Have you ever seen a light eater? Sounds rather unusual, doesn’t it? Actually, we are constantly seeing light eaters. We simply do not recognize them as the miracles that they are. The dictionary defines a miracle as “an event causing wonder and astonishment, often suggesting a force or power outside of the ordinary.” I thought about this when reading an astounding book, The Light Eaters, which describes in beautiful detail how plants create miracles every single day by eating sunshine. “Miracles” is my word. “Photosynthesis” is author Zoë Schlanger’s word. Here are two of the hundreds of paragraphs that filled me with astonishment and wonder.
“The roiling plasma surface of the sun flings out a fistful of light. The particles—billions of photons—hurtle 93 million miles through black space to rain down like bread and honey on the outstretched flesh of the most abundant living mass on earth. Plants eat light. Photosynthesis, so basic to plants, is the prerequisite for most every other life form on earth. Through photosynthesis, plants suffuse the air with the oxygen we breathe. …As photons from the sun fall upon a plant’s outstretched green parts, chloroplasts in the leaf cell covert the particle of light into chemical energy. This solar power gets stored inside specialized energy-storing molecules, the rechargeable battery packs of the world.
…the leaf siphons carbon dioxide out of the air through miniscule pore-like openings on the underside of the leaf, called stomata. … The stomata suck in carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide now encounters both the stored solar energy in the chloroplasts and the water that is coursing, always, through the leaf’s veins. Through that encounter with the pure energy of light, the water and carbon dioxide molecules are ripped apart. Half of the oxygen from both parties float away from this meeting, passing back out into the world through the parted lips of the stomata—becoming the air we breathe.”
This remarkable process goes on in the leaf of every plant. And all the while we humans go about our daily scurrying unaware of this miracle. Schlanger terms this unawareness as “plant blindness.” Could this sort of unseeing also be applied to “spiritual blindness,” a lack of awareness regarding the photosynthesis of the soul, how a Light-filled Spirit suffuses our inner being—converting the grace we receive into our loving responses and actions?
Soon after reading The Light Eaters, I was sitting on a friend’s patio. I reached over and gently lifted up a lovely palm-sized leaf on a geranium plant. No matter how closely I looked, I could not see those little mouths drinking in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. I simply had to take a scientist’s word for it, much like I have to have faith in how Light-filled grace flows through my soul.
The feast of Pentecost is almost here. This might be the time for us to sit down with a plant, to behold one particular leaf in her process of photosynthesis, then reflect on how Light continually filters through our inner being. In doing so, we might just witness a miracle.
Abundant peace,
Joyce Rupp
