Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
On a Sunday afternoon in Virginia, a family drove home from church and never arrived. Marlysha and Paul Liddell, and their four-year-old daughter Leilani, were killed in a fiery crash on Interstate sixty-six near Manassas. Two people have been charged. There is something unbearable in the detail of that morning — the worship, the ordinary drive, the life that held together until it didn't.
From that grief, perhaps we turn toward what Tolkien understood when he wrote about fairy stories and the stubborn human need to believe the world is worth loving. He called it recovery — not escape, but a return to seeing things freshly, as though for the first time. To fall in love with life is not naivety. It is, he suggested, the deepest act of courage available to us.
And Wendell Berry, walking through his dark nights of the dread, found that same courage not in answers but in wild things — the heron, the wood drake, the water. He lay down in the grace of the world and was free. Not because the grief had passed, but because something older than grief was still there, quietly breathing.
That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
