Looking Up: What Do You See?
Total solar eclipse this week swept across parts of Mexico, America, and Canada, and people from everywhere went to wherever for the chance to see the moon eclipse the sun. The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun and was 400 times farther away from the sun when this event occurred.
Scientists do the math. Journalists report this as a cosmic coincidence when the moon blacks out the earth. People interpret this event through the lenses of telescopes, myths, superstitions, horoscopes, and religion.
Whether people watched televised coverage, looked through special glasses, or experienced the total darkness of a blackout solar eclipse, “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands” Psalm 19:1.
Link to picture NASA took: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240402.html
Stand in Awe
A NYT article cited the author of a new book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life1, a psychologist who says that experiencing awe comes from “perceived vastness,” triggered in moments that transcend our understanding. These moments, he suggests, can calm down our nervous system, releasing oxytocin, a hormone that lowers stress and anxiety and promotes warm feelings.
What struck me in this article is the definition of awe as “the absence of self-preoccupation.” Awe as an emotion helps us get out of our own heads and “realize our place in the larger context, our communities,” which he prescribes as an antidote to the “narcissism and self-shame and criticism and entitlement” so prevalent today.
The Big Sky
The sky above is one thing all people everywhere have in common. One big sky covers the whole earth.
Looking up, people anywhere can see sky. Some days cloudy and dark, and some days rain falls or snow or sleet, or if you live where I do … dirt. Other days the sky appears a glistening red-gold at sunset and cooler colors at sunrise, during daylight hours some shade of blue––azure, cerulean, sapphire, lazuline, cobalt––and almost pitch black at midnight when sprinkled with twinkling lights called stars.
Incomprehensible to think that the nearest star is Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light-years away. A light-year is 9.44 trillion km, or 5.88 trillion miles2 and yet knowing facts about space does not seem to have made mankind wiser. Or even more attentive.
Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above join with all nature in manifold witness, Great is Thy Faithfulness …
manifold* a whole that unites or consists of many diverse elements
So why are people drawn to look up?
Buechner’s story
Frederick Buechner wrote that when he was in college he sat among a crowd of rowdy college students watching the Italian film La Dolce Vita. He described a scene in the movie where a helicopter uses a harness to lift a giant statue of Jesus, arms outstretched, on flight to the Vatican. Without the helicopter in the screen, it looked as if Jesus was flying across the sky.
In the film, the people below look up. They see this strange sight and responses vary. One group of girls in bikinis wave at the men on the helicopter and the men on board hoop and holler and say they will be back, hopefully hook up.
I know, “hook up” wasn’t the term back when the movie was made in 1960. Still, how much have people actually changed?
“During all of this the reaction of the audience in the little college town where I saw the film was of course to laugh at the incongruity of the whole thing. There was the sacred statue dangling from the sky, on the one hand, and the profane young Italians and the bosomy young bathing beauties, on the other hand––the one made of stone, so remote, so out of place there in the sky on the end of a rope; the others made of flesh, so bursting with life. Nobody in the audience was in any doubt as to which of the two came out ahead or at whose expense the laughter was. But then the helicopter continues on its way, and the great dome of St. Peter’s looms up from below, and for the first time the camera starts to zoom in on the statue itself with its arms stretched out until for a moment the screen is almost filled with just the bearded face of Christ––and at that moment there was no laughter at all in that theater full of students … la dolce vita college-style. Nobody laughed during that moment because there was something about that face, for a few seconds there on the screen, that made them be silent––a face hovering there in the sky with outstretched arms … as if the face were their face somehow, their secret face they had never seen before but they knew belonged to them … [and the Face] they belonged to.”
Secrets in the Dark, Frederick Buchner
Jesus’ Question
Anticipating the eclipse, I remembered Buechner’s story and thought about Jesus’ question.
In Matthew 11, Jesus asked the crowd, his own fickle generation, “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?”
Were you merely curious? Was it FOMO? Or did you see what you wanted to see and project onto the experience simply what you expected?
“He who has ears let him hear.”
Buechner compared a scene in a movie to how irrelevant and out of place religion seemed in his day––like an antique statue in the sky.
Until … in those rare moments people can see that face, stand still, look up.
Stand in awe, and with the psalmist ask, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” Psalm 8
We get it backwards, don’t we?
- “How a Bit of Awe Can Improve Your Health” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/well/live/awe-wonder-dacher-keltner.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email; quotes Dacher Keltner, psychologist at University of California, Berkley ↩︎
- https://www.britannica.com/story/how-do-we-know-how-far-away-the-stars-are#:~:text=The%20closest%20star%2C%20Proxima%20Centauri,km%2C%20or%205.88%20trillion%20miles. ↩︎