Under a Different Sky

Some days I long to be under a different sky. This place I toil in feels tired and I can’t help but agree with Solomon, “Nothing is new under the sun.” The days blur together and moments lose meaning.

Listen to me read this post:

Yesterday morning when I walked Bonnie around the house, the moon surprised me. It was a chilly twenty-eight degrees in the dark and I looked up and there she was, mid-horizon in the southeast—a crooked smile of waning crescent, earthshine curving around to meet her edges, a whisper in the sky. I saw Orion tipped over above her, candling the quick-disappearing dark. The robins were already in full chorus and I listened to their morning song as we bended around back. The stars were only just beginning to wink out and I felt the needs of the day press down on me, edging out the beauty above. Later, I followed the moon all the way to work, grateful for the changing sky. When I arrived at the hospital, I parked where I could see her, balancing above the tower atop the ER.

There were no stars remaining, just that pale smile in the sky. Without the stars to capture my eye, I lose my center. My mind flits through one thousand things I am doing or need to do or want to do. I feel like a mist-person—half here and half somewhere else.

Some days I long to be under a different sky. This place I toil in feels tired and I can’t help but agree with Solomon, “Nothing is new under the sun.” The days blur together and moments lose meaning. Time dissolves like sugar in water but leaves behind no sweetness.

I’ve been re-reading parts of Run with the Horses by Eugene Peterson. It’s a book about the prophet Jeremiah, the one we know as the weeping prophet. Peterson talks of Jeremiah’s creativity, seeming to describe him as a performance artist. This prophet went to alarming extremes to communicate an urgent message to his people.

Yesterday, I read this:

 “The great masters of the imagination do not make things up out of thin air, they direct our attention to what is right before our eyes. They then train us to see it whole—not in fragments but in context, with all the connections. They connect the visible and the invisible, the this with the that. They assist us in seeing what is around us all the time but which we regularly overlook. With their help we see it not as commonplace but as awesome, not as banal but as wondrous. For this reason the imagination is one of the essential ministries in nurturing the life of faith. For faith is not a leap out of the everyday but a plunge into its depths.”

For faith is not a leap out of the everyday but a plunge into its depths.

When life gets busy, this is what I tend to do: compartmentalize. I put my everyday life in one box and my spiritual life in another. Don’t we all do this? Our minds need to simplify for efficiency. Compartmentalizing is one way of doing this. But this can lead to a smaller life and narrow vision. Psychologists tell us this is one reason why adults lose their ability to stay present in the here-and-now—therefore losing that sense of wonder that so captivates children. We compartmentalize. We label. We oversimplify.

This is good, this is bad. This is sacred, this is secular. This is black, this is white. This is necessary, this is beautiful.

“But there have been times in history,” Peterson tells us, “when these things were done better, when the necessary and the beautiful were integrated, when, in fact, it was impossible to think of separating them.”

What if everything that is beautiful is useful? What if it inspires and unveils and pulls us deeper into relationship with the Sacred and each other? And what if everything that is useful was beautiful too? What if crafters of the utilitarian began to see their work as art? As a way to leave a mark on this world? What if?

I am working on my imagination, dipping into some of the great masters Peterson describes. I read poetry out loud every day—rub the lines between the fingers of my heart like prayer beads. I’m listening to music more, letting stories carry me away. I have found these things do not take me under a new sky, but they open my eyes to the beauty of the one I am living under, the place that is my center.