Light When It Comes
In this book I blend pieces of my homilies with short prose poems to try to suggest the subtle, surprising presence of God in our lives. Even in the darkness. Even when things no longer make sense, and especially then.
Light When It Comes: Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness,
and Seeing God in Everything
Eerdmans Publishing (2016)
“Light When It Comes is both a literary gem and a cup of blessing for all who long to experience God’s presence.”
–Paula Huston
“Chris Anderson offers us a triune gift wrapped into a whole: beautiful prose, pastoral experience, and an authentic believing eye turned to our world. This volume is a grace to be received with abundant thanks.”
–Lawrence Cunningham
“In Light When It Comes Chris Anderson pays fierce attention, and you will be illuminated somehow when you read what he saw, what he sings of the holy everywhere around us. “
–Brian Doyle, from the foreword
from my preface to the book
The shock of stars at five a.m. The bright belt of Orion and the arc and sweep of those other brilliant, nameless lights and even the blackness glittering. The smell of wood smoke and fir. The cold, damp air.
I hear the voice of my wife calling from another room: “Do you know where I put my book?”
Standing at the sink rinsing out a bowl, I look up and see a strand of a spider web rising and falling, made visible by the wind. Then another and another, looping from the willow to the roof. Glinting on and off. As if all the shingles and boards of the house are secretly bound with thread.
We all have moments like this, moments that move us somehow, that seem to mean something we can’t quite put into words, but we are embarrassed by them or we doubt them or in the rush of things that happen to us each day we forget about them. . . . .
Be not afraid, Jesus says. . . . All we can do is live with things the way they are, trusting the days to God–remembering the darkness and remembering the light, and holding them both in our hearts, together, side-by-side. . . .