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Today marks the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, when the balance of light and dark has tipped as far toward the nighttime as the heavens will allow. The heavens with their heavenly bodies are powerful enough to beckon daylight and summon nightfall, to change seasons, to move whole ocean tides, to host celestial orbits, and to shift seasons. It would be easy for us, modern humans, to miss the power of what the heavens proclaim.
I think about how many nights I don’t even bother to look up at the sky, taking for granted that the stars are there in their courses, that night falls and the moon rises, without me lifting a finger, much less my gaze. There was a time when humans knew their lives, even their livelihoods, depended upon knowing something about the heavens and what they had to say about when to plant or migrate or prepare for something. Humbly, my existence does not.
The story of Mary’s hope, the hope of the Messiah, is a cosmic hope. It is a hope so grand that God wrote it into the heavens. And, wildly, it is a story that is small enough that we can hold it in our two hands, like a candle, or in our arms, like a child: grand enough that it can be written in the sky, and intimate enough that we prepare for it in our homes and our very hearts.
It is a grand thing: this being human, this waiting for the God-child. Because it is more than I can dream alone, I remind myself to look up, to feel small beneath the eternal arc of the heavens and not to miss the story of God’s goodness written above all our heads. Maybe tonight I will pause, go outside purposefully and look up at the stars. Maybe tonight it will feel good to feel small beneath the whole story contained there—a story that holds me, and you, and all of us and that is wrapping us into something salvific and eternal, beyond our imagining.
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