We are children of an uncreated light. Yet our egos sometimes have different roles they’d like us to play. Sometimes, my ego assigns to me the role of God. Sometimes, the part of devil. Most of the time, it casts me in roles between these extremes. It assigns me any part besides that which I really am.

Who and what are we, really? It’s ironic that a human is the only animal that’s uncertain as to its own nature. Every creature acts according to its own nature. Snakes slither and eagles soar. We’re the only animal that asks: Who am I? Where am I going? Maybe that’s because we try to be everything we’re not until the last, and to ignore the only thing which we really are until we have no other option left.

We want to be the big boss of it all: the producer, telling everyone what they need to do; what their roles are. But we mess up the whole production. We try to be the director and find that’s not who we are either. We’re not too good at telling anyone else how to do it. We try being the writer, flipping the whole script, and discover that we can’t change the questions asked. So we go back into our our pasts and try changing the answers we already gave. We try to be the editor, hoping for a better past by rewriting it from our perspectives in the present. That doesn’t work either. OK, maybe we’ll be the casting director and recast ourselves into different roles. Nope, we are what we are. We auditioned for the leading roles. We didn’t get the parts.

When we finally accept our roles as extras, as walk-on parts in an infinite production, then we’re happy. Or at least at peace.

So, what is that part we each have? We’re kids, in a children’s play.

What does it mean to be a child? It means to be who and what we really are in the eye of the infinite.

The infinite is, by definition, beyond all definition. Yet the closest we can come to understanding that phenomenon, which is beyond all understanding, is to call it love. If the endless is love, then we, too, must be love.

If we are love, then we cannot help but love. For love is both the subject and the verb, the lover and the object of her desire. Loves loves. Love is both the subject and the object of its own action and attention. Love loves love.

This is our role. This is what it means to be children in the play. If you believe in the infinite, this must be so. You can argue the point, but like can only yield more of itself. And so, as children of the infinite, we must be infinite ourselves.

To be a child of the endless is to forgive all, for love forgives all. It is to have nothing but compassion for all. Since love is mercy, it means we are mercy itself. Since love is boundless generosity, we, too, must be ceaselessly generous. Love gives all to all. We, too, are conduits which must let flow through us what comes our way.

This is what it means, then, to be children of light. No more. No less. And since the infinite cannot itself be measured in terms of more or less, in terms of quantity, neither can we measure ourselves that way. Since love never changes in quality from being in its perfect state, then we, as children of the endless, can never vary in quality either. Unborn, perfect, love gives rise to the deathless. In human form we seem fallible and subject to death, yet the children of the infinite are beyond human.

We will come to know ourselves as eternal extensions of this love, for love is endless expansion. Were love a place, it would be an infinite expanse. Were love time, it is a time that lasts forever. How could it, why would it, make anything less than more of itself if it is boundless generosity? Without bounds itself, anything connected to it is without boundaries as well, and therefore shares in its illimitable nature. This is what it means to be children in an endless play. Your highest and best fruit which you most treasure are your own children.

Why, or how, could light make anything less than its own children? When your children mature, you regard them as peers. When love ripens, it leaves as its offspring more of itself. This is what it means to be children in an endless play.

All else is seeming. None of it but love is real. And when the evidence builds to the contrary, and it will, and when the voices whisper or shout all around that you are something other than that supernal light, remember that you can no more change your true nature than can a lover stop loving.

As children are not to be judged as evil or as less than, neither can you be judged, for you have never stopped being a child. You transcend judgment itself, and so judgment is beneath you to exercise.  If you allow it to slip from your grasp, then you will transcend all judgments about yourselves. The one alive in your heart whom you always were lives still, and its supreme innocence can never be judged. Neither can it be changed into something else. Neither can it die. Anything less would defile light itself, which is impossible. Birthless, deathless, this is what it means to be children of light.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within