The Shining

One of my favorite Christmas carols begins by invoking a heavenly choir: “Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining.” Brilliant imagery raises the mind’s eye to the heavens, sonorant consonance jingles the vowels and resounds them like a bell tower’s chiming, and the whole step from the “ly” of “brightly” tunes the ear to a higher pitch. The effect seems akin to the pull of star-shine itself.

And what glitters above does seem to exert a pull. The other day I jangled a belt near my six-month-old daughter, who had rolled upon her side on the floor. The sparkle of the silver buckle in the light caught her eye as a lure attracts a fish, and the tiny girl took the bate. Her hand shot out and grabbed the buckle; and then, so long as she pulled back, it was a simple matter of reeling her in. She was spun around, onto to her bottom and then, as the belt exerted a bigger pull than her own, her hands and her head were lifted up. The moment she saw my face at the other end of the belt, she grinned from ear to ear.

In Psalm 14:4, starlight is pictured as a belt gone out to the ends of the world: “The heavens declare the glory of God. . . their voice goes out into all the earth, their message to the ends of the world.” Here shining is a kind of call. This call goes out on a rope, for the word translated “voice” is the Hebrew word qav, which means rope or line. Is the firmament here akin to a golden cord, a shining string that calls the eye and draws the mind to contemplate the all-seeing, all encompassing, weighty Presence? But are stars that say such things giving us a line? Are we to swallow the message hook, line, and sinker?

“The stars are not liars,” says the unicorn Roonwit in C.S. Lewis’ Last Battle. As impressive as they seem, Eustace thinks a star is just a flaming ball of gas," for that is what he has been taught in his progressive school; Wikipedia calls them “massive, luminous balls of plasma.” But the star Ramandu, like my seventh grade Latin class, has thought a little more deeply about the word is: “Even in your world, my son," Ramandu tells Eustace, “That is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” My student, a boy named Peter, could have told him the same thing. In our discussion of the Latin verb esse, Peter declaimed vehemently that if I cut off the legs of a table and pasted them to the side and top at strange angles, it would be a table no longer. A boy named Jensen went further. He said that what a table “is” has something to do with its “function,” or its “purpose,” the sake for which it is made. But what is a star’s function or purpose? Why is that ball of plasma doing its massive, luminous thing?

Is it possible that the ancient psalm is right, that the answer is shining night after night; that there is no language in which its meaning is not heard? To wit, this question is said to be meaningless to modern science, which seems to be deaf to the call of the stars and blind to their shining belt, not to mention certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation produced by thermonuclear fusion. Or as J.R.R. Tolkien says:

He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued.

Just days before a helicopter landed on his head, Navy Helicopter-gunner Mike Shafernocker looked up from a Vietnam shell hole and saw the sky. His mother found this poem amidst his belongings:

Look God, I have never spoken to you,
But now I want to say, "How do you do".
You see, God, they told me you didn't exist,
And like a fool, I believed all this.

Last night from a shell hole, I saw your sky.
I figured right then, they had told me a lie.
Had I taken time to see the things you made,
I'd have known they weren't calling a spade a spade.

I wonder, God, if you'd shake my hand.
Somehow I feel you will understand.
Funny, I had to come to this hellish place,
Before I had time to see your face.

Well, I guess there isn't much more to say,
But I sure am glad, God, that I met you today.
I guess the zero hour will soon be here,
But I'm not afraid since I know you're near.

The signal, well, God, I'll have to go,
I like you lots and I want you to know.
Look now, this will be a horrible fight,
Why, who knows, I may come to your house tonight.

Though I wasn't friendly to you before,
I wonder, God, if you'd wait by the door.
Look, I'm crying...Me, shedding tears,
I wish I'd have known you better, these many years.

Well, God, I'll have to go now, goodbye...
Strange, since I met you...I'm not afraid to die.

The message has gone out to the ends of the earth, and in a weary world, a soul had felt its worth.