I met a woman yesterday who told me, with no little pride, that she was a non-believer. She doesn't believe in God, never has and has no interest in God at all. I respect that, and perhaps can guess where it might be coming from. We had a pleasant congenial conversation as I took interest in her. She is deeply committed to the community. She has served terms in town politics - on school boards, appropriations committees, doing the hard and unpaid work of a community leader. She started a community band that is going strong long after health issues forced her to quit leading it. She lives by the 'golden rule' - and says she is a good person. What she means is - she is not intentionally mean to people. She is a nice person. Indeed I enjoyed chatting with her.
Is she at peace? No, she isn't. I sense it. Neither with herself, nor the universe/God/whatever is out there.
I asked her one leading question: what does she feel when she watches a beautiful sunset at the oceanside? She prevaricated and said she appreciated it but didn't 'feel' anything. Fair enough. It was a leading question and she saw it for what it was.
I shared that for me, I connect with God in natural beauty: the thousand thousand stars in a midnight blue sky; the thousand thousand shade of green in Spring, or orange in Fall; the eternal lapping of the sea on a stony beach; the dragon fly that lands on my arm as I sit on my little deck. These are touch-points for me - where heaven bends down to touch the earth.
This morning I walked my dog - nothing new there - and the pre-dawn air was cold on my face. The sky was dazzling with stars. (Yes, I did get out my cell phone and use Google Sky Maps to identify a few stars - I couldn't help myself.) I thanked God for such beauty and allowed my heart to fill with praise and then give that praise to God as a wordless prayer of worship. Just a private conversation - me to God, while Penny the dog snuffled in the grass.
Then as I played with my dog - throwing a stick in the darkness, the sun slowly rose. It's vast light flooded the sky until no stars where visible - only the perfect blue of an autumn morning in New England.
I reflected that our lives are like the little stars - individual, gathered in clusters and bright and beautiful - even the stars that don't acknowledge or sense the coming dawn. Then the great 'morning star' arises - Christ Himself, whose holy brilliance does not extinguish the little stars, or eclipse them. No - the stars are still in their place, They are just overwhelmed by the perfect beauty of the God who reached down to humankind and took all our darkness into Himself and yet rises again to bring them the purest and most beautiful light. We are indeed made in His image.
