Inspiration

My mother taught me everything I know about astronomy. She kept track of when the meteor showers would be at their peak, and we would get up in the middle of the night to watch. We’d wrap ourselves in warm blankets on lawn chairs out in the back yard, find the right area of the sky and settle in to watch together. We’d let our gaze rest far out in the dark sky, waiting and watching for the streaks of light we hoped to see oohing and aaahing when they’d come. Flashes of beauty, there and then gone, against the quiet of the velvety night. I am so grateful for those memories.

The traditional season of Advent will soon be here and I’ve been thinking a lot about night. Culture often casts times and places of darkness, like night, as bad and day as good. I’m not convinced about that. Seeds start in the ground. Babies begin in the womb. The Jewish day begins at sundown. Darkness has a place and a purpose (Try to grow a seed above ground, for instance.) Run the logic from a spiritual perspective: if God (or however you would name a higher power than yourself) is everywhere, then God is there in the night too. And given what I’ve experienced of who God is, if God is there, night 1. is not a bad place, and 2. we are not alone in it. 3. There is good to be found (and created) there.

There is such hope in the thought that God meets us in our seasons of night as well as day. And what if…what if we could wrap the good of God - the goodness of God with us in the night - around us? What if it was something we could be enfolded inside?

What can be created?

Coming next: the unfolding of this creative trajectory.

Photo: Klemen Vrankar, for Unsplash