Have you ever found yourself in a situation so bleak that it darkens your days? It is well known that when things take a bad turn, we feel that we’re surrounded by obscurity. But when things get better, it is also well known that we feel that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

It is so natural to desire bright days, a bright existence, filled with the light of joy, love, and health. “Light” is indeed an element that is often mentioned in the Bible. As a matter of fact, God’s first words are: “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). And the Bible says that indeed “there was light,” illumining the universe.

Now, what light are we talking about? What is its origin and nature? Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, helps us understand something essential on this subject when she writes: “This light is not from the sun nor from volcanic flames, but it is the revelation of Truth and of spiritual ideas. This also shows that there is no place where God’s light is not seen, since Truth, Life, and Love fill immensity and are ever-present” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 504). Understood as such, light is not a physical element, like the sunlight or the light from another source, but a concept, an infinite idea. All the work of God—the creation as presented in the first chapter of Genesis—is manifested in light. There are no shadows, darkness, confusion, troubles. All is clarity, harmony, purity, holiness, beauty.

However, those qualities do not always accompany our human existence, do they? Often gray—and sometimes very dark—areas fill our thoughts and our lives.

So where does this darkness come from? How can it exist? One thing is for sure, and you will find it very useful to know: It couldn’t come from the infinite God. The Bible tells us that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (I John 1:5). Having no origin in God, the only Creator, darkness can only exist as a suggestion, and is therefore unreal and illusory.

In order to illustrate this point, I’ll tell you a small story. When our son was about ten years old, he asked me, “What makes you believe that God is almighty?” I answered by telling him that in most religions, God is compared to light and evil to darkness, and I reminded him that light always chases the darkness away. But he pointed out that when the night comes, it’s the darkness that takes precedence, and the light disappears.

Where the light is, there is not and there can never be darkness.

I am still grateful today that right then and there, I was inspired to say to him, “Let’s imagine a trunk, perfectly sealed, separated into two equal parts by a movable partition. On one side we are going to put the brightest light there is, and on the other side the darkest imaginable night.” I asked him if he was indeed picturing the situation. He was. So I continued, “Now, if we pull away the partition, what happens?” With half a smile, he admitted that the light was the “winner.” Then I asked him if he thought there had been a combat, if the light and the darkness had needed to fight with each other. After giving it some thought, he said no. There had been no fight. The light had instantaneously occupied all space. So, pushing the reasoning a little further, I asked him, “Do you believe that the darkness could be hiding somewhere, ready to jump on the light, lurking for an opportunity?” We saw together that darkness could not hide or stay hidden somewhere, because in fact there was no darkness at all. Where the light is, there is not and there can never be darkness.

It is so comforting to realize that there never is combat or struggle between light and darkness, and that the pure presence of light is the evidence of the nothingness of darkness, pointing clearly to the fact that darkness has no substance, no being. It is fiction, a belief in the absence of light. This allows us to better understand that one never needs to fight against an entity called evil (darkness), but one has to eliminate and replace the false belief of darkness by the consciousness of the immutable presence of good (the light). Mrs. Eddy explains it this way: “We are sometimes led to believe that darkness is as real as light; but Science affirms darkness to be only a mortal sense of the absence of light, at the coming of which darkness loses the appearance of reality. So sin and sorrow, disease and death, are the suppositional absence of Life, God, and flee as phantoms of error before truth and love” (Science and Health, p. 215).

Darkness—evil, under whatever form it may appear—is only a mortal sense or a belief of absence of light, of absence of God, good. But we know that such an absence is clearly impossible. God is infinite Principle, is All and in all. Nothing could exclude Him from that creation whose only cause He is. “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever” (Romans 11:36). The understanding of the omnipresence and absolute light of divine Principle brought Mrs. Eddy to say, “The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus’ time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation” (Science and Health, p. xi).

Each one of us has the ability to withstand the temptation to believe that we have the responsibility to fight against darkness—against sin, sickness, and death—in order to eliminate it. When we welcome without reservation the light of Truth and Love in our thoughts and in our hearts, that is the “operation of divine Principle.” It is that spiritual light that compels sin and sickness to lose their alleged reality in human consciousness. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” said Jesus (John 8:32). It is always Truth, divine light, that chases darkness away, and that makes us free.