Cut Off from the Gods

If ever you wanted a symbol for our current predicament you need look no further than the fact that few of us can see the night sky any more. We are literally cut off from the heavens.

Until the invention of electric lighting human beings were able to see the glories of the night sky in almost every location of the globe. This helped keep them in touch with transcendent reality. At the very least, they were aware of something beyond that was much greater. But now all that is gone. Only in the most remote locations can one see the true magnificence and beauty of the stars and constellations that remind us of the Creator and the fact that his works exceed anything we can possibly imagine. For most of us, especially in towns and cities, a few of the major stars and planets is all we can perceive on a clear night, and the sad truth is that most of us don't even bother to look at those. The recent solar eclipse was a reminder of the impact the movement of the heavens can have on the human soul but the moment passed and we soon got back to our normal shrivelled existence.

The increasing invisibility of the physical heavens is not just a symbol for the complete loss of contact with the spiritual. It is a consequence of it. That invisibility is caused by the products of materialism. A more spiritually focussed consciousness would not wish to destroy our relationship with the sky and stars but to nurture it as a source of inspiration and connection with the image of the divine in creation. We, on the other hand, are happy to trade spiritual connection for material comfort and convenience. I am not suggesting we should return to the hunter/gatherer way of life, but there is surely a happy medium between spiritual awareness and material ease.

The vision of the physical heavens feeds the soul. It is a sign of God's work in a quite different way to the signs on earth. It gives us a sense of the transcendent and the utter vastness of God. That does still exist but in a severely diminished form because we have traded real light, which includes darkness for there was no darkness before light arose to reveal it, with false light. False light shuts out real light just as the artificiality of the modern world shuts out God to the point where even many people who claim to follow God have no idea who or what God is, and simply follow an idol of their own imagining, often  one that seems quite happy to co-exist with this world to which God is ultimately subordinate. I am not saying it is the obscuration of the night sky that has done that but the same mindset that has obscured the sky has also obscured God. We need to learn to look up again, and we need a clean space in which to do that.