Chasing Awe

The evening is still. The bare trees know we’re tilting into winter. The people, adding lights to their eaves, mittens to their fingers, and egg nog to their grocery lists, know it too. Clouds scuttle across the sky in my tiny corner of the northern hemisphere. Through the stillness, they remind me I’m hurtling through space, weeks away from the darkest night of the year.

The moon rises, shifting into the glow of the sun’s rays, like she’s lining up in front of a sunny window for the perfect selfie. Tonight, in her track across the sky, she’s headed for the Earth’s shadow. It’s the longest total lunar eclipse in centuries and my kids have made me promise to wake them at 3:30am to see it. 

We spent the summer peering through our telescope, magnifying the sun, the planets, the smudge of the Andromeda galaxy, and the moon, but we’re not pulling out the telescope tonight.

With our telescope trained on the moon, we’ve seen craters, mountains, and valleys, but I think eclipses are better when they’re not magnified.

Around midnight, everyone is tucked in their beds, as the moon passes through the edge of Earth’s shadow–the penumbra–and darkens. The eclipse has begun. A crescent shaped shadow overtakes the edge of the moon’s glow at first, before inching forward to obscure craters and hide the unicorn my kids are certain they can see etched on its surface. It’s not long before the moon is dark. Much of the time, the eclipse peaks here and the moon’s glow grows, as if someone has pressed fast forward on its regular cycle of waxing.

But tonight, things are lined up just right for a total eclipse, and the show is far from over. Instead of creeping back into the sun’s light, the moon passes into the Earth’s inner shadow–the umbra–and a strange thing happens: she turns an eerie rusty hue. The sun’s light sneaks around Earth, bending and separating and being filtered through the Earth’s atmosphere before casting the newly ruddy glow back towards us.

If I was standing on the moon at this moment, I’d see the reverse. I’d see the sun aligned in a game of hide-and-seek behind the Earth, a glowing ring of sunlight encircling a dark dot. And in the ring, I’d see all the earth’s sunsets and all the earth’s sunrises at once. I’d see all the mothers putting little ones to bed on one side our dot and all the mother’s waking up with little ones climbing into their beds on the other, with night in the middle.

I wake everyone, as promised, and we stumble to the window. My budding astronomers ooh and aah over the celestial alignment for a few minutes and then stumble back into (my) bed.

A half hour later, it’s 4am and I’m the only one still awake. I peel back the covers and wade through a tangle of tiny arms and legs on my way to the window for another peek. And there it is again: the glow of all the Earth’s sunrises and sunsets at once.

Viewing an eclipse is a practice in patience. It’s an hours long, stumbling out of bed in the middle of the night, extra caffeine the next day event. But, there is something awe-inspiring about staring out the window at a rusty moon and seeing so much of the world at once.

I have spent much of the last two years fighting the urge to do the opposite. I feel pulled to focus on my own crumbs and clutter, on my own to do list, on my own political leanings and opinions about vaccines and lockdowns and rising case counts. I feel pulled to fixate on the causes that are important to me and the heavy things I’m carrying. I know other people feel it too. A scroll through my social media feed confirms it.

Matthew’s version of the Christmas story features a character with a similar penchant. Herod never makes it to see the baby. He is so troubled by a threat to his reign and by what a new king might mean for him, that he misses the miracle. In magnifying his own situation, he misses the awe. He misses the whole point.

The wise men, on the other hand, aren’t so much like Herod. They choose a journey without a map or a timeline. They choose to rejoice. They choose awe. They choose to chase a star. And while they may not have arrived in time to find a baby lying in a manger, chasing awe still led them to a Saviour to magnify instead.

The wise men’s story compels me to abandon the lenses that magnify myself and to sit in the glow of the world’s sunrises and sunsets at once. To remember there’s a lot more out there than the little patch of earth I call home. To chase stars. To spend Christmas chasing a Saviour. 

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Contrast".