I've been on a study retreat in northern Arizona this last week and will not be home to preach this morning, so there has been no post about today's sermon.

Part of my retreat has been to read Gerald Sittser's fine book on the history of Christian spirituality, Water from a Deep Well. As I read the chapter entitled "Holy Heroes" on the iconography and biography of saints, I was helped further in understanding the Eastern church's use of icons by Sittser's simple explanation. The unreality of the icons is deliberate, striving to show spiritual realities through visual symbols. In particular the icons of saints strive to show the image of God restored in human lives through the work of Christ.

One symbol of that restored image in the saint is a luminosity that appears to come from within the portrait rather than, more realistically in a physical sense, from without. This represents the divine life of Christ shining out through the humble human life of the saint.

I was struck by the thought that such divine luminosity shining in human life is often the only way we can perceive God, who is invisible, of course, to ordinary sight. Until we enter enternity, we need Christ shining in others around us in order to truly see Him.

Then I remembered that this way of seeing God's light in the physical lives of His people is not that different from our perception of physical light. Sunlight would be invisible, but for it's reflection from and entrance into all the various mediums by which we perceive it, whether air or water, or more solid objects. When we speak of seeing beautiful sunlight, we are actually seeing it made visible through some other physical object(s).

So on a hike I took in the Inner Basin of the San Francisco peaks, I took this photo of a couple aspen trees in full golden fall glory. They were the only 2 trees which had not lost their leaves in groves of thousands, so they stood out spectacularly. I realized the way they shone with the light of the sun was a perfect picture of the way a Christian's holy life can shine with divine light in the midst of a dark world. The fragile and delicate leaves are only the medium by which the beauty of the sun is revealed.

May we learn to cultivate such lives.