I was reading recently about a minister who, as a young child, had been introduced to meteor showers by her father. In August every year, these meteor showers return to our night skies. This shower, called the Tears of Saint Lawrence, were seen in such abundance from the little balcony off her parent’s bedroom that she was in awe. She talked of learning reverence from the experience. While feeling a part of the meteor shower, she said it helped to make her feel the place she had in the great scheme of things. We learn reverence for things that we cannot create, things that are big and things that are small: a tree, the Grand Canyon, a hurricane, a bumble bee, a microscopic virus which can bring us to our knees.
Although the members of our Sunday school class and I are reading it as adults, I think that children are more susceptible to “awe” than we are. We’ve seen so much and done so much that we sometimes overlook those things in this world that we should have reverence for.
The story brought back memories of our daughter’s desire for a telescope. She was thrilled with the pictures of the planets and wanted so much to be able to see the rings of Saturn and the face of the moon that she begged for a “big” telescope. Her father, who was as much in love with space as she was, made it happen. Santa put together a nice big telescope and had it standing in front of the tree on Christmas morning.
We could hardly take time to open the presents that year for her begging to go outside and look at the moon. It was morning … a cloudy December morning … and she didn’t understand that she had to wait. The second shock came when she found out she would have to go outside in the dark to view the stars. Outside? Dark?
Through many stages of negotiations, she finally was coaxed onto the front porch that evening. Unhappy about the dark, disgusted that her father took too long to focus on anything, furious that she was too short to reach the eye-piece, and generally irritated by the whole process, she huffed into the house exclaiming that she hated “stars.”
The telescope was used a few more nights that year, but since it was not “professional strength,” it wobbled too much, was hard to focus, and was generally unappreciated by the “chief scientist father-figure”. The telescope is still in the basement, some thirty years later.
We did venture out another time to view meteors. “We” being the two girls and their mother. The father wimped out about the first ten minutes when he realized we would be lying on blankets on the grass among the mosquitos and June bugs. We had taken along pillows and blankets, snacks and drinks, binoculars and cameras. I’m not sure why the binoculars and cameras, but it seemed appropriate. Again, the darkness wasn’t attractive. Before long, I found myself alone, viewing a spectacular meteor shower. I called into the house to tell everyone to come outside. At this time, the girls had moved into their pre-teen eye-rolling stage and were totally disgusted with my “awe.”
I watched a little longer, but my nose started running, my legs began to itch, and the mosquitos began to buzz. Maybe if I’d had a little balcony off the bedroom where we could have lain together on a soft blue blanket like the author of my Sunday school book, I might have taught my daughters about reverence for the night sky … and I could have written a best-selling book.
- Log in to post comments
