The Daily Pearl
On Light
A pearl kept from the brand’s mornings: a verse to hold, a prayer to say and a word to carry.
“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”
Isaiah 60 : 1
A Prayer for This Morning
Lord, the command is not to make light but to rise and meet the light that has already come. Lift my eyes past the low weather of this week. Let whatever shines in me today be borrowed honestly from you.
Affirmation
I do not manufacture my light; I receive it, and I am not afraid to reflect it.
The Reflection
Isaiah's command sounds like effort until you notice its logic. Arise, shine: not because you must produce the morning, but because the morning has already been produced. Thy light is come. Dawn is never a reward for the watchful; it arrives with complete indifference to whether we deserve it, and asks only that we stand up into it.
There is a kind of hiding that dresses itself as humility. It declines the room, dims the gift, apologises for shining, and calls the whole performance modesty. Scripture is unpersuaded. The glory is the Lord's, which is precisely why refusing to reflect it is not humble; a mirror gains nothing by staying in the drawer.
In Her Company
St Clare of Assisi
Her very name means light. She left a noble home for a lantern-lit life of prayer, and the radiance of it still travels eight centuries on.
Clare of Assisi was born in 1194 to a noble family and, at eighteen, left everything to follow the way of Francis. She founded the Poor Clares and led her community at San Damiano for four decades in radical poverty and prayer. The first woman to write a rule of religious life for women, she was canonised only two years after her death in 1253.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
The Wardrobe