The Dazzling Light of God

Conversion is a violent event. From its first pages, the Gospel calls us to metanoia – “Repent” – that is to say, turn around. No longer look at yourselves: face me.

Baptism effectuated this violent turnaround.

But this conversion in us can be barely or fully conscious, barely or fully voluntary, barely or fully free….

Conversion is a decisive moment that diverts us from what we knew about our life so that, face to face with God, God tells us what he thinks of our life and what he wants to do with it.

At that moment, God becomes supremely important to us, more important than anything, more than all life, even and especially our own.

Without this extreme, dazzling primacy of a living God, of a God who calls us, who suggests his will to our heart, which is free to respond yes or no, there is no perennial faith.

But although God leaves us wholly dazzled in this encounter, this dazzling light, in order to be utterly real, must also be utterly dark.

To have living faith is to be blinded by it, in order to be led by it.

Nicolas Bernard Lépicié, Conversion of Saint Paul, 1767, oil on canvas. Wikimedia Commons.

We do not take the word of God to the ends of the earth in a suitcase: we carry it within us, we take it within us.

We do not put it in a corner of ourselves, in our memory, as on a closet shelf where we keep it in storage. We let it go to the depths of ourselves, to that hinge on which our whole selves pivot.

We cannot be missionaries without having made this frank, wide, cordial welcome in ourselves to the word of God, to the Gospel.

The living tendency of this word is to become flesh, to become flesh in us.

And when we are thus inhabited by it, we become fit to be missionaries.

But let us make no mistake. We know that it is very costly to receive the message intact within us. That is why so many of us retouch it, mutilate it, mitigate it.

We feel the need to make him fashionable, as if God were not always fashionable, as if we were touching up God….

Once we have experienced the word of God, we do not have the right not to receive it; once we have received it, we do not have the right not to allow it to become flesh in us; once it has become flesh in us, we do not have the right to keep it for ourselves: from then on, we belong to those who await it.

From The Dazzling Light of God: A Madeleine Delbrêl Reader (Ignatius, 2023), 42–3, 47–8. Used by permission.