The Lighthouse at Castle Island
by Dr. Drew Henderson
Let your light shine so bright before men…
It’s a mere strip of sand near the eastern end of the long Bahaman archipelago. I’ve never been to Castle Island – few people even in the Bahamas know about it – but I think of it whenever I read the above passage.
Tiny and isolated though it is, Castle Island is important for the lighthouse that is its sole human trace. Sailing in the area, my friend Adam anchored there one evening and swam ashore to stretch his legs on the beach. The light house keeper, surprised and delighted to have company, insisted that Adam join him for fresh lobster and a tour of the building. What astonished my friend when they’d climbed to the lantern room at the top of the stairs was the size of the light that signaled safe passage through a maze of shoals and reefs.
“It was a tiny kerosene flame,” Adam told me, “barely bright enough to read by.” Yet with the aid of mirrors and reflectors, it was visible twenty five miles out to sea.
I think often of that lighthouse keeper and his stewardship to that feeble flame on his scrap of sand. “Let your light shine,” the passage instructs. But what if my light is a very dim one? What if my good works are few and small?
Perhaps, I think, my little light is magnified in the immense mirror of the Principle. Perhaps its reflectors are human hearts, spreading the flame of love to one another through the adjustment. Castle Island tells me that even the most insignificant act of mine – ceding my spot in the grocery line to a mother with a baby, a two-lined note to a neighbor and telling the stranger about the effects of a subluxation – even such faint candles as these can be multiplied by the Principle to shine like beacons in a dark world.
I love you and I appreciate you all.
Dr. Nardi
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