The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge – Psalm 19:1-2
At
night, the brightest light around is my own security light. I had a switch installed on the pole when the
Co-op put it up so I could turn it out because sometimes there is something I
need more than security. Sometimes it is
important to study in the dark.
Sometimes I get my shaky, goofy little telescope out and peer at red
Mars or the moons of Jupiter that Galileo saw or the rings of Saturn so far
away. So far away.
But
last night I just looked up standing in the deep shadow of a pear tree to see
the luminous spill of the Milky Way, countless burning atomic furnaces unified
in an ethereal body to my dull vision.
The many dimensions flooded my consciousness in a flash as I transcended
the flat sky illusion. The nearby
wanderers are there with the transfixed blinking beacons that have not moved
perceptibly in a thousand lifetimes. In
ten thousand years a man may stand on that same worn spot and see the Plough
and find true north.
Who
knows? By then there may be no men. There may be only whispering ghosts and
ruins. There may be spaceports and
ringed, ringing satellites and levitating, talking dogs and wormholes to
Arcturus and Buicks bound for Eden.
Or
there may be a white-haired man walking back to his cottage after a long day in
the vineyard, his basket laden with clusters to be crushed, broken, and bottled
who pauses in sight of his homely light and gazes upward at mirroring planets
and misty fixed fires, who loses in a moment the illusion of a flat sky, whose
consciousness is flooded with many dimensions, who hears a luminous and holy
ghost spilling stillness and whispering of the Way who still loves the deep
shade and studies in the dark.
