Watching for Morning

Watching for morning means many things.  It has different meanings for the astronomer at his telescope, the student or careerist pulling an all-nighter, the father awake with a newborn or a sick child, the hiker walking through the night, the man in the toils of exhausted depression holding onto defiant hope that at last the sky will clear and the sun shine again in his soul – and the Christian trusting in the Biblical promise of an ultimate dawn, closer with every passing year: the return of Jesus with the destruction and rebirth of all creation. 

 

Or it could mean a chap up before dawn who just likes to see a pretty sunrise.

Thursday evening I set my alarm for 4 AM, because I had a lot to do Friday.  I woke up sometime in the middle of the night and changed the alarm to 4:30.  When it went off, I wished I had changed it to 5, and lay in bed until 4:40 just to spite it.  But I don’t fall asleep easily once wakened.  I showered and ate, and started walking by 5:45.

It’s about five miles from home to the university where I work, as a postdoc in astronomy.  Most days I commute on foot in the morning, and then my wife picks me up in the evening.  That way it’s good exercise without being excessive, and we can get by with just one car. The walk takes an hour and a half.  I don’t usually leave before dawn, so Friday morning was special.

There was a beautiful full moon ahead of me as I walked, beginning to look orange as it lowered over the trees.  It’s autumn in New York, but the biting cold hasn’t yet arrived: the air was pleasant to walk through.  Sirius and Jupiter shone overhead: of all star-like objects in our sky, only Venus – or a galactic supernova – can be brighter.

Though stressed, driven, and weary, I was happy for no reason.  The sight of the full moon over the trees made me think of the skyline drive at dusk near Shenandoah, years ago when I was a child.  A moon like that – only huger and more orange – rose low over the hills as I watched out the back-seat windows of our car.  We passed dozens of deer – not threatening to cross the road, only feeding under the eaves of the forest.  My parents were astonished at their numbers.  The hills, the moon, the deer, and the excitement of being on vacation – far from home and yet safe at the same time – combined to make the drive magical in all the best and deepest senses of the word.

I don’t experience things that way any more as an adult.  I have to know too much now, and there’s less space for wonder.  Now I have to be one of the responsible parents in the front seat, figuring out where we are going to eat and sleep, and how much gas we have left.

There are compensations.  I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to do many of the things I only daydreamed about as a child.  The job I’m walking to – a job as a professional astronomer, however modestly paid – is one of those impossible dreams come true.  Even when I’m hanging on, as Rich Mullins sings, “somewhere… between the passion and fatigue,” I know astronomy is one of the things I was born to do.

I pause, leaning over a low wooden fence in the brightening dawn.  Trees at the other side of a field, partly bare now with the autumn, stand silhouetted against the pale blue light in the sky.  The moon is gone; I can’t remember when I lost sight of it.  Far overhead, more distant and perfect than it ever appears in the night sky, Jupiter is fading in the growing light.  For a moment I remember how small I am, and there is peace in the thought.  This beauty – from the earthly dawn to the unimaginable distances of the cosmos – means something immeasurably important.  Yes, my thoughts and feelings are, at some level, neurological electrochemistry.  Yet if there is any meaning at all in my electrochemistry, it constrains me to believe that the beauty of the Universe is more than a flicker of pleasure in the hominid brain.  It is the splendid artistry of God, in which the Creator himself delights.  It stands, regardless of my dreams and my fears – regardless of which, if either, are fulfilled.  It does not matter that I am tired and stressed, that my future is uncertain and I have so much to lose.  The beauty and the glory stand, nothing that I fear can even touch them, and they are what matters.

The moment passes quickly, and I am my anxious self again.  But something of the peace remains.