Julián Jamaica Soto was the theme speaker at this year’s Central East Region Summer Institute.
In their poem “Spilling the Light,” (found in a book by the same title), Soto asks
To what have we promised ourselves? To this
moment in time and place. To this community and even,
tenderly interconnected, this planet.
We promise ourselves to the idea that we
are each and all human beings. We promise that there
is something moving between us that we cannot tame
and cannot measure. The chalice is a reminder
that what flame we keep inside us cannot light the way.
The light must spill to shine.
The sentiment might bring to mind the closing song of this past Sunday, This Little Light of
Mine. We have to shine if we expect our light to offer anything meaningful to our relationships,
our communities, our world.
And yet, we have a tendency to spill all sorts of other things onto one another. Not light. We spill
our frustrations, our pain, our anger, our defensiveness, our anxieties about the world. Especially
following a week rife with natural disasters in various parts of our world, perhaps affecting
people we care about and leaving us feeling rather helpless. Especially following an act of
political violence that sparks all sorts of emotions in us and the people around us. We spill all
sorts of things onto one another.
Isn’t it strange that some of us keep our light carefully protected and yet allow so much else to
spill? If we are spiritual beings having a physical experience, and if we have light to spill, why
would we hide that most needed resource from one another?
Maybe you don’t like that phrase—spiritual being. Maybe that doesn’t feel true of you. Is it
possible to set aside the objectionable definitions you may have attached to those words and
wonder, though? What if spiritual just means “capable of connecting”? What if being a spiritual
being is just another way of saying that we are capable of meaningful connection with our own
inner wisdom and the people around us and the planet we all share?
And what if the inner wisdom with which we’re capable of connecting is the light we can spill?
A stable center of our own being that draws us back to our values. Back to a hopeful vision for
the world. Back to a sense of what it would be like to act in alignment with our life-affirming
values, rather than spilling unmindfully into the world around us.
“What flame we keep inside us cannot light the way,” Soto reminds us. And I wonder if what we
contain is closer to a sun than a candleflame. A sun with a gravitational pull capable of drawing
us back again and again toward those things we say we value most deeply. What would it be like
to spill that light on the world around us?
It would be enough if each of our lights was as a small chalice flame. But what if we are each
capable of spilling so much more light than we can imagine?