O Gracious Light

Early this week, before sunrise, I was out for a run. The sky was still dark, resting in that in-between hour when night lingers and morning is still gathering.

And then there was a light.

It was a small single point, steady and bright against the dim sky. Then it began to change. It moved slowly, not like a plane or a shooting star. It seemed to drift, almost as if it were descending. Behind it, something wider began to form. An arc grew and spread outward, like a veil. We stopped running to watch.

There was something about it that felt out of place. It was a light unlike anything we had the capability to understand, shining before the sun had risen, before the world had come into focus.

Only later did I learn what we had witnessed. It was a SpaceX rocket, high enough to catch the sun before the dawn reached us on the ground. What looked like its own brightness was light from beyond our horizon, already shining, already present, even while we stood in the dark.

Easter is like this. “While it was still dark,” says the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb, and what she sees still awaits understanding. An ancient hymn prayed at Evening Prayer calls this light Phos Hilaron, or “O gracious light.” It is sung as the lamps are lit, as day fades and night begins, naming Christ as the light that remains when the sun has gone down. To call that light gracious is to say it is given. It comes to meet us, already shining, already present, even while we stand in the dark.

In these fifty days of Easter, we are invited to pay attention to that kind of light, to the early signs as much as the full brightness of day: the widening arc, the quiet glimmer, the hint that something has already begun.

Because resurrection is not only something we proclaim. It is something we learn to recognize.