looking at the moon because we cannot look at the sun

The moonrise last night.

A full moon. Rising over the backbones of the hills and bluffs and table mountains of the plains. A red moon. I would say blood red. Except it wasn't blood red. Maybe she was draped in red silk. Perhaps the moon painted itself. For a wedding. Because there was no war. Marking her face with a bridal mask. A shared light. Not her own. Light that had escaped over the horizon. A patient, lonely, waiting light. Solitary in the dark of midnight.

She outshone the stars in their array. And she rose among them, casting aside her red mantel and mask. A full moon.

Deacon laughed at the moon's face and said, somebody turn out the street light please, it's blinding me. We all laughed. And the antelope stared, bowed their heads, bowed as we drove by, their white necks gleaming in the light of the moon.... They dare not laugh at the moon's light....

And I wasn't grieving in the light of the dark, but my soul was quiet with the goodbyes and hellos. So many words --the butterfly wing words caught in the branches of the leafless trees --or the words without wings tumbling and driven by the wind and caught against the stiff brown grass of last year along the fence. Words that are skeletons of hope and lost love. Generations gone and yet to come.

What are we to you, God, in this vast wilderness of cosmos, that we should dream of your love, or that you should notice us? That we are in any way draped as some kind of tilted pattern in the window of your concern? What are we to you, God, that our strife and desire, our end game of destruction and greed be overlooked and not snuffed out? What are we to you, God, except a whisper of some hope long lost to despair and oblivion?

Perhaps it is the image in my mind's eye of those children, up on the hill, playing outside in torn polyester party dresses many sizes too big for them, their unkempt hair standing at odds with their dark cherub faces. No jackets to fend off the winter. Lonely moon children. Cherub children without wings caught in the tall dead grass along the fence.

Perhaps it is the many funerals, of lost boys, drowned in tears.

Perhaps it is just the red full moon, pulling at my inner tides....

At prayer this morning (from Romans 1 after verse 16)

Ever since the creation of the world his [God's] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.

So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

--exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being...

uuuummmmmmm.... which is precisely why I cannot worship Jesus. Just sayin'. I am a member of his Body, and worship God --caught up already as he is, in the divine...

Oh, well, there we are. Of course God takes notice of us... we are God's beloved child, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. Part and parcel of God's own being.

Back to the glory then. Of the moon.

And giving thanks to God. Because God is God. And we are like the moon, and not like the sun. And we wax and wane. But the light of the moon is not the light of the moon. It is the light of the sun. Reflected.

And all creation is a reflection of God's light.

--something about looking at the moon because we cannot look at the sun....
and then i am done