Baptist Spirituality

For a guy whose sabbatical focus is studying the cosmos, I haven’t been studying the cosmos very diligently. In fact, I haven’t had a good view of the night sky since I left South Florida. Now, don’t get me wrong, part of the purpose of sabbatical is to do some serious work in soul care, but I did intend to spend a few nights looking at skies uninterrupted by the light pollution of Vero Beach.

Things just haven’t worked out in my favor.

When we were in North Carolina for the first week, I attempted to look at the sky once or twice from our commune parking lot only to find that my visibility inhibited by a lofty and full tree line. There was a tiny window to see the stars: the Big Dipper and the moon winked their sleepy goodnights from their perch. Nothing special. I guess I could’ve traveled off campus to a secluded spot, but our rhythm became so routine, we were in bed by 9:00 PM every night to catch breakfast and community prayer by 8:00 AM.

Surely, if I didn’t get a clear shot of the sky in North Carolina, I would have better luck in the mountains of north Virginia. My two-day stay in the Shenandoah Valley would provide an optimal low-light situation and higher altitude.

When I stepped into the darkness my first of two nights there, I couldn’t see anything. Just so happens that a swath of smokey haze migrated south from Canada, the result of devastating wildfires that was so intrusive President Trump threatened, quite impetuously I might add, to tag 50% tariffs on Canadian goods.

There was no line of sight that night, or any other night in the Valley for that matter.

Once I drove into New York, I knew I was going to lose my opportunity to sky-see because of the massive light pollution from the City that Never Sleeps. I had one ace in the hole, however, as I planned to travel to an observatory (or two — one is still up in the air) in nearby Lyndhurst, New Jersey. The observatory is open only on Wednesdays, which made things complicated when I was planning family events, which I primarily scheduled on weeknights.

Come the third and final Wednesday I am here — tonight, as of the writing of this article — and my plan to go to the observatory was scrubbed by a pervasive rainstorm. Of all the days I’ve been here, amounting to nearly three weeks of beautiful, dry and crisp weather, it just haaaad to rain on my parade tonight. This was the only observatory I planned to visit on my eight-week itinerary.

The only saving grace was that the agenda for the observatory seemed a bit lackluster: The schedule included views of the moon, of Venus, and — most interestingly of them all — the M57 ring nebula. My “white whale” — the Andromeda Galaxy — was not included in the list. Perhaps God did me a favor in keeping me home tonight, saving me a few bucks in fuel and an $8 bridge toll.

For the past year, I have made cosmology the centerpiece of my sabbatical work, and I finally got around to putting some of that research to work while in New York. I’m up to the fourth chapter in a book I am currently working on, “a pilgrimage into the soul and beyond the stars” as I’ve been pitching it for the last month, but getting my eyes from the word processor to the whites of Venus’ eyes has eluded me since the very beginning of my journey. This trip hasn’t been what I expected when it came to the astronomical aspect of things, but at least the writing has been productive.

Isn’t life just like that sometimes? We can plan our way, but the Lord directs our steps, and all of that. Sometimes some things remain hidden while other things come to the light. A cloudy sky might bring a meaningful conversation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Turning in early for the evening might have been that spiritual boost I needed to greet what the Lord wanted to teach me the next day. The weather is fickle and we see as in a mirror darkly, but God is faithful.