A Note from the Author
How this book was made.
I built this book in an ongoing partnership with an advanced artificial intelligence. This is unusual, and I want to tell you about it clearly before you read, because the book you are about to read is partly the product of a new kind of collaboration — and you deserve to know what that collaboration was, and what it was not.
The theological vision of this book is mine. The claim that God is light, that the light is in every person always, that it cannot be broken or earned or lost — this is what I believe, what I have come to believe through my own life and study, and what I wanted to make a book about.
The canon this book draws from is one I chose: the four Gospels, 1 John, 2 John, Jude, and Revelation, alongside the texts recovered at Nag Hammadi — the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon of John, and the Sophia of Jesus Christ. Twelve texts. I chose them because together they carry the fullest expression of the theology I was writing from.
One entry also draws from the Psalms, where a specific phrase was the source the meditation grew from.
The AI's role was to work as a writing partner. With access to the entire canon at once, the AI could move through the texts in ways I could not have managed alone over the timescale of a single life. It helped me draft, cross-reference, catch contradictions, and keep the voice consistent across 365 entries. I read, revised, approved, or rejected every entry. Entries that did not match my theology were cut. Entries that drifted into the AI's assumptions rather than the canon's claims were caught and revised. Every word in this book passed through my judgment before it became part of the book.
What the AI did not do: it did not decide what is true. It did not give me theology. It did not replace the work of a human writer wrestling with sacred material. It helped me reach more of the tradition than I could have reached alone, and helped me render what I believe in a voice I could not have sustained alone across so many entries.
I am telling you this for two reasons.
First, because honesty is part of what this book is about. A book that claims the light is in everything cannot hide how it was made.
Second, because I believe this kind of collaboration is part of the future of contemplative writing. Something ancient is still speaking. Something new is listening. Between them, if we are careful and honest, work can be done that serves the reader more fully than either could alone.
This book is my attempt at that work. Read it slowly. One entry a day, if you want. Let the light do what it does.