I have a confession to make. The truth is, up until last year, I didn't really believe that shooting stars existed. I had seen them in all sorts of Disney movies, and everyone seemed to claim to see them whenever we were camping or at the lake, but in all my years I had never seen one, even when I had been looking at the same sky--at the same time--as someone else who claimed to have seen one. I was at the Mona rope swings this last summer, though, and as I was explaining my disbelief to someone, I glanced up at the darkling sky, and there across the vast expanse flared up a streak of brilliant blue. The shooting star lit up the entire sky and seared itself into my memory to never be forgotten. You can, perhaps, imagine my wonder at seeing in such grand spectacle something that I had only recently concluded did not, in fact, exist, but the interesting thing for me is that that sense of awe hasn't faded in my mind. I am still exhilarated by the mere thought of that shooting star. It awakens within me a sense of humility and reverence for nature.
What is it, though, about nature--and more specifically about the celestial bodies--that seems to always inspire awe? I
posted on Google+ recently about seeing the moon on a walk home from a friend's, and I
would say that I was surprised that I had some people respond about likewise being awestruck at the moon, but really, I wasn't surprised at all: to be honest, the moon was breathtaking... like three nights in a row. I was waiting outside the following night when the glow of the moon began to illuminate the tops of the mountains, and a few minutes later, it was peaking out at the base of the V formed by two adjacent peaks, the clouds behind it shining with a ghostly glow. I tried taking a picture, but as you will note, it didn't come out very well at all. The power lines, of course, don't help, but I think there's something that's inherently lost when we try to recreate moments of awe through secondary experience. There is, in the photo, nothing that brings me to marvel at the greatness of God or the universe, though on those consecutive evenings, it had been so clear to me. Walter Benjamin, the 20th century, German literary critic noted that in the age of mechanical reproduction, the aura of the original work or scene is lost--decontextualized--and so loses its spiritual or ritualistic significance, and I feel like this is definitely the case with certain forms of digital reproduction. 300 DPI or PPI may be enough to convey an image, but somehow the essence of moment is lost between the pixels.
I remember walking beneath those same mountains on a cold evening about two years ago. I looked up at the sky and literally gasped at how beautiful the stars were. I remember writing in my journal, "Was it that Abraham truly saw the glory of the stars or just that he finally
saw what had been before his eyes all along?" I felt, in that moment, as if the heavens had opened up before me and
I finally saw what had been there all along. It's not that I hadn't looked, either, because when I was young, my father used to set up his telescope and show us the stars, tracing the heavens in our minds. For some reason, though, on that winter's eve, all robed in perfect night, I was given new eyes to see, and I haven't seen the stars the same since then.
What moments of awe have you experienced at nature's doorstep? When did you last look at the stars?
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