“As a rather observant child, I made a mental note of the fact that my maternal grandmother would ask me to ‘make a light’ instead of asking me to switch it on. When she was a child, no one switched lights on. At night, light was not had without effort, not in her English town nor in most places yet. She was born on the day that Gladstone introduced his Irish Home Rule bill in the House of Commons, the same Gladstone who gave a lamp to Newman who had ‘never sinned against the Light,’ a lamp that still can be seen on his desk in Birmingham, and it certainly was not electric. Four years after my grandmother’s birth, Florence Nightingale recorded her voice on a wax cylinder patented by the Edison Company. My grandmother harbored a devotion to the ‘Lady with a Lamp’ for her town’s regiment had fought in the Crimean War and some of them remembered the Lady visiting at night the wards in the Selimye Barracks of Scutari and it most definitely was not an electric lamp: that was the year Thomas Edison was born.”
In a recent commentary, Father George W. Rutler reflected on light and life going together and on how the Lord dignifies the human race by enabling His own light to shine through his human creatures.
To access Fr. Rutler’s complete post, please visit:
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