Welcome to The Light, where we pause to consider what the day is quietly asking of us.
Somewhere in a laboratory, a sixteen-year-old girl carries every day of her life intact within her — not as impression, but as vivid, retrievable fact. Scientists studying her highly superior autobiographical memory find themselves asking not only how the mind stores experience, but what we lose, and perhaps what we gain, in the ordinary mercy of forgetting.
From the architecture of memory, we move to the architecture of stone. The historic Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Midtown Manhattan has agreed to sell eighty-seven thousand square feet of its unused air rights to a developer for nearly twenty-four million dollars. There is something quietly vertiginous about a sacred institution selling the sky above itself — as though the heavens, too, have become real estate.
And on the question of what faith permits, televangelist Kenneth Copeland has offered Scripture as his answer to questions about private jets and considerable personal wealth, arguing that prosperity and righteousness are not merely compatible but intertwined. It is an old argument, and it has never quite stopped asking to be examined.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
