luminous fragments: finding light in a broken world
“I don’t know my own power.”
This thought arrives like a whisper, an unbidden truth surfacing in the stillness of a moment. It’s not a declaration, but an admission—a crack in the veneer of certainty I’ve carried for too long.
I don’t know my own power because I’ve been afraid to see it. Power isn’t always comforting.
Sometimes, it’s blinding.
I stopped trusting myself even before I knew I had any power. Before I knew I was capable, that I was smart.
Instead, I learned to make myself small and stepped on.
Because conflict in my childhood escalated like a drizzle would escalate to a hurricane, upending the peace within.
I learned therefore to make myself small and therefore never understood, until recently, that I was bigger than any hurricane - I was the sky.
The crunch of brittle branches under my boots echoed in the stillness as I stepped into the forest.
Leaves carpeted the ground, their edges stiff with frost, crackling softly beneath me. The air carried the sharp freshness of early morning, each breath biting but invigorating.
Dawn painted the horizon in pale gold, and slender sunbeams pierced through the lattice of branches, catching the lingering mist like strands of gossamer.
I stopped, letting the silence settle, broken only by the melodies of birds already deep in their morning symphony. Their songs wove through the trees, a chorus of life that seemed to quicken my pulse.
I crouched and pressed my hand to the cold, rough earth, feeling its steady strength.
Each step forward felt lighter, as though something unseen was loosening its grip on my heart. The weight I hadn’t noticed before was lifting.
The forest held me in its quiet embrace, a perfect stillness blooming from within.
Change was stirring, tangible and electric, in the crisp air.
Nothing could stop me now.
Each step felt like breaking through invisible chains, the brittle crunch of frost underfoot echoing the fractures I could feel deep within me.
The forest around me wasn’t pristine—it was littered with fallen branches, leaves decaying in patches, and the jagged remnants of trees felled by storms.
Yet, in its imperfection, it was alive, vibrant with the sharp scent of cold earth and the soft glow of morning light.
The moment wasn’t flawless—it was beautifully, achingly broken, like a shard of glass catching the sunlight.
We carry on, pretending the world is intact, its surface unmarred, until the weight of pretending presses too hard.
It starts with small fissures—a word left unsaid, a promise unmet, a fleeting ache that grows into something deeper.
And then, suddenly, the cracks become visible.
A relationship splinters under the strain of misunderstanding. A body falters, its silent burdens too heavy to bear. A system buckles under its own inequity.
The truth doesn’t arrive with fanfare; it seeps in, slow and steady, like water finding its way through the tiniest openings.
The illusion dissolves, and the world reveals itself as it has always been: fractured, imperfect, human.
Perhaps it has been broken forever, and we’ve simply been too distracted to see the cracks.
The sunlight filtered through the canopy above, pooling in fragments on the forest floor.
Each ray lit up the imperfections—the gnarled bark, the moss clinging to stones, the jagged edges of fallen branches.
And yet, it was the light that made the imperfections visible, casting them not as flaws but as part of a larger, intricate beauty.
The brokenness wasn’t something to fix or erase; it was simply part of what made the forest whole.
I paused, letting the realization settle in my chest.
The cracks in the world, in ourselves, weren’t signs of failure—they were openings.
Places where light could seep in, where transformation could begin.
The forest wasn’t perfect, but it was alive, and in its brokenness, it thrummed with potential.
When I think about this brokenness, the 5th century figure of Augustine of Hippo comes to mind. I see him not as a towering saint, but as a man pacing the dim corridors of his own doubt, his footsteps echoing off the stone floors of a world he struggled to reconcile. He was not immune to the fractures he saw around him; they mirrored the fractures within.
Augustine’s life was a mosaic of yearning, its pieces sharp-edged and scattered, glinting with his insatiable hunger for truth.
I imagine him in the shadowed corners of his study, the faint light of an oil lamp flickering over scrolls and books as he poured himself into questions too vast for simple answers.
The world he sought to understand was divided—riven between light and darkness, good and evil, spirit and flesh. And so, he turned to Manichaeism, its stark binaries promising clarity.
For a while, it sufficed. I picture him at gatherings of the faithful, their eyes alight with certainty, their teachings crisp and unyielding.
Yet something about their rigidity left him restless. The world was not so easily divided, and neither was his heart. The longing persisted, pulling him onward, until he found Neoplatonism—a philosophy that shimmered like sunlight on water, suggesting that the divine was not distant but woven through the fabric of the material world.
In Neoplatonism, Augustine glimpsed a vision of unity, of a cosmos humming with divine presence.
I see him standing by a river, the sunlight catching the ripples as they refract into infinite shapes.
Perhaps he saw in that moment what Neoplatonism promised—a world where brokenness could be folded into beauty, where every fragment pointed back to the whole.
And yet, even this was not enough. The longing that defined him, the ache that burned in his chest, drove him further still.
It was as if every answer only deepened the questions. His search wasn’t merely intellectual—it was visceral, etched into the lines of his face, the curve of his shoulders as he carried the weight of his doubts.
Augustine was a man who wrestled, not only with ideas but with himself.
These philosophies shaped him, but they did not satisfy him.
His heart, as he would later write, remained restless.
And so, he turned to Christianity. In his early years as a Christian thinker, Augustine believed in human potential. He believed in our capacity to choose the good, to shape the world for the better.
His writings glowed with optimism.
But life has a way of wearing down even the brightest idealism. Augustine lived through wars and betrayals, saw the cruelty of men and the fragility of their promises.
Slowly, his theology darkened.
He began to see humanity not as inherently good, but as irreparably flawed—capable of goodness only through divine grace.
Without God, he concluded, we are lost.
I wonder what it cost him to come to that conclusion.
Did he mourn the optimism he had once carried?
Did he long for the clarity of his earlier years, when goodness seemed within reach? Or did he find solace in surrendering to a truth that was harder but perhaps more honest?
Augustine didn’t pretend. He allowed his beliefs to be shaped—and reshaped—by the world around him. That willingness to evolve made him one of the most influential thinkers in Western history. But it also divided the world he left behind. His theology planted the seeds of the Reformation, centuries later.
Catholics held onto Augustine’s earlier optimism, insisting that while humanity is broken, we are not beyond repair. Protestants clung to his later pessimism, asserting that only divine intervention can save us from ourselves. This division fractured the West, and its echoes linger even today.
But while Augustine’s ideas dominated the West, the Christians of the East walked a different path.
They, too, saw the world’s brokenness—but they did not see it as the whole story.
Where Augustine saw a fall from grace, they saw a journey toward healing. They did not speak of original sin, but of original beauty.
Philoxenos of Mabbug, a near-contemporary of Augustine, emerges in my mind as a figure not bound by the weight of walls or dogma but walking freely through the landscapes of paradox.
I imagine him pausing on the threshold of a monastery courtyard at dusk, the scent of incense mingling with the cool, dry air.
For Philoxenos, faith wasn’t a doctrine to be memorized or debated in dimly lit halls. It was a lens—a way of seeing the world as it truly was, fractured yet luminous.
In his writings, you can almost hear the weight of his reflection, his words carrying the rhythm of someone who has wrestled deeply with the contradictions of existence.
He didn’t shy away from brokenness; instead, he leaned into it, as if tracing the cracks in the world with his fingers, feeling their jagged edges and searching for the light they concealed.
He spoke of a God who does not retreat from the dark corners of existence but dwells within them, filling even the most desolate places with presence.
I imagine Philoxenos looking out over a barren landscape, the sky heavy with clouds, and seeing something others could not: a divine light faintly pulsing through the shadows.
“Even in the depths of hell,” he wrote, “God is present.”
It’s a jarring thought, isn’t it?
That the sacred would not recoil from the broken, but inhabit it.
Philoxenos didn’t write this as an abstract idea. I see him carrying the scars of his own suffering, his own losses.
His faith wasn’t an escape from these realities but a way of holding them—holding both the sorrow and the beauty, the shadow and the light, in the same trembling hands.
For Philoxenos, the paradox wasn’t a problem to be solved but a truth to be embraced.
To him, faith wasn’t certainty but a willingness to stand in the tension, to see beauty and brokenness intertwined like the roots of a tree pushing through stone.
It wasn’t about resolution but about presence—the presence of God, even where it seemed least likely, even in the places we’d rather turn away from.
When I first read Philoxenos, his words unsettled me.
How could God be present in hell?
Wasn’t hell the very absence of God?
But then I thought of Psalm 139, which has long been a companion in my own moments of doubt:
Where can I go from your spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
These words suggest a reality that is hard to grasp: there is no place, no state of being, where God is absent.
Even in our darkest moments, even in the deepest fractures of the world, the divine is present.
This is not an easy truth. It does not erase pain or justify suffering. But it offers a kind of hope—a light that does not overwhelm, but quietly persists.
Philoxenos lived this truth. He suffered greatly, yet his writings are suffused with a sense of wonder. He did not glorify suffering, but he did not deny it either. For him, the cross was not an abstract symbol; it was a reality—both the suffering of Christ and the suffering of the world.
But the cross was not the end. The resurrection stood as its counterpoint, a reminder that light and life are woven through even the darkest moments.
I think of Christ’s cry from the cross: “Eli, eli, lemana shebaqtani—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
These words resonate across time, echoing in every heart that has ever felt abandoned or overwhelmed. Yet even in this cry of despair, there is a kind of surrender. In his final moments, Christ entrusted himself to the hands of the Father.
This surrender is not passive; it is transformative.
It is an acceptance of the paradox that defines existence: life and death, brokenness and beauty, despair and hope.
To live fully is to hold all of these realities in tension.
Ephrem the Syrian, a 4th-century theologian and poet, explored this tension in his writings. He spoke often of the “luminous eye,” a metaphor that puzzled me when I first encountered it. How could the eye emit light? Modern science tells us that the eye merely receives light; it does not create it.
But then I learned that the body does, in fact, emit faint light—so faint that it is invisible to the naked eye. Ephrem’s metaphor began to make sense.
The eye, like the soul, both receives and reflects light. And this light, however faint, is a reminder that all of creation is imbued with divine presence.
This is why these ancient voices matter. Augustine, Philoxenos, Ephrem—they remind us that the world is broken, but it is also luminous.
They remind us that to see this light is a choice, to embrace it is an act of courage, and to express it is love.
Beauty, I have come to realize, is like a shard of glass caught in the sunlight.
Its edges are jagged, sharp enough to draw blood, but when the light strikes just right, it refracts into something astonishing—a cascade of colors splintering into every direction.
It isn’t perfect. It isn’t whole. But perhaps that’s the point. Its power lies not in seamlessness but in the way it transforms what is broken into something luminous.
I see it in the way the sun filters through a cracked window, scattering patterns of gold onto a weathered floor.
Or in the way a melody carries more weight when it falters, when the singer’s voice trembles with the weight of what cannot be spoken.
Beauty doesn’t demand perfection; it thrives in imperfection.
It pulls us closer, inviting us to lean into the fractures, to look beyond them and find the light that quietly persists, even in the darkest corners.
The world often hides its beauty in these broken places—like the stubborn bloom of a wildflower in the crevice of a stone or the way a storm leaves behind a sky so clear it feels like you can see forever.
These moments don’t shout for attention; they whisper, waiting for us to notice. In their fragility, they call us to something greater, to see not just with our eyes but with our hearts, to hold the tension of what is shattered and what remains whole.
In my own life, I am beginning to notice the light—not in grand displays or dazzling brilliance, but in the quiet, unassuming glow that lingers at the edges of awareness.
It is not the blazing fire of the sun that overwhelms and burns, but the steady flame of a candle, its glow soft and persistent, casting just enough warmth to guide me forward.
I see it in moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed: the way twilight lingers a little longer on the horizon, painting the sky in hues of quiet resilience.
Or in the faint shimmer of dew on blades of grass, catching the morning light like scattered jewels.
This light is delicate, faint—almost imperceptible at times—but it is there, steady and unwavering, like the pulse of something eternal beneath the surface of all things.
It reminds me of the luminous eye Ephrem wrote about, a vision that looks beyond what is obvious and into the depths of what is real.
This light doesn’t demand attention; it doesn’t blind or dazzle.
Instead, it waits patiently for me to notice, to lean in and see. And when I do, it feels as though something within me begins to glow as well, faint but unwavering, a quiet ember holding its place against the shadows.
I don’t know my own power—not entirely.
It feels like something just beyond the edge of my vision, like the faint glow of a distant star in a darkened sky. But slowly, step by step, I am beginning to sense it. It isn’t loud or forceful; it doesn’t announce itself. It is quiet, like the rhythm of my own breath or the way the earth steadies beneath my feet.
As I start to notice it, I am learning to hold the tension of what it means to exist.
The world is undeniably broken—splintered in ways that can feel irreparable. Yet, even within its fractures, there is light. Not the kind that floods a room or blinds you with its intensity, but a softer, subtler light. It gathers in the quiet places, waiting to be seen.
This light doesn’t clamor for attention; it doesn’t force itself into view.
It is the glimmer on the surface of a still lake at dawn, the faint luminescence of fireflies in the dark.
To see it, I have to stop—really stop—and let the stillness settle over me like a soft blanket. It’s in that stillness that the light begins to emerge, threading its way through the cracks of my understanding.
To see this light requires more than just my eyes; it requires trust.
To embrace it means stepping into its quiet mystery without demanding answers.
And to express it?
That takes something even deeper: love.
Not the grand, sweeping kind that shouts its name, but the kind that lingers in the smallest acts—the touch of a hand, the warmth of a smile, the decision to keep moving forward despite the darkness.
This is the paradox of beauty: it is fragile, fleeting, and fractured. Yet in its very fragility, it reveals something eternal.
In its brokenness, it points us toward the divine.
And so, I return to where I began: I don’t know my own power. But perhaps, in learning to see the light in the world’s brokenness, I will begin to see the light within myself.
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