Darkness & Light, Imprisoned & Free

In today's reading and Gospel, I realised a similarity of the duality of darkness and light, imprisonment and freedom. The Sadducees did not like the apostles going around telling the truth, and tried to control it by having them imprisoned. But God sent His angel to set them free, and we see them teaching early the next morning, in the light of day, in contrast to the darkness of the night in prison.

One thing for me in this retreat, is to look back at the darknesses in my life. Things which I may have been unaware of, or intentionally hidden or pushed aside. To bring to my awareness the broken areas of my life, even things that I might have intellectually justified but have truly distanced myself away from God.

The next thing after the awareness, would be to surrender all these brokeness and sins to the Lord, to set me free from the imprisonment. To acknowledge that the Lord has the power to set me free from our entrapments and that He wants to free me, and to embrace His light. As I shared previously, it is a scary experience, and I think the Gospel verse describes it very well.

"For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. - Jn 3:20"

Sometimes God has already opened the prison door, but it is we ourselves who rather stay in the dark prison. Its like how after watching 2 hours of movie in the cinema, and then coming out to the bright sunlight really hurts our eyes. The thing is that we have to trust God, that He does what is best for us, and if we have to go through that pain, to burn away all our impurities, so that we can be transformed by Him, that is where faith comes in. Faith in the good times, more so in the bad times, and to see the goodness that comes out from the bad times.

My last reflection was whether I can accept that God is setting others free from their prisons. Do I still go to those prisons to look for them, do I still see them as prisoners. So often my prejudices, my first impressions, my images of what others are, prevent me from seeing the light in them, or even worst still, I might prevent them from growing, from being set free. So abstract yet so real. If I am a butterfly, and when I see a caterpillar, and I tell it, you are just a worm, I have forgotten that I was once that "worm", but through metamorphosis, or the Christian term Metanoia, I have transformed. And I must remember what the angel of the Lord told the apostles when they were set free:

"Go and take your place in the temple area, and tell the people everything about this life." - Acts 5:20