest source of our understanding of true faith. They are the keys for the mystics.

The real mystery is that they are all descriptions of this world, of life, of people, of what we truly are. If only we could stop believing and start knowing.

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