Stars

On a clear, early December day we piled into the car with the fading glow of the 4pm sunset. The dwindling light was winking between branches and spilling out onto brambles dotted with snowberries. The final wildflowers of summer in their death throes, clothed in sparkling frost. Delicate Queen Anne’s lace lined the roadway, arrayed in icy royal ball gowns. Wheels rolled over a brown carpet of rotting oak leaves and the poplars pointed their bare and crooked limbs up toward the crisp, blue sky.

As the sun slowly made its descent, the stars began to pierce through the darkening cover of twilight. My son’s wonder-filled voice called from the back seat, “I see the first star!” We wound around curves and climbed the familiar hill to my parents’ 5 acre woods. Tumbling out, we were clad in layers of fleece, wool socks, and puffy jackets. With upward gazes we beheld the moon as it towered in the eastern sky, nearly full and brilliantly dimming the stars surrounding it. Not too far off, Mars was rising, hidden behind the silhouette of a jagged tree. We craned our necks and leaned to peer at the faintly glowing orb with its reddish hue, like a tiny ember in the vast black.

I pulled out my night sky app, tracing constellations and identifying the brightest lights. To my son’s overwhelming delight, we found the location of the International Space Station. My children were meandering in circles, bathed in moonlight, with heads turned skyward, and I called to them. I ushered them close. We listened to the sounds of the night—navy jets in the distance, the hushing hum of waves crashing on the spit below us, the delicate crackling of branches from woodland creatures tiptoeing in the forest. I whispered softly, “Let’s just lie here and look up at the stars for a few minutes. No talking, no running around. Let’s look for shooting stars.”

They sprawled out on the grass with my husband’s tall frame standing protectively nearby. He was shifting from side to side to keep warm, a sentinel outlined by moonlight. I laid with my back propped against a wooden bench. And for that silent breath we gazed at the array of luminescent pinpricks in the inky darkness. My mind wandered across the universe and across time, and I imagined another form staring up into the heavens.

Millenia ago, he laid on his back in the desert crying out to God, and recounted all of his fears. If I could paraphrase his strained words: You say you want to bless me, you say you want what’s best for me. That you will care for me. Yet I sit aching, waiting for the one thing my heart desires above all else. Abram wanted a child.

He stumbled out into the night, led by a whisper, “Look up into the sky and count the stars if you can.” ¹ There was an unmistakable hint of sarcasm in the heavenly voice. As if a finite human could count the infinite flecks of exhaled, divine dust. 4,800 stars born each second. “Count the stars if you can, so shall your offspring be.”

God met with Abram, a minuscule speck on a “pale blue dot.” ² He promised to fulfill that one seemingly inconsequential longing; a child. And yet in that same moment, He widened Abram’s perspective to hold the vastness of eternity. All of Abram’s aching and waiting must have trembled beneath the weight of what he saw spinning in motion. He viewed his desire, just one miniature star in the cosmos, connected by unseen strings to an innumerable number of other stars moving in rhythm. Each stretching out toward each other, conjoined amidst heaving celestial bodies, perfectly balanced, ordered, timed within God’s careful hands. A constellation of promises—past, present, and future—all working to restore and to bless not just Abram, but all of humanity.

“Count the stars if you can.” 

An echo of the words God spoke to Job as well, “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens?” ³

Every movement in any direction, every second in time, every atom of the universe delicately linked and affecting another. And so on and so forth into infinity and exceeding human comprehension. Abram bowed beneath the limitless expanse that unfolded above his feeble flesh. And yet, he was simultaneously enfolded within the nearness of a God who knew him deeply; a God who promised to fulfill his inmost longing.

“Abram believed the Lord, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” ⁴ In that moment of awed clarity, the God who quite literally cradles the complexity of existence, met with Abram in the intimate space of his aching. And Abram chose to trust Him.

In Matthew’s gospel about 1800 years later, we hear of three other men gazing at the stars. ⁵ They were scholars and astrologers seeking hope, the fulfillment of promises in the cosmos. They followed a “star,” in the East, more likely an alignment of planets. Many have speculated that it was a conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, the moon, and the sun (in the constellation of Aries) that is said to have taken place on April 17th, 6 B.C. ⁶  Jupiter was the king of the gods in Roman mythology. Aries was the Greek god of war and also it is argued, the astrological sign of Judea. Perhaps these scholars came seeking what they saw in the stars, a powerful King born to the Jews. This child, this King, a direct descendant of Abram’s son, a fulfillment of whispered promises beneath an ancient, twinkling sky. 

Millennia later, and just a few short weeks after that moonlit family night, we were again climbing into the car at dusk. It was Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, and there was another conjunction of planets rising in the western sky. Jupiter and Saturn were aligning, our very own 2020 “Christmas Star.”  I can’t help but wonder how many faces were lifted to the heavens, marveling and searching for meaning in a chaotic year of destabilizing events. 

We stood beneath the same sky where for generation upon generation people have sought direction, hope, and guidance from outside of themselves. And in the still night air, my icy breath visible, I exhaled our communal questions. “Are you there? Do you see me? Will you care for me? Will you do all that you have said you will do? Can I trust you?”

On this, the darkest night of one of the darkest years, I grasped my son’s fragile hand and we beheld that bright point, hovering over the silhouette of the Olympic Mountains. The light hit the backs of our retinas and sank down deep into our marrow. Our gazes widened and we were silent and small as we staggered beneath this ageless, magnificent sky. And yet over the roar of the West Beach surf beneath us, I also heard the whisper of his nearness, intimately close. And I know and I will always know, that He keeps his promises. And I will choose to trust Him.

¹ Genesis 15:5

² Carl Sagan

³  Job 38:31-32

⁴  Genesis 15:6

⁵  Matthew 2:1-12

⁶ “Amazingly, astronomy can explain the biblical Star of Bethlehem”