I offered these reflections at an interfaith winter solstice service. Representatives from various faiths were asked to offer two reflections on the theme “From the Darkness of Division … to the Light of Love.

“From the Darkness of Division…”

 In early Christian art there’s this fascinating and strange image that comes up of Jesus on the cross at the end of a fishing line cast into the water, with this giant, gnarly sea monster coming up from the deeps with its terrible toothy jaws open wide to devour Jesus.

The idea is that Jesus serves as bait to trick the very forces of evil out of the darkness of the human subconscious to attack, only to find themselves hooked by a higher power and hauled out of the murk and into the blinding light of God’s truth and the pure air of God’s goodness.

When we look at Jesus’ teachings about the love-nature of God, and his ethic of nonjudgment and mercy and humility, and Jesus’ rigorous exposure of hypocrisy; when we look at the example of how he lived his life, and look at the nature of how he died, we can discover a diagnosis of the core affliction of our human condition – what Christians call “sin” – its various symptoms, and its antidote. Above all, Jesus offers the cure, the way back to reunion with God and with each other

According most Christian theologians, sin is our separation from God and from each other. The heart of sin is is human pride in taking ourselves to be the center of existence, rather than God, the delusion that we somehow have godlike powers to rule over the lives and deaths of others, to be all-knowing, to stand in ultimate judgment of others, and so on – to be anything other than the very limited and quite mortal creatures that we are before God.

One of the symptoms of sin that Jesus brought to light in a very striking way – as the crucified and risen savior – is the human inclination to scapegoat.

Scapegoating is this pernicious tendency in humans to think we can somehow purify ourselves of our sins by isolating and expelling or extinguishing certain kinds of people whom we decide somehow embody those sins.

We’re distressed because of the tensions between us; we’re distressed because of the terrible things that human beings are capable of doing to each other; and we try to resolve that distress by convincing ourselves that all these problems would go away if only we can purge ourselves of this person, or those people, or these people, or you people. In this way we justify ourselves in rising up in righteous violence against the scapegoat.

We see this scapegoating mechanism these days cutting lots of different ways in our divided times. One way close to my hearts is in the brutal efforts to purge our country of people who are immigrants. We are told that pretty much all our problems are somehow the fault of foreigners in our midst. Therefore, get rid of them and our problems will go away.

But it doesn’t work. Scapegoating doesn’t work.

In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Orthodox Christian thinker who wrote about the experience of being imprisoned in a Soviet gulag, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Because we are in fact powerless to purge ourselves of sin, our attempts to do so only lead us to ourselves commit terrible acts against our fellow human beings. Some of them will in turn let violence prey on their anger and fear against our harm against them – and, lo and behold, we are caught in cycles of violence, sucked down into a maelstrom, into the darkness of division. This is not what our Good and Holy Creator created us for. 

It is not by our own power that we can deliver ourselves of sin.

As it’s said in 12-step recovery programs, we need a higher holy power. The good news is that this higher holy power is there ready to help us. We can let God haul the monster out of the murky depths and into the light and air of holy truth and divine love.

“… to the Light of Love”

To share from a Christian perspective how the Light of Love serves as an antidote to the darkness of division, I’m going to turn it over to someone much wiser than myself, Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and contemplative, peace worker, and writer.

This is Thomas Merton’s account of what has been called his “Fourth and Walnut Experience,” which occurred when he was out walking in downtown Louisville KY. (From “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander” pp. 153 – 154)

 “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation …

“This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.”…

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself [sic] gloried in becoming a member of the human race…

“I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself [sic] became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other…

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us in our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependents, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely… I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”

Delivered Sunday, December 20, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg