Once upon a time, in the deep recesses of time on this planet, there was some slime. Or maybe it was bacteria. Slimey bacteria? I don’t really know. I wasn’t there and I’m not actually a scientist. But there was something alive. It was in water, consumed energy and could reproduce itself.

One day, a bit of this slime got left in a puddle on the beach and survived. Then little by little, over the course of more time than you or I can imagine, it changed. It left the water and adapted to dry land and became a plant. It could take the light of the sun and use it to grow itself. The plant loved the sun. At every chance, it would adapt to grow higher and higher, ever closer to the sun it needed, loved and desired. When many eons had passed, what had once been slime left on the beach, had given way to trees so tall they seemed to scrape the sky. And yet, no matter how much of the sun they took in or how high they grew, the trees could never reach the sun. There would always be a space between the trees and the object of their desire.

While the slime that got left on the beach was morphing into mighty trees, another bit of slime was far out at sea. Over the eons, it adapted and morphed until it became a fish. At first the fish kept close to the surface, eating what grew in the sun. But as time went on, the sun became bothersome, the food more plentiful down below. And the fish adapted bit by bit to delving deeper and deeper into the sea. Like the trees, the fish was seeking life, but instead of reaching for the light, the darkness pulled it deeper and deeper in its quest.

The light became faint and the fish grew accustomed to living in a twilight world. But still something kept drawing it deeper. At the same time the trees were striving to meet the sun, the fish had all but lost its eyes in the darkness. It could hardly fathom the world it had known so many generations before when it had swum where the sun shone. The fish came to think that the darkness was all there was and that it was endless.

But a funny thing happened. One generation, the fish began to glow a bit. And in what seemed like the blink of the eye in the scheme of things, the fish didn’t just glow, Its light could blink and flash and dazzle in the dark depths. The fish had found life and become light there in the inky blackness.

The slime that became the tree was doomed to forever seek, but never reach the light it loved so dearly.  It took dwelling in complete darkness for the slime which became the fish to discover that it carried light within itself.

And so it is with man. We can seek after the light of God with all our might, but we will never own it that way. It is only when we allow God to lead us into the darkness that we discover the light of God within our very being.

“Moses’ vision of God began with light; afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses climbed higher and became more perfected, he saw God in the darkness.” ~ Gregory of Nyssa