I Wonder...Out Under the Sky

It was there but a brief time – proudly plain in the southwestern sky as evening settled into darkness, then gone an hour later; descended, we assumed, beneath the horizon for someone else’s viewing pleasure.  It was intriguing, yes, but why all the interest?  Novelty is surely part of the answer.  This grand romance between Jupiter and Saturn won’t happen again in my lifetime, so there is that.

 

Coming as it does, however, on this Christmas week, perhaps the wonderment has to do with more than novelty.  Aren’t we, after all, always looking for signs?  Of what, we never really know, and signs are best read in retrospect, but we are always…wondering.

 

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky…”

 

Earlier in the day we were pondering the various birth stories in the Gospels, especially the lack of one in Mark’s account.  His is likely the more honest telling.  Matthew’s fanciful story of the Magi notwithstanding, who would have imagined or predicted much significance in the ordinary birth of an irrelevant baby to an irrelevant couple from an irrelevant town?  Mary, according to the stories, “kept and pondered these things in her heart,” but that isn’t unusual for a new mother.  Nobody else was likely taking notes.  It was only later – decades later – that people would have started to care about the beginnings of the man about whom they had come to care.  Hence, the “backfilling” of those natal blanks.

 

If, then, we completely missed the significance of that obscure 1^st century Palestinian birth – even if understandably so – it’s only natural I suppose that we would loathe the thought of missing the significance of other potentially earth-shaking convergences.  If it will mean that something holy is afoot, according to the psalmist, when “justice and peace kiss each other” (Psalm 85), then perhaps there is something consequential about Jupiter and Saturn kissing as well?  It would be nice if it were more than mere planetary grinding.

 

A sign of new global health, perhaps.

 

Or the dawn of a new age of sanity.

 

At the very least, perhaps it signals the rebirth of curiosity to fill the void resulting from the erosion created by our leaden certitude about that which simply isn’t true.

 

Maybe that’s why we all trouped outside last night and looked up into the sky.  

 

Hoping…

 

…for even a little fresh light.

Who knows, after all, just what might be being born?