moonshot

moon floats high 

in radiant darkness. 

still night peace, 

her gentle glow. 

suddenly, an omen of great portent!

cupid's tiny silver arrow 

slicing upward 

through the heart of Moon. 

and now, his backlit con-trail 

adorns Moon's shimmering grace 

and drags her back into the east. 

It had been a day full of challenge and work and hard struggle. A day when he wrestled with the newness of his life and the failure of his strength, and the uncertainty of his emotional survival and the wonder of his new-found capacity for uncomplicated love. A day when he felt exhilarated and distressed and full of energy and weary and tired, and all these things had come tumbling one on another so fast and so rich and full that he would have marveled at them now if he weren’t so tired.

One of the issues of the day had been his ongoing wrestling match with God. For months now, he had been in a quandary about how he could possibly relate to God. He was confident that the images and metaphors in his Christian faith were valid and true representations of God, but he had come to a deep conviction that they were mere scratches in the sand. The true nature of God must be enormously more complex, and perhaps dramatically simpler, than he had ever considered before.

One of the problems he wrestled with was the profound absence of femininity in the Christian representations of God. He was not trying to turn God into a woman, as some feminists attempt to do, but he was very uncomfortable with reducing God to a man, as his traditional beliefs seemed to want to.

God must be far more masculine and far more feminine than any finite mind could comprehend, and yet perhaps very much of neither. He was frustrated with the simplistic approach he and his culture had taken with this problem. We were all too happy to construct a nice tidy patriarchy and let it go at that. He had always been willing to live in that tiny tidy box until recently, when his transformation had begun.

Now this problem of the true nature of God was a primary consuming preoccupation. The more he had wrestled with this, the more he understood the inadequacy of his understanding and connectedness to God. He had not yet reached the point where he had any comfortable mode of communication with this great magnificent unfathomable Deity. He had no name for God. He had no pronoun rich enough in gender to refer to God. He felt wholly inadequate and unqualified to approach God, and in spite of his theological grounding and training, or perhaps because of it, could not bring himself to any resolution of this problem.

He was reluctant to discuss this with any of his Christian friends, because he knew the patent answers they would give him. They were the very same answers that had been comfortable and dependable for him all his life. Now they were no less true than they had ever been, but they were shallow and insufficient for the God of which he had begun to catch tiny glimpses. This God was far more. This God had a capacity and intensity and presence that all his metaphors and all his analogies and all his imagery could not express.

Mingled into his wrestlings was another thread of ponderous enigma: the nature, power, and mystery of woman. Just as he was confounded by the nature of God, he was also equally perplexed and challenged by the mysteries of the feminine and of that half of the species so intimately steeped in it. These two mysteries seemed to be connected. He felt that if he could understand the nature and strength and remarkable beauty of woman, it would somehow enhance and compliment his understanding of God. Thus far, both had been illusive.

Today had been a day of wrestling with all this. As he lay down, he had not come to any satisfactory conclusions, and was no more settled in the matter than he had been at the beginning of the day. Having settled onto the pillow and pulled up the covers against the February chill, he opened his eyes to see a remarkable thing. It was a gift. An omen from the God he could not fathom. An image bursting with intense symbolism. It was profoundly simple. Dramatic beyond telling. His heart melted in a puddle in the middle of his bed.

Outside his window, and high up in the sky, the full moon hung still and ready. She was bright and clear and no cloud was visible anywhere at all. And running straight through the heart of the moon from west to east was a tiny jet plane flying very high. It laid a long, lingering condensation trail straight out to the west from the moon as it went, and now as he watched, Cupid’s little arrow pulled the luminous silver con-trail through the moon, and shot swiftly into the eastern sky. The con-trail was backlit by the moon’s intense glow, and was joined to her in their reflective radiance.

This image was so striking, so dramatic and evocative, that he lost himself in it for as long as it lasted. It was not profound in any theological sense. But it was clearly a message from heaven to his awakening. It was perhaps not seen by any other living being, since timing and location were essential to the seeing. And although it is conceivable that the same precise image is visible many times over whenever the moon is full, he had never once in his entire life been in the right place and time to see such a thing. The God he could not fully comprehend had placed an indelible mark on a fleeting moment. It was a remarkable, tiny act of beauty and creation meant for one man and one moment. He would never forget it!