“You are all walking around shining like the sun”

“You are all walking around shining like the sun” presents spiritual radiance as something shared: the image belongs not to an isolated figure but to people moving among one another. In the book’s wider treatment of mystical experience, that image resonates with accounts in which contemplation becomes a felt bond between people, rather than a private inward state alone.

Image and Meaning

The phrase’s sun image makes illumination vivid and bodily, while its address to a plural audience distributes that brightness across a community. Its emphasis is therefore not only on seeing or understanding, but on perceiving people as bearing a common radiance. The supplied passages do not establish the phrase’s speaker or occasion, so its significance here rests on the image itself and its resonance with the book’s documented accounts of shared spiritual experience.

Worship and Shared Experience

At the Abbey of Gethsemani in the late 1950s, about 250 monks entered the church silently, took their places in the choir stalls, and sang Latin psalms in Gregorian chant. The author, then a Protestant seminary student, was deeply touched by the service; the day’s schedule also included the Divine Offices, meals in the guest house, a monastery tour, and a conversation with a monk about monastic life. Silence and chant made religious practice perceptible as a common life, a setting in which the phrase’s language of collective radiance finds a suggestive parallel.

A different kind of shared experience appears in Douglas Steere’s account of a Quaker planning meeting for relief work in Finland. After he offered a brief prayer and Fred Tritten prayed, Steere described feeling melted down, overcome by tears, close to everyone present, and certain of God’s life. He also saw two others who seemed to be undergoing the same experience. The episode gives communal spiritual awareness a concrete form: prayer is followed by bodily emotion and a sense of connection among those gathered.

Contemplation Becoming Community

Steere’s account of silent worship among the Religious Society of Friends likewise stresses what can change between people. He valued meetings in which no one spoke unless moved by the Holy Spirit, and described worship as tendering those present and knitting them to one another. He had seen it level an ugly barrier between two members and begin a process in which they asked forgiveness. In this context, spiritual illumination is not merely an inward quality; it is associated with a changed relation between people.

Howard Thurman’s experiments in worship at Howard University offer another example. Seeking to engage students in chapel, he introduced silence for meditation and prayer, liturgical dance, and staged presentations of six European Madonna masterpieces. In the presentations, people reproduced the paintings behind a nine-by-five-foot frame, with silence between displays and “Ave Maria” played for each one. Thurman said the congregation and participants were fused in a single moment of spiritual transcendence, and understood that experience of unity as more compelling than what divided them. The phrase’s image of many people shining together resonates with this movement from artistic and contemplative attention toward a shared sense of unity.

A Motif of Presence

The book also places shared spiritual experience beside images of divine presence across distance. On a flight to China during the Korean War, Dag Hammarskjöld copied verses from Psalm 139 into his journal, including the assurance that even at the farthest limits of the sea, God’s hand would lead and hold the speaker. The passage does not identify the sun phrase with Hammarskjöld or connect it directly to the psalm. Read alongside it, however, the phrase’s image of light belongs to a broader pattern in which spiritual presence is figured as something that accompanies people through the world, while accounts of worship show that presence being experienced among a gathered community.