August, 1988
If I hadn’t walked out to meet Bruce, dressed in my nightshirt and bathrobe, I might not have seen them. They shot straight overhead as if they were a beam from a searchlight. But unlike a beam from a searchlight, the lights were dim on the horizon and bright in the center of the sky. I asked Bruce if it was a searchlight or Northern Lights. He said, “The Lights.” He’d watched them all during the time he walked the dog through the neighborhood, at times stopping to look around himself to get his bearings.
Greedy for more, I suggested, “Let’s look behind the house to the North.”
There were no lights. Only a platter of clouds. We sat on the step of the front porch and watched as the beam became a milky stream, like a single cloud moving. By comparison the Milky Way was a clear back drop. The rays parted just above us and we saw a curtain shimmer in an invisible wind. Then they became a literal stream where we saw the current, the rock over which the light curved. When water rolls over rocks, it rolls back on itself, a crystal lip drawn back. There’s singing.
If we looked another way, we stood underneath thick ice looking up at sunlight, —-particles hurled from the sun agitating the upper atmosphere–shining down through crystals and air. We stood in the dark pond, the world white with sunlight and wide above us. But the ice was the curtain. The ice was magnificent.
It looked as though the curtain parted directly above us, the shimmers sweeping in from the East and moving out to the West. What would the heavens look like opened up? What kind of play or ballet would we see? Would we hear the speeches and chatter that’s supposed to be out there? Or the hum that’s supposed to be the beginning of Creation? Is this the glory of the Lord the heavens are supposed to declare?
It was hard to see as if we were flat, dead figures looking on a rounded, living scene. Perhaps it was hard to see because we’re not used to seeing from under the curtain as it parts.
I think of how the veil was rent in the temple when Jesus died,the veil people said separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple and the people. The veil split, so there wasn’t even cloth between God and us. Is some other son of God dying, opening the curtain, so we can see God, with nothing between?
Bruce chuckled when I suggested we whistle to see if the lights would respond. A lawyer who lived in Alaska said that Eskimos whistled and the Northern Lights would dance down to them.
I sang the Gloria Patri –“Glory to God on the highest and peace to his people on earth. Lord God, heavenly king. Almighty God and Father. We worship you. We give you thanks…”and watched the heavens move. A star fell from the center of the sky, a long trajectory, then it skipped as if it hit a solid wall, and it skipped again the opposite way before it burned out. Once I skipped a stone five times across a lake. It smacked the water as though water were stone, the stone water, and it flew out until it disappeared in the water, sending rings that came to shore in a quiet lapping.
The beam streamed across the sky from East to West. I swear I saw it get brighter when I sang. Then it gathered itself behind itself and arched into the Western sky before it faded.
It made me think of the ancient idea that what happens here on Earth among men affects heavenly bodies and the contemporary idea that the breeze from a butterfly’s wings can be felt across the world. What if the lights were spirit, not just particles shot out from an overactive sun?
Maybe another son of god didn’t die. Maybe God is getting around to coming again. The Bible says there would be signs in the Heavens. At the same time we’d get a dose of the Spirit. Lord knows we need the Spirit, a drenching in goodness to stop the killing. I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days. I will show wonders in the heavens and on Earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, as the Lord has said among the survivors whom the Lord calls (Joel 2: 28 – 32).
Sometimes I think this great and terrible day of the Lord was the day Jesus died. When God’s judgement was meted out to mankind–a judgement that had to do with coming to seek and save that which was lost, that had to do with not condemning the world but saving it. Saving it, not hellfire and brimstone, loud thunderings and quakings–we’re all burned up. They say there will be a fire at the end of the world, but maybe it’s a fire we should welcome, a fire that will clean us up, make us presentable to whatever it is that’s on the other side of the sky.
Scientists say this year may be a special year where the Sun’s activities flare more than usual. Apparently the sun gets spots and storms every twelve years. There was an unusual southern sighting last March where the Lights were sighted as far south as Florida.
Bruce said he’s seen them glow green, red, and yellow. The very first lights I saw, appeared like these, as a fast moving curtain in the Eastern sky. They looked like a ghost and scared me. They looked like God answering my prayer and showing up.The second time I saw the lights was the winter after Bruce and I married as we drove home to Rockton from Belvidere. We watched the rays shoot up, the sheets shimmered across the sky on a cold winter night. We held hands.
Tonight I wanted to drive out to the country to get away from the brightness of vapor lights at the hospital, our neighbor’s porch lights. It hurt my eyes to look straight up at the stream in the heavens and then to rest looking at dark houses and artificial light. It should have seemed more wonderful, to be able to be in town and look all the way up to the Milky Way and see those Northern Lights. But it made wonder seem tame as if there were a thick suburban curtain to beat around before you got backstage which was really front and center but secret from the stage we see everyday in the sky.
So many signs in the heavens. Two weeks ago we saw the moon fade to a watery blood with a dark shadow moving, slowly, gracefully across it. Talk about graceful. How the front shadow of the earth closed the bright white light of the moon until the last edge peeked out.The moon stayed dark, watery, bloody as a darker, smaller shadow moved across it. Such huge bodies in the heaven moving so gracefully–earth, moon, sun–smooth like skaters on ice over a sheen of water, ballet without the thud of feet landing.
May 2024
Quietly, news leaked out, that the solar flares hitting the earth, had were potentially a Carrington level event. In 1859 a solar storm slammed the earth head on and fried telegraph lines, burning down some offices because the electrical charge was so strong. Evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein speculated about how a solar storm this powerful could explode transformers by sending massive electric currents through the lines, creating a cascade of failures that could destroy civilization.
I’ve been reading the prophet Isaiah whose predictions are dire, not just for Isreal and neighboring countries, but the whole world. As I wound down to sleep, I pondered the text, “I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity. I will put an end to the pomp of the arrogant and lay low the pompous pride of the ruthless. I will make people more rare than fine gold, and mankind than the gold of Ophir. Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place, at the wrath of the Lord of hosts in the day of his fierce anger” (Isaiah 13: 11 – 13). Humans more rare than gold, sounds like a worldwide catastrophe.
I guess there’s nothing like scaring yourself. I do that often. In Canto IX of The Divine Comedy Dante is warned by Virgil to cover his eyes because the Medusa approaches. (She’s the creature with snakes for hair. If you look she will turn you to stone. You may have seen the campy Amazon commercial that draws on this myth.) “Turn your back and keep your eyes shut tight;/for should the Gorgon come and you look at her, never again would you return to the light” (45). There are some evils it’s best not to look at because the temptation to despair is so great. But in the same scene, Virgil tells Dante when he can look. He sees, “a thousand ruined soul/scatter away from one who crossed dry-shod/the Stygian marsh into Hell’s burning bowels.//With his left hand he fanned away the dreary/vapors of that sink as he approached;/and only of that annoyance did he seem weary//Clearly he was a Messenger from God’s Throne” (46). Virgil tells Dante to be silent and they watch as this messenger waved open the gates of hell like they were nothing.
To see the aurora, Bruce and I stood on the road and looked up at clouds blocking our view. Because people said the only way we might see the lights, is to snap a picture, I snapped a picture and got a blob of pink where there was the night sky.
Around 2 am Bruce looked out our windows. “I could see the lights through our windows—east, south, west, north,” he explained later. He came back to bed and pushed hard on my back.
“I didn’t know if you wanted to be awakened,” he said. (I’ve grumped at him for flapping the blankets in the middle of the night.) I nodded. We pulled back the window quilt and saw the lights, dancing like three veils. Once a healer told a group of us to pull back the veil, and ask Jesus what he thinks about our pain. “How do you feel?” she questioned softly. And by feeling she meant images or bodily sensations or words.
Right there. The veil. And deep drowsiness. In the Presence, some prophets have fallen into a black sleep. But this wasn’t that.
I’d seen Northern lights before, especially the summer my brother died. Maybe he kicked the sun on the way past to glory, the sunspots his heel marks, plasma splashing up. I wondered at his sudden death from aorta aneurism, and wrote about what it was like to sleep at my aunt’s house, after arriving for his funeral.
Every time I curled up in my toes and legs, fingers and arms, an exercise my motherused to ease pain when giving birth, I fell out of my skin as if I leaned on a curtain I thought was solid wall. I wanted to settle my spirit against muscle, bone, and blood but I could not find them. I wanted my husband’s backside, a warm fence to keep me inside my flesh, so I could warm up and sleep gathered like cattle chewing cud, sunning in warm mud by the farm pond.
I wondered if this was what my brother felt when he got yanked out of comforting flesh. Was he in danger like cattle wandering onto a highway, semis doing sixty? Without his body, how could he keep from flying apart like the wide circle from a flashlight bright on close ground but dimming against the trees and stars? Did he miss his body yet, or was he gladat last to be free of being short, too strong, always proving himself because he had to be tall.
My brother used to say that light gathered at the river, that the stars we flashed light at started shining before the earth began. Maybe he was swinging out toward that river letting go of the rope and curling into a ball to splash into water like crystal, to swim under trees with leaves for healing the nations.
Bruce and I were both so tired, we went back to bed, as if the lights were common.
Now I regret not going down stairs to grab my phone, brave the three damp steps off our porch and look, really look and take pictures, so I’d have them, just like all the people who posted on Facebook. (It got to be as cliché and annoying as Happy Mother’s Day or Merry Christmas.)
But exhaustion, my legs aching like nobody’s business and sleep called me. The next day I was sick with tiredness. Sick with it.
Jesus’ story appeared from behind the veil I saw in the sky. There were twenty virgins who fell asleep waiting for the bridegroom to come. Ten lamps flickered out. The women begged the others to give them oil. The other ten said no, buy your own. They left for the market and missed the bridegroom. There’s an encouragrement here to set boundaries, to keep your lamp full of oil—perhaps what my spiritual companion says the most important work is keeping that light lit, with plenty of oil, letting the calm and quiet of Jesus shine through.
Joy, not necessarily singing with arms in the air, but quiet, calm, full of thanks, is the great shaken fist at the powers of darkness/outrage/fear. It’s time to heed the warnings from Jesus and Paul to wake up. The darkness is fading. The day is at hand. Habbakuk reminds us, “Though the fig tree should not blossom,/nor the fruit be on the vines,/the produce of the olive fail/and the fields yield no food,/the flock be cut off from the fold/and there be no herd in the stalls,/yet I will rejoice in the Lord;/I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (Hab. 3; 17 – 18, ESV).
Today I looked past the leaves on the Linden, the oak, the black walnut, to the blue sky. I saw something. The glory of the Lord? The love that has woven the world together? There were no lights or veil, just leaves and blue sky, but…well I’ll leave it at that.
Alighieri, Dante, and John Ciardi. The Divine Comedy. Norton, 1977.
When have you experienced something awesome in nature? What’s the story?
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