The Inner Light

Meditation for Tuesday in Holy Week, 2026

The journey of Holy Week continues. Today we read the Passion as recorded by Saint Mark.

Yesterday we focused on the darkest aspects of the Passion narrative: Judas’s betrayal, the violence of the Roman soldiers, the injustice of Pilate, the perfidy of the Sanhedrin. And I talked about how these things, as horrible as they are, are hardly unique, but common experiences of life in the material world. Today I want to leave the darkness, at least for a moment, and focus on the Light.

In yesterday’s post I suggested that, while we have all been the treacherous friend, the feckless leader, and the willing participant in mob-violence, nevertheless while reading these stories, we should identify with Jesus primarily. And the reason for that, to say it very simply, is that He identifies with us primarily.

Let’s take a moment to recall the nature of Christ according to the esoteric tradition. Jesus is the Logos, the intelligible superstructure of the Universe. He is, in another way of saying it, the Divine Mind, and his thoughts are the eternal Ideas which form the universe. And He is both fully divine, and fully human. The precise details of how his divinity relates to His humanity have been debated repeatedly and fruitlessly for millennia; these debates produce nothing but schisms and neologisms (Monophysitism) and are not worth rehashing here.

The point is that, to fully be the Divine Mind, Jesus must have entire knowledge of all things. Experiential knowledge, meanwhile, is a different thing from discursive knowledge-- therefore, in order to have the knowledge of all things, He must also have had the experience of all things. In this context, calling Him “fully human” can be understood in more than one way. He is, on the one hand, fully human in the sense that He lived the life of a single human being, as do all human beings; to live a life from birth to death is one of the nonnegotiable parts of being human. But we can also interpret “fully human” to mean that He is the “fullness” of being human: He has, unlike the rest of us, been one man, and been all men.

It doesn’t stop there, though. The Gospel of Philip, which I’ve relied upon as the Fifth Gospel throughout these meditations, tells us that He appeared to the great as great. He appeared to the small as small. He appeared to the angels as an angel, and to men as a man. And indeed, this must be so, because He must have the knowledge of angels as well as men, and animals, birds, insects, trees-- He must know what it is like to be an ant an atom as well as what it is like to be a human or a god.

In identifying with Him, then, we unite ourselves with the Christ that is already within us, as within all Creation. Finding that light within ourselves, we then see that it can be found within others, and not only other human beings, but everywhere that mind can be found. And not even mind only: The Ideas which structure our Universe are generated in the Mind of the Logos and woven by the Divine Mother into everything we encounter, a light hidden by a veil of matter.

And now the veil is rent in two, and the gate of Hell is broken. We wander here, yet, in darkness, but the way beyond is all around us. As the Irish poet and nationalist Joseph Mary Plunkett wrote:

I see his face in every flower;

The thunder and the singing of the birds

Are but his voice—and carven by his power

Rocks are his written words.

This is not figuratively but literally true. Darkness, ultimately, has no power, nor even any existence: like cold, it is only an absence of something, not the presence of something else. And if the light is everywhere, then even the most profound darkness of this world has, ultimately, no power to contain us, no hold upon us1.