The Solace of Stary Nights - Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany, Year B

Last February, around this time, my family drove long miles through the deserts of Texas—tumbleweeds rolling across the pavement and roadrunners darting from creosote bushes. Moving south, then west, then south again, we took a left up a winding road, following the ridge of an ancient volcano.  The landscape changed as we climbed, cacti to pines and scrubby oaks, then aspen and firs along the mountains above.  We were in the Chisos Basin of Big Bend National Park where we would camp for a week.

That first night, it was cloudy, and when dark fell it was almost like turning off a flashlight in a cave.  I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.  But on the following nights, clearer skies opened to a dazzling array of stars, the Milky Way running like a bright ribbon across the sky. This is one of the darkest skies in North America, which means, ironically, that is one of the brightest with starlight.

It had been a long while since I had seen a night like that, but looking up at the vast expanse I was reminded how comforting it can be to lay beneath the stars.  There is a feeling of being both small and grand, each of us a flash in the cosmic scene and yet included within it, wrapped in the great swirling dance that made it all.

B.J. Miller is a palliative care doctor who has attended to over a thousand patients in their final hours.  A triple amputee and burn victim, he knows in his body the realities of suffering and the fleeting nature of life.  One of the exercises he uses to cope with that reality is to spend time looking up at the stars.  For him, there is comfort in watching the night sky and realizing that some of the stars we see have already collapsed into blackholes by the time their light reaches us.  Seeing such a reality can help put our lives in perspective; it’s a truth that can bring peace to whatever momentary pain we are feeling.

This comfort is something the ancients understood.  Job, perhaps the oldest book in our scriptures, shows its hero finding solace not in the words of his friends trying to provide reasons for his pain, but instead in the whirlwind from which God calls Job to look away from himself and toward the vast wilds that serve no human purpose.  This same truth is repeated in Ps. 147 where God’s ability to count the stars and name them is a reminder of the limits of human life and power.  And in Isaiah 40, in a message to the people returning from exile, we are given a glimpse of the divine perspective: “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (Isaiah 40:22).

Such a reminder of our smallness, or even our insignificance, might not seem palliative at all.  And yet that is exactly what it is.  In these reminders of our dependence and fragility, we are given the best news possible: we are not God.  All of our institutions and powers, our politics and problems are nothing in the grand expanse of God’s life and love. That God brings “princes to naught” and “makes the rulers of the earth as nothing” (Isaiah 40:23) is very good news in a world that seems ever more unsettled.

In our world, however, it can be hard to realize this ancient truth.  We go out at night and see only a scattering of stars if we are lucky.  We have placed our artificial lights everywhere, blazing into the night so that only a few stars shine through.  And it is easy in such a world to begin to feel the burden of our power, to begin to think that the future is ours to make and control.  

Why have we blocked out the stars?  Why do we leave our lights burning—disrupting the rhythms of our bodies and the cycles of creation?  There are two answers: our ambitions and our anxieties. 

In our ambition, we want to do more and have more.  Instead of ending our days shortly after the sun goes down; we just flip a switch and can keep on as long as our bodies hold up.  And when they fail, we can force others to keep going, exploiting our world at a pace out of step with creation so that we can have more without limit.

The second reason is our fear.  It is in the dark that we begin to feel our frightening fragility. We realize that we cannot protect ourselves from all of the forces that might harm us, and we answer that fear not by facing it, but by escaping.  We light our streets and entry ways, we have night lights in the halls.  And that light gives us comfort, at least for a while, until we realize that artificial lights cast shadows and we cannot escape the dark.

Since we cannot escape the dark, and all our artificial lights will fail to bring us fullness or safety, what are we to do?  On another camping trip, several years ago while Lily was only a toddler and Lucia was in Emily’s womb, we pitched our tent at a state park in Connecticut. There was a trail from the campsite to the beach, the Atlantic’s roar beckoning.

We arrived late, the daylight waning, with just enough time to setup camp and cook our dinner.  By the time we could walk to the beach, it was dark, so Emily and I put on our headlamps, grabbed Lily’s three-year-old hand, and started down the trail through the forest. When we had entered the woods, Emily suggested we turn off our lights.  Suddenly it was profoundly dark. We waited, the three of us, in the calm silence of the woods.  Slowly, yet clearly, the path began to appear as our eyes adjusted to the night.  We walked down to the beach and stood before the starlit ocean, feeling a deep blanket of calm in the vastness of the world. 

“Wait for the Lord,” Isaiah councils. It is waiting that makes walking in the dark possible; our eyes need time to adjust to the illumination of stars. Jesus knew this need for waiting.  In the midst of his rising fame and a chance to do the work of healing in the world, he took time to wait in a dark and wild place, away from the fires of the town and the safety of the city.  It was into the dark that he went to pray, that most fundamental waiting before God. In prayer he oriented himself, remembering and accepting his dependence on his Father.  In the dark he could look into the night and feel the comfort of the Love that made it all; the Love of which his own life was an expression.

Our world is filled with anxiety and fear, ambition, and a longing for control.  This ambition and anxiety are twins born from the attempt to be more than creatures, small gods blazing our lights into the night.  But such lights won’t answer our deepest desires; they will not lead us into the peace of being whole.  To move into that comfort and completeness, we must learn to walk in the dark, waiting for our eyes to adjust.  In that waiting, looking up at the bright and vast expanse of night, we will find the solace of our smallness, the freedom of dependence upon the one who is true light and love.  Laying back upon the ground, remembering the one who calls all these stars by name, we will find awe, and in it healing from all our ambitions and anxieties. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 40:28a).