[I understand
that not all my readers will agree with me in these reflections, but these are
honest thoughts I’ve had recently, and I just ask you read them graciously.
Cheers :) ]
DOMINUS ILLUMINATIO MEA.
As humans, we
love the light—be it bold rays of summer sunshine, the blazing of a bonfire,
the flickering of a candle in a corner. We are drawn to it. We gather around
it. We bask in it.
We rejoice in
its brightness and the sight it provides. It allows us to perceive colors and
textures, shapes and shadows, giving artful form to our surroundings. By it we
see oceans and hills, flowers and fields, pictures and paintings, the smiling
eyes of another person. Things that cannot be heard or touched or tasted or
smelled, we can see with our eyes. Even when we are unaware, we love the light.
Our physical
eyes are not the only lovers of light. Our souls also crave it. We hunger for
illumination and understanding. We reach for any strand of truth to anchor us.
We seek knowledge as a sun to orbit around, to give us direction, to lend
gravity to our lives. We search for any source by which we can make sense of
existence and find meaning in life. Like being drawn to light, we are drawn to
that which provides stability, security, sweetness. Even when we do not
acknowledge it, we long for light.
DOMINUS ILLUMINATIO MEA. In English, “The Lord is my Light.”
"The Lord is my Light." Oxford’s motto.
The theme upon which it was founded. The plaque which students and faculty and tourists
walk by daily.
Another related inscription I often walk by when at home in Boston:
“What is man
that Thou art mindful of Him?” -Inscribed
on Harvard’s philosophy building.
And yet every
day as I walk by the inscription on George Street, I think about how far we
have come from this foundation. Were it not for the history books that have
told us how Oxford and Harvard and Yale and Princeton*—the list goes on—began
as seminaries where men could learn of the greatness of God, it would be hard
to believe that these values ever existed in these places. Universities that
once saw God as the ultimate source of light and held as their mission the
spreading of that Light to the nations now scoff at His existence. Where He
once stood as Judge, He now stands on trial. Rather than a Person to loved and obeyed,
He is a theory to be questioned—or better still, doubted.
Truth, once
clear and simple (though at times, difficult), is now relative. Abstract.
Unstable. Professors boldly claim, “There are no absolutes!” (Which begs the
question, ‘Are you absolutely sure?’) Our search for light has become darkened
by the absence of the only One who has authority to give it. “’Let there be
light’…and there was light.” The relativizing of truth has
contributed to the very chaos we wished to resolve. Instead of answers, it has
only created more complex questions. The yearning for light remains.
And yet truth is
not changed for lack of believing it. As
C.S. Lewis (Oxford scholar) once said, “Man can no more diminish God's glory by
refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the
word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.” Light exists, even if I am blind.
Even if I shut my eyes.
As these
inscriptions in stone are not easily removed, so the eternal truth remains: DOMINUS ILLUMINATIO MEA. The Lord is my
light. I have hope, and I pray that one day we return to these foundations.
As Charles Malik has said: "What
I crave to see is an institution that will produce as many Nobel Prize winners
as saints, an institution in which, while producing in every field the finest
work of thought and learning in the world, Jesus Christ will at the same time
find Himself at home in it - in every dormitory and lecture hall and library
and laboratory.”
*Other mottos:
Yale: To be a
school “wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts and
Sciences [and] through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick
employment both in Church and Civil State.”
Princeton: “Dei sub numine viget,” which
is Latin for “Under God she flourishes.”
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