Few compare, among the high delights of ocean sailing, with that of watching the sun come up and go down, with the stars then wheeling overhead, until the light of the sun floods the eastern horizon again. Actually when I was salmon fishing at night off Donegal at this time of the year, there was always a flush of sunlight in the northern sky. Yet it is sadly perhaps only as a yachtie, these days, that one has the opportunity to lie back and watch one's rig gyrating against the stars, so that one can almost imagine, on a clear night, that one is actually in outer space.
The light floods in gradually, before the sun bursts through. Very often of course the horizon is smothered in cloud or mist at the dawn, even if the sun's heat eventually chases it away. I guess it is somewhat rarer to see the sun's orb actually come up over the horizon than it is to see it go down. However, at sunset and sunrise, cloud may even enhance its glory, perhaps more so at sunset, or is it just that one is by then in a better state to appreciate it? The horizontal light illuminates things better, albeit with longer shadows, as in the evening of life itself.
Having been stranded off the sea for most of this last decade, it is such experiences that I am hoping to enjoy again before the sun finally sets on my own earthly life! In that strange, dreamy state between wind and sky and sea, when one's normal preoccupations have fallen away, one's imagination is free to roam in heavenly places and contemplate the astonishing dance of spheres, wondering what it can possibly all be about? The mind may perhaps even drift down to considering, as an astronaut may look upon this world, all the various spheres of our lives, which can seem so very all-absorbing when one is engaged in them, even for instance in a sport. They do ripple out from our personal life, which could be imagined as a little disk (though excessively big to ourself) within a series of ever larger ones,- family, community, country, technology, church, cosmos, just to name a few. Then again there are the infinitely small players, down to atoms and molecules, and we are delicately poised between them all. But yes, the cosmos is well described as a dance of spheres, with the Blessed Trinity at its heart, no static point, but a dynamic play of loving energy that pervades it all.
Forgive me for simply letting my imagination play,- I am no theologian attempting to define reality, but I have found these concepts helpful as they well up in me. Well, I do love St Peter, no theologian like St Paul, a fisherman who however humbly said, 'speak in words that seem to come from God'! Yet we may assert, with all the great theologians, that a Christian is one who shuns the tendency of original sin, who does not imagine himself as the centre of the Universe, in favour of aligning himself with Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, the Truth. Perhaps the disks that survive might eventually stack up, in the form of a cone, with Christ as an axis between the apex and the base, stretched between God the Creator and the Holy Spirit who pervades it.
The drama goes on until all the spheres which are going to be saved finally achieve this harmonisation, having Christ as the hub around which they revolve. Meanwhile they are all caught between attraction and repulsion, like the heavenly bodies between gravity and centrafugal force. Gravity would have them align their centre-points on that central axis, where truth and beauty and justice and peace dwell, but God has given them their freedom, so that they may seek to be their own centre. In fact they are often way off course. The bigger the sphere or disk, as for example on the human level a nation or government, the greater the risk of this happening. As in a Venn diagram, some remain substantially within the circle of God's love, others not so, though even, like Jerico, the worst may be saved by Him for the sake of a few just men. Yet the more they spin away from it, the greater the danger that they will spin off into the outer darkness altogether.
 |
| Galician dawn. |
