Looking Through a Thin Place, April 22, 2004

I started yesterday (04-21-04) with the intention of spending three days with God, but my mind and heart are still cluttered with looking for answers instead of looking for God, even if it is God’s answers I am looking for. I am preoccupied with what to do instead of who to be or how to be.

I did get a taste of being with God as I watched the sunset and the stars come out last night. Lying on my back by the lake I saw a bank of grey clouds divide a deepening blue sky overhead with a crescent moon, just days away from new, with a bright planet. They were bright and clear in the sky before any stars were visible. Below the cloud the sky was luminous, pearlescent – white just the below the cloud blending to a coral or peach pink toward the horizon. In contrast to the crisp sharp moon and planet in the deepening blue sky, the pearlescent pink was unfocused. The blue above, with moon and planet, seemed to be a defined plane, approachable, tangible. But the pearlescent pink below seemed mysterious, elusive, distant, unattainable, infinite. It drew me toward eternity. I though about the images of passing into eternity in the books Peace Like a River and Crested Butte. Fathers and sons together – a processional over a ridge where the son is sent back – the father reaches across a stream in a cave to welcome the son in.

The pearlescent pink sky was drawing me in. As the bank of cloud drifted east and the moon and planet settled west, at one point the bank of cloud separated moon and planet. The pink was beginning to lose its luminescence, and the crescent moon’s sharp edges and points invaded and disrupted the haziness of the pink. With moon on one side and planet on the other, the mysteriousness was punctured and soon the pink melted into grey that merged into the blue that had now deepened into black, with stars glistening through. The cloud bank had drifted away and isolated clouds dodged among the stars. I was sent back.

I remembered walking with a friend in Mckemmie Woods, Virginia in 1997 watching the Hale-Bopp comet and discussing the heightened awareness we have of God in the transitions and seams of life, like dawn and dusk. I read in Phil Yancey’s Rumors of Another World of the “thin spots” between this world and God’s eternity. I reflected on the Orthodox understanding of icons as windows from or through which we catch a glimpse of eternity.

Last night’s sunset was surly such a thin spot – an icon – into eternity. I sure it could all be explained with meteorology and optics – physics and chemistry – but with spiritual eyes on an intentional awareness of God gracing me/us with his presence, I got a glimpse of eternity. That the far more to the point that answers to my uncertainties about my can and the path immediately ahead of me.