Light.  Most of us enjoy the light, most of us appreciate seeing a new day.  Unless we are like Anna Lyndsey, the pseudonym for a British woman who actually becomes ill when she is in light (and who wrote Girl in the Dark, a poignant memoir about her experience), we like illumination, natural, artificial, or otherwise.
     Religion speaks powerfully to this likely innate desire for light.  In the course of my contemplation about Jesus being the "light of the world" this Advent season, I have read some of the Lakota Sioux stories about the role of light in the human experience.  As the Lakota see it, light is seminal to reality.  One Lakota story tells of Fallen Star, the offspring of a Lakota woman and a star who, after his mother unfortunately passes away shortly after he is born, is raised by a meadowlark.  Because Fallen Star fused in his being the celestial and earthly, he carries the weight of all things in the light that he subsequently brings to the world.
     This story's parallels to the Christian picture of Jesus as the one who brought together the divine and human in one person are striking.  They underscore a universal religious understanding that "true" light only comes from one who grasps and holds together the union of all things, that genuine insight into reality is gained by encountering and experiencing the one who has made it.
     In this Advent season, this is the central message of light.  Light is the beginning, light is the end.  Because of Jesus, in God, throughout the world, light is the compass of all things.