August 4th: Part B! Because you can never have too many entries in two days.
On Not Seeing the Aurora Borealis
There is this green you get in the warm South Seas, the splashing, laughing dolphin seas, you never see it north of Bermuda, but we were in the North Atlantic and that green just came out of the night and starting blazing, desperate, wild, above us. It was a sail of light, rippling in some higher wind than the cold one that bit our faces, streaking, waving, ethereal, ephemeral, and sacred.
The above quotation is from my January 15th entry. Exactly one month later I published a seemingly unrelated one on the trend toward anti-intellectual fundamentalism that has recurred cyclically throughout the history of Christianity. As it turns out, the two entries and a debate I had last summer with prudentior all twisted together in my experiences last night. It might take a fair bit of unravelling to make all that make sense anywhere outside my own head, but I’ll give it a whirl.
In the religion entry, I compared Christianity to a boy band pandering to reunion tour audiences who only want to hear the “Greatest Hits.” What if the truth is worse than that? Maybe the best metaphor for God is a celebrity musician who’s “famous for being famous” and is adored by fans who never listen to His music. Worship, it seems to me, has become too much about “I like you! You’re great!” and not enough about “I appreciate the complexity and beauty of your work.” I can just see God putting on a rhinestone-studded jacket to attend another church service and saying to his manager, “When did I become this? When did it stop being about the music?”
This whole line of thought is self-serving, though. In my haughtiest moments I fancy myself a “true fan” skipping the sold-out sell-out show to listen to classic vinyl in my basement. Moreover, I fancy that the “true fan” narrative helps my side in the aforementioned debate with Prudentior. The topic was experiencing beauty and whether the act of doing so is morally good or just morally neutral. Prudentior, a pragmatist of the highest order, contended that a person who spends her entire life watching light reflect on water and being overwhelmed by its majesty is guilty of consuming resources without contributing to the world. I countered that aesthetic appreciation is independently valuable work, maybe the most valuable work a person can do, and would, henceforth, be one of the declared purposes of my life.
Fast forward to 11:50 last night. I was tired. And I mean tired! Every muscle in my body ached and raged and yearned for sleep. Then ungfh told me he had heard that the Aurora Borealis might be visible overhead. Of all the beautiful music of creation that I haven’t experienced yet but hope to, my dearest dream is the aurorae. Those words back in January were a kind of worship; what I would feel actually watching a sail of light streaking green as the dolphin seas would be the purest worship of all.
I pulled on my father’s tall work boots so my SpongeBob pajamas wouldn’t drag in the mud. I made my way outside. My stiff legs could only keep my heavy feet up for an instant at a time; the end of every step was a general collapse. I tried to follow the gravel to the graveyard. It was so dark that I don’t know if I stayed on it at all. Everywhere below my chest level was absolute blackness. I was terrified. Waking nightmares came to dance. It wasn’t the zombies I feared, really it wasn’t. I imagined being attacked by coyotes. I imagined being attacked by teenaged vandals. I imagined being attacked by a crazed widow mourning her lover in the night. Mostly I imagined falling into an open grave and being buried alive. I regained only enough composure to scan the sky for colour. There was none.
Back inside, I consulted an online newspaper. It confirmed that there was a possibility, though just a small possibility, I could see the Lights, but not until 2 am. I wanted sleep and the odds were so low… but what if the majesty did come and I slept through it? That would be the opposite of worship. It would be a sin against God and myself. He might forgive me. I never would. I wouldn’t sleep if there were a rumour that Dylan or Bad Religion might be playing at Piper’s. I wouldn’t sleep if there were a prophecy that the angels or the aliens might be poised to descend. So I couldn’t sleep then.
The decision to wait up brought a technical problem, what to do for two hours. The first hour had an easy answer, given to me my best friend kmadelyn . I hadn’t seen The Daily Show and The Colbert Report in way too long. It was an okay hour, except that Jon Stewart now has facial hair (eww!) and his guest was Will Ferrell whom I loathe with a level of passion I otherwise reserve for love. And Colbert’s guest was just a horrible, horrible person. My flip show was an unsettling documentary on the slow decay of Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body and the argument to finally bury him.
The second hour was harder. It came down to sitcoms for both my main feature and flip show, which is really hard for me. I survived it for two reasons: Hamish Linklater’s delightful character on The New Adventures of Old Christine and the irony of it all. There I was waiting on the possibility that I might see the majesty of God, the streaking, waving, ethereal, ephemeral, and sacred, and I had to watch sitcoms to do it.
2 am finally came. I donned the heavy boots and went again to the graveyard. It wasn’t scary this time. It was actually bright enough to see the path, either because more of the streetlights were on or because my eyes were more adjusted to the dark. I knew this time around that the bodies moving in the distance were my own shadow reflected on the polished surfaces of the headstones.
I saw light the colour of dolphin seas, moved to investigate it and found it was only the security brights in the post office. I walked deeper down the path, and stared across the hills of the dairy farms. No aurora. I don’t regret waiting. The waiting was worship, too.
Someday I will see one of the aurorae. Hopefully, it will be the Southern Lights dancing above me and reflected in Antarctic ice. Hopefully, I’ll be with someone I really love and who sees it, too, the green, the glow, the movement, the music, the Majesty of God. That is a moment worth waiting for. But I won’t spend the interim watching sitcoms.