Lord's Day Reflection: When mercy displaces darkness

By Abbot Marion Nguyen

When Jesus tells his disciples, “You are the light of the world,” the words can sound reassuring, even flattering. In our time, light is often heard as self-expression, personal fulfillment, or the quiet glow of interior authenticity. But Isaiah disrupts that comfort immediately. For him, light has grit. It shines when bread is shared with the hungry, when the homeless are welcomed, when oppression, accusation, and despair are removed. Light is not discovered by looking inward; it appears when darkness is actively pushed back.

This helps us hear Jesus more clearly. His words about light follow immediately after the Beatitudes, which describe the poor, the meek, the persecuted—descriptions that ultimately point to Jesus himself. To be light, then, is not to transcend suffering but to move toward it, to share in the blessedness of those who already stand close to the Kingdom. This is not self-actualization, but the actualization of our humanity through compassionate love, ordered entirely to the glory of the Father. What Isaiah foreshadows, Jesus will later make unmistakable in Matthew 25: light shines where mercy is made concrete.

From a monastic perspective, this teaching raises an obvious tension. The monk seems poorly positioned to practice the corporal works of mercy. He does not possess even his own body, as the Rule reminds him, much less the means to feed or clothe others. Yet Benedictine life has never understood mercy as merely individual initiative. What the monk cannot do personally, the community does corporately. Benedict devotes careful attention to the porter and to the reception of guests: every guest is to be received as Christ, and the monastery offers them food and care freely, often better than what the community itself consumes. In earlier Benedictine practice, fasting was never an isolated ascetical feat; the reduced portion of bread went directly to the poor. Mercy remains real and concrete, but it is purified of vanity because it is never about the individual monk’s achievement.

Still, Isaiah presses further, and here his words speak directly to the heart of monastic life: “If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation, and malicious speech…” For the monk, the most demanding work of letting light shine is interior. Benedict is blunt: whatever is good is God’s work; whatever goes wrong is the monk’s fault and his alone. This is not self-loathing, but spiritual clarity.

Oppression begins when the monk tolerates the domination of the evil spirit within himself. False accusation is not merely a social sin; it is a rejection of the first step of humility—the fear of God who is present everywhere and is Truth itself. To accuse falsely is to flee responsibility and to refuse the vulnerability demanded by the fifth step of humility, where faults are revealed, and the seventh, where one accepts responsibility even for small contributions to failure. The impulse to accuse is a sign of immaturity, not insight.

Malicious speech goes deeper still. It stands in direct opposition to the twelfth step of humility. Instead of doing the work entrusted to him, the monk begins to survey everything around him, inserting himself into matters that are not his concern. What begins as irritation—often a disguised love of one’s own will—hardens into murmuring. Murmuring seeks allies, draws others into shared negativity, and eventually becomes presumption: speaking against authority, against order, against peace. Benedict knows how corrosive this is, and how quickly it extinguishes light.

At first glance, this interior struggle may seem far removed from Jesus’ command that our light shine for the glory of the Father. In truth, it is precisely here that the light is either released or suffocated. The monk learns that holiness is not primarily about adding good works, but about removing what he himself has layered over the light already given. The psalmist knew this well: if the Lord withdraws his Spirit, all living things return to dust. The light is not ours to manufacture; it is God’s life within us. Like the elder son in the parable of the prodigal, we often believe love must be earned. In reality, it must be received and safeguarded. The light is God’s before it is ever ours.

This is why monasteries so often rise on hills—Subiaco, Monte Cassino, Montserrat—not as monuments to accomplishment, but as signs. People do not come to admire brilliance, but to encounter peace, presence, and a quiet radiance that does not call attention to itself. When monks do the work that is truly theirs, the community itself becomes light—not because it strives to shine, but because nothing remains to cover the light God has already placed there.