Day 2: 'Lux in Domino' Examen 2/5: Reconnection

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ECONNECTION: Light, unlike sound, does not need a medium to travel. But as light emanates it interconnects with various media. As early as the third century Origen asked: “If God knows what we are going to ask, why bother to pray?” And he has a good an answer as anyone has given: “God knows, of course, what we are going to say and do, but God has foreknown before the foundation of the world to work out the divine plan through what we ask of God or decide to do in freedom.” God does not take back our freedom. So if it’s God’s desire to bring about something, God ensures that our prayer is interconnected into a divine pattern of causes and interactions that makes God’s sovereign will to happen. It is like refracting white light through a prism that transforms into a rainbow of interconnected colors. This is God reconciling and labouring through, with and in all of creation which is made possible only by the mystery of God’s Incarnation when God chose to let pre-incarnate shade of light to pass through a prism of experience which unravels God’s glory. Law of conservation of energy states that light as a form of energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be recreated or converted from one form to another. Energy is the capacity to do work—to recreate, to interconnect, for “everything is interconnected” (Laudato Si’ 70). Eighty percent of what we know comes through our eyes. “The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness” (Lk 11:34). Colors and shades of light are like the different thoughts, feelings, reactions and reconnections which are all part of God’s labouring in the world. At this point of the examen we scan the nexus of interactions. Allow your spiritual sight to see connections, or the lack of it, between self and others. I ask, “In my dealings, what self-image resurfaces as a result of the interaction of light and darkness (chiaroscuro) this past hours?”