If today were not the feast of Saint Barnabas, the Gospel reading today in the Latin Rite would continue from yesterday and teach us (Mt 5:14),

You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.

Yes, Jesus’ transforming joy is a light. However, one thing that is a trapping for us, as long as we are not living in the most intimate union with God and understanding all this from the inside, is the desire to ourselves be the measure or control of this light. In fact, the light is God’s. We can’t plan or gawk at ourselves. The desire to do so is a creeping desire. It is started by the good motive to give light, but twisted the wrong way by trying to think of the light and control it or manipulate it.

In his Autobiography (the story of his vocation), Marcel Văn writes,

Without being aware of it, I had become a lamp which drew everyone to look at the light. (131)

And elsewhere, he says of another circumstance, that two friends

noticed the reflection of an extraordinary joy on my face (at least that’s what I heard them say in a low voice when they were chatting to each other, since for myself I was unaware that there was anything unusual about my face). (630)

It wasn’t that he planned and intended to be a light. He wasn’t self-conscious. He wasn’t thinking about this, let alone planning it. In truth, if one intends to be a light, it isn’t a lamp that one becomes. It’s more like a floodlight or a neon sign: audacious and perverting the entire meaning of light.

The real transformation, the transfiguration and glorification of our bodies and our lives and gestures and actions, passes largely unnoticed in the person transfigured. The “light” is “unaware”. This is not difficult to understand. If we are looking at ourselves, how can we be looking at Jesus? And if we are not looking at Jesus, how will the light over-abound and to what light will those around us look because of our presence?