Long-exposure of Jupiter & Saturn in alignment, December 21, 2020
Last night on the winter solstice, literally the darkest day of 2020, my son and I craned our necks skyward on the front lawn.
“Can you see it?” I pointed. “Below the moon to the southwest.”
Just the day before, I’d sunk pretty low, feeling decidedly un-festive and weary of the yoke of fear, anxiety, and loss wrought by a year that seemed to present fresh disasters with the dawn of each new day.
As soon as the sun dipped below the horizon, the bright orbs of Jupiter and Saturn appeared. The distance between them is something like 500 million miles, but from where we stood, the planets seemed almost to collide amongst the stars above. People were calling it “The Christmas Star,” an occurrence unwitnessed for 800 years.
Having no telescope, my son and I glanced at each other once we’d spotted the planets. Had there not been such media fanfare, we would definitely not have noticed the sky that night. It was cold and dark, and the warm living room beckoned. It wasn’t the blinding flash of light I imagined the shepherds following to a humble stable in Bethlehem. Truth is, seen with the naked eye, it was a bit underwhelming.
Jupiter (left) and Saturn, December 21, 2020
And yet. As I stood peering into the darkness, a word kept coming to mind: behold.
What does that mean?
A funny little word, behold isn’t something most of us use every day. “Behold, I’m home!” “Behold, child, here is thy dinner lain before thee. Partake and be glad.” It’s clunky and archaic, but it carries a simple meaning: look and see. Pay attention.
In older translations of the Bible, behold was sprinkled through the pages over 1200 times, but as time passed, its use waned. A quick glance at my NIV concordance showed it was not important enough to be referenced, and modern translations like The Message show no uses of the word. Not even one.
Is this because so few things amaze us anymore or because, weary and numb, we’ve stopped paying attention? We’ve stopped beholding. It doesn’t occur to us to venture out and raise our eyes to the sky.
Half a miracle
A few verses in the gospel of Mark recount an odd little event where, in Bethsaida, Jesus is asked to heal a blind man. By this time, He’s fed the multitudes, walked on water, cast out demons, and raised the dead. One more blind man should have been a one-and-done sort of moment.
Instead, we read the only half-miracle recorded in scripture.
“When He had spit on the man’s eyes and put His hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?” He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” ( Mark 8:23–24, NIV)
People like trees? Had there been a miracle glitch? A power outage? Was restoring sight suddenly too hard for the Son of God?
Maybe it was like me and the Christmas star. I’d witnessed something amazing — enormous gaseous balls of rock suspended in the heavens, reflecting the moon’s light back to earth in a stellar array that won’t be seen again for another 80 years.
I saw them through eyes and a sense of sight perfectly tuned and designed, which in itself is an extraordinary feat of creation. There I stood, on legs that held me upright, breathing in the cold December air with no effort. Yet all I could muster was a nod before retreating to my spot on the couch.
Oh me of little faith
God is ever patient with us. He let me get comfortably settled before the text came through. A friend sent me a long-exposure photo of the event and bam! There it was. Now that could get a shepherd’s attention. That was something to behold. Of course, that’s what it had looked like the whole time, but I hadn’t seen it the way the camera caught it. Because it didn’t match my expectations, it was easy to dismiss and shelve as just another hopeless 2020 disappointment.
I love the next two words in verse 25. Once more. Jesus doesn’t scold or walk away in disgust. He doesn’t clench his fists in frustration over the man’s lack of faith or hard-headedness.
Instead of pinching the bridge of His nose and heaving a loud sigh at the blind man’s veiled recognition, once more, Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes.
“Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.” ( Mark 8:25, NIV)
How often we, too, need an extra boost to see. How often we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror before grace reaches down to clear the mist clouding our vision. Behold. Look and see. Pay attention.
The fact that the longest, darkest night of the year coincided, this year, with the Christmas star can surely be taken as a sign for those who would pay attention to such things, a nudge of grace for a world that pines for a glimmer of hope.
It was just what I needed to lift my dark mood and remove the veil that had caused me, like the blind man, to see people like trees walking. My dimmed vision and the burdens of this difficult year had fooled me into believing things — including myself — were somehow less than.
All year I’ve had a sense that something important was happening, in and around me, but whatever it was has been kept curtained off. That evening, as I watched the lights on the tree twinkle like stars, lines from a familiar Christmas song played in my head:
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices; For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn. (from “O, Holy Night”, Adolphe Adam)
As we celebrate the fortuitous advent of Emmanuel, may we be granted eyes to see — a 20/20 vision, if you will — the wonder that surrounds us, even still. The Light that leads us. The grace and hope that carry and sustain us. Fear not, the angels say. Behold.
One of my great uncles had 11 children. They came to our house once, some of them having to sleep in our camper out in the driveway. At our house, when one of the five of us deserved a scolding, my mother tended to run all our names together as she yelled, too distracted to zero in on the one who was at fault. I tried to imagine what it must be like to mentally juggle 11 kids, so I asked my uncle what his kids’ names were. He got all the way to 10–twice–and could not for the life of him recall who he was leaving out. This both shocked and amused me.
In my Catholic childhood, big families were part of the scenery, as were loud, over-the-top wedding receptions, midnight mass on Christmas Eve, and sweating nervously in the confessional box. I went to parochial school for several years and wore a white blouse and blue plaid skirt with loafers every day as the nuns taught class. On a couple of occasions, I had to hold out my palm to be whacked with a ruler for talking too much. I can recite the Hail Mary, Our Father, and Grace Before Meals in my sleep. We went to mass with my father on Sundays, but my mother did not go. She had a falling out with the Church before I came along, and she spent Sunday mornings with her coffee and the crossword puzzle. I always missed her presence there, wished I could have heard her voice blending with my father’s in song.
I’ve always been a questioner. This did not always work in my favor (hence, the palm whacking). In third grade, the nun asked the class to close our eyes tightly and tell her what we saw. I said I saw blackness with bursts of flashing lights. (Try it–tell me I’m wrong.) Apparently, the correct answer was “nothing,” but I would not give in to that fiction. I knew what I’d seen and, like young George Washington, would not tell a lie. Lesson: people in positions of authority could tell you what you should believe, but they could not make you believe it. From then on, I questioned lots of things, which finally culminated in a hostile car ride on the way to mass one Sunday, when I demanded to know why I had to go. My father, at his wit’s end with my incessant questioning, gave up, pulled over, and told me I could walk back home if I couldn’t bear to endure a mere hour with God.
I stalked back home to my mother and the crossword puzzle, but he’d missed the point. It wasn’t God I was questioning. Him, I got. For me, God was personal and experienced. He was my Aibileen Clark, from The Help, whispering to me that I was kind, smart, and important, when everything else in middle school seemed to say the opposite. It was logical and reasonable to me that God was holding the world together. It was either that or Bermuda grass–an easy choice. It was the particular trappings of church I had trouble with. We read from the hymnal each week, with prescribed scriptures and songs according to what day it was. We sat, stood, and knelt as dictated. The “smells and bells” of the church were beginning to wear thin.
For the next few years, I read, studied, investigated, asked. At my father’s request, I had a Q&A with my priest, took lots of classes in college. The world of faith was a petri dish that I gazed at intently, curious to see what would appear, certain that something would. I found a more grounded, personal, rubber-meets-the-road faith in the Protestant tradition where I landed. It seemed more engaging, challenging, and best of all, encouraged questions. I watched and experienced a dynamic, alive faith in the lives of people I knew. So now I guess I have a sort of dual citizenship. When you’re raised Catholic, it’s something you carry with you, even if you’ve lapsed. It’s like being German by birth, but not walking around in lederhosen carrying a stein of beer. No one would even know by looking at you.
This past summer our family toured Israel, historically holy ground for three major world religions. There, you literally wear your faith on your sleeve. You can tell by hairstyles, dress, and language which faith someone holds, unlike in America, where we tend to hide it well. At the wailing wall, amidst dozens of orthodox Jews praying and chanting with a fervent rocking motion, I experienced a presence of the sacred so moving I wept. Walking in the historical steps of Christ, in the stone holding cells beneath the chief priest’s house, again there was a sacred awe. People at several of the Muslim sites we visited were openly hostile. There, I felt the opposite of peace, yet it was still a spiritual experience. Israel is an intensified microcosm of faith displayed in a bell jar for the world to see on the nightly news.
Despite how culturally adversarial and balkanized different faiths can be, tradition can be a useful talisman, a beacon shining on the path behind and lighting the way forward. Revisiting the church of my youth, I can appreciate a depth that I was oblivious to as a kid, squirming in the pew, and more importantly, I appreciate that others find a depth and a comfort there. I hope I have matured in many ways since that long walk home when I was banished from the car. One thing I have noticed is that much of my walk in faith has been like that moment in third grade—bursts of light in the blackness. Moments where I totally get it and feel a grateful peace, and moments where I stumble along in the dark stepping on Legos, ignoring lights along the way. I still question, seek, occasionally doubt or wonder, and encourage my kids to do the same. It warms my soul that they can hear their dad and me blending our voices in the pew on Sundays, not because we make some lyrical harmony, but because we are creating a tradition and a beacon of our own, one they can draw a peace from and build on themselves. I am grateful they know a personal Father who will always, no matter the chaos or multitudes, be able to recall their names, leaving no one out.
A long time ago, our family happened upon this idea of what I’ll call “God signs.” The idea came through a friend of ours who had mentioned that whenever he was faced with a tough decision or was feeling conflicted or particularly low, he had started noticing birds. Not just birds on a wire or flying by, but he’d be sitting alone somewhere outside and a single sparrow would perch close by. Now, maybe sparrows are just an extroverted little species or are particularly bold trying to beg for crumbs. I’ve certainly fed my share of them on the patio outside Panera. But these weren’t sparrows in a group who appeared to want something. This would just be a single sparrow, and it would alight nearby and stay for a while.
If you are familiar with scriptures, you might be thinking, as he did, of that verse in Matthew 6 where Jesus refers to the birds of the sky as a reminder that God takes care of all of his creation. All of it. Even you. So worrying doesn’t help anything. Because it became such a regular occurrence to see a sparrow in difficult times of his life, our friend chose to see the little bird as a “God sign,” God’s way of saying “Hey, I’m thinking of you right this minute. Be joyful.”
While I liked the idea of God sending little tangible messages as a nudge or nod to people, at the time I was kind of an eye-roller about that sort of thing. I mean, really, ever heard of coincidence? We were in the middle of raising our young kids, struggling with a business and the craziness of life in our early-30’s. I was tired and, let’s face it, had become a little cynical in my faith. I didn’t get the big, brazen answers to prayers that some people seemed to. Bad stuff had happened in my life and I just had to handle it. Nobody with a red cape swooped in to Save the Day. And while little magical sparrows were sweet and all, that sort of thing would never happen to me.
So when my husband came home and told me about the sparrow thing and the idea of it maybe being a “God sign” and wasn’t that neat, I admit it: I scoffed. Actually, I think I said OUT LOUD, “Oh, right. You can interpret it that way if you want. But God would never do that for me.” I probably threw in an old-fashioned “pshaw” and then did the eye-rolling thing and said “If I had a God sign it would be something totally ridiculous like a praying mantis.”
Where did I pull that one from? I don’t have a particular affinity for insects (except maybe bees). I could’ve picked a lightning bug or Japanese beetle or even a bumblebee, something I saw every day in our yard. But I was trying to come up with something nuts, totally out of the realm of what I saw on a regular basis. Anybody can see a sparrow, I thought. Let’s see you pull this one out of your hat.
You know where this is going, right? I shelved the conversation in the back of my mind and the next day (the next day) loaded my kids in the car to go to a local blueberry patch, about 30 minutes from our house. We met some other moms there and spent the morning picking a gallon or two of berries. After our picnic lunch, when it was time to leave, I got everyone in their car seats and threw my stuff in the passenger seat. We still had to run to Target for an errand before heading home and the afternoon was getting away from us. I was distracted and thinking of what was on the list for the rest of the day. Which was probably why I didn’t see him until I had already backed out of my space. As I took the car out of reverse and looked ahead to drive out of the parking lot, there he was. I gasped so loud the kids in the back were startled. “What’s wrong, Mommy??”
I pointed to the windshield. There, smack dab in the middle of the glass, staring in at me with a look on its face like “You were saying?” was the biggest, greenest praying mantis I’d ever seen. I didn’t even know they got that big. It was a good 7 or 8 inches long, perched sitting up like they do with its arms folded. I might have seen a mantis when I was a kid sometime. I kind of remember my dad showing me one he’d found once, but I’d never run across one myself. Like, in the WILD, let alone this close to me on my CAR.
After a moment of stunned disbelief, I started laughing. No. Way. This was before cell phones with cameras on them, or you’d better believe I would have subjected this guy to a photo shoot on the spot. “Look!” I told the kids, “Look at this big bug!! It’s a praying mantis!!” For some reason, my kids couldn’t fathom why this would be so funny to me or why I didn’t just turn on the wipers and get it off, my usual reaction to unwanted insects. “Look at him! Isnt’ he AMAZING??”
I continued to laugh all the way to Target. All the way back into town, 30 minutes away. I drove at normal speed–on the highway around 50 mph–and he stayed there. The wind didn’t blow him off. It was like a mantis shampoo commercial, with the breeze slightly ruffling his wings as he turned his triangle head this way and that. Mocking me. God was like “you think I can’t do a mantis? I’ll show you mantis. How ’bout THIS.” This granddaddy of all mantises clung to my window until we parked at Target. He stayed there as I showed him to my kids up close. Then we had to go in the store, and when we came back out he was gone.
I was chastened. Touche. For some reason, a verse from Joshua came to mind, clear as a bell: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” I tucked that little gem away. I’d been deservedly popped upside the head. Oh me of little faith.
Could it have been a coincidence? Sure. Insects are everywhere. I have seen them since then, though. It’s usually when I’m distracted, busy working on My List, which good Type A people always have on hand. I’d not seen one for YEARS, and now I see them every few weeks. They’re unusual and reclusive. I’ll just be walking out the door, and there’ll be one sitting on the fence. And–coincidence or not–I see them when I’ve been deep in thought (ok, worry) about an issue in my life or a relationship. That Joshua verse always pops into my head. My spirits always lift and I feel like I’ve been given a nod from above. Whether it’s been actively placed there just for me or whether I just choose to see it as a reminder of what I should be more mindful of, I have grown to appreciate more of the magic and joy in life. I’m a lot less dismissive than I was back then. More full of wonder and ready to notice and receive blessings, however they’re packaged. Even in a weird little green bug.
