“Sic luceat lux vestra!” “So let your light shine” is the long-standing motto of the college for women founded by my community of Benedictine sisters. This was years before women were given the right to vote, at a time when women’s access to higher education in rural America was nearly non-existent. Convinced that women as well as men have light within them, our college has encouraged young women for well over a hundred years to shine their inner light outward to make a difference in the world and to glorify God.
“Your light must shine” is clearly a mandate of Jesus Christ, as proclaimed in today’s Gospel. It is a message for all of us not to put our light under a “bushel basket” or a “bed” (Mark 4:21), or in a “jar” (Luke 8:16) or a “cellar” (Luke 11:33). Why this firm exhortation from Jesus to his disciples? Surely because Israel was a dark place during the time of Roman occupation and competing Jewish factions.
Nonetheless, Jesus was sending his disciples to go out to preach the reign of God. They would be on their own to give witness in a hostile land. Perhaps the disciples “pushed back” in fear of going there without him. But wisely, Jesus used the metaphorical lamp on a lampstand to convince his disciples that the reign of God could not be hidden or concealed. It had to be preached, not only in the troubled land of Israel but in the Gentile world as well.
Let us ask ourselves today: How am I called to shine my light within the darkness of our present world? How can I love fearlessly in a way that leads others to let their light shine?

Sr. Ephrem Hollermann

Ephrem Hollermann, OSB, is a former prioress of Saint Benedict’s Monastery, St. Joseph, Minnesota, and professor emerita of theology at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.