Hope and Sunrise

[alanajoli]

I wish I had had my camera as we hiked up East Rock in New Haven for the sunrise service this morning. I often comment on asakiyume's blog about how I really enjoy seeing the world through her photographs. This morning, I had the experience of watching the sun rise, first over a hill in the distance, and then over a stretch of clouds that formed a second horizon, and thinking how I felt like the beauty of the world was coming into focus. It's hard to look at the sunrise for any length of time, because it becomes too bright quickly -- the eyes can't handle so much light. And if you twist the metaphor and think of it literally -- thinking of light for what it means rather than the science behind what it is -- it's nice to think that there can be moments when we are faced with so much light that we're dazzled, that our breath is stolen away.

Easter for me is a day of hope -- of the restoration of hope. I always come away from Easter with a feeling like the year is new, things are beginning all over again. It doesn't surprise me that there are so many mythic parallels, and that Easter itself takes place during a spring festival. Tolkien and Lewis talked about the correlation of the spring myths (Robert Graves's "year king" tradition; Osiris's battle through the underworld to come back from the dead), and Tolkien convinced Lewis to think of them as a sort of rehearsal for Christianity, in which the myths became fact. (I've found a description of this conversation most recently in From Achilles to Christ by Louis Markos, which I discovered in a Google search and obviously must read in its entirety.) The emotional content of those stories is certainly a unifying factor: what we believed was dead has returned to life. Hope has returned, and we are reborn. The sun has crested the horizon and filled our world with such brightness that our eyes overflow with it and we must look away.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

thinking of light for what it means rather than the science behind what it is -- it's nice to think that there can be moments when we are faced with so much light that we're dazzled, that our breath is stolen away.

Yes, yes exactly: the actuality of breathtaking

Makes you think, this is grandeur.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I don't think Lewis made the distinction so much (though he might have) -- I'm using my own words to describe some ideas I'm getting from Barfield. Lewis would have been familiar with the idea in Barfield's terms, but I don't know that he ever used it. (Now I'm tempted to go looking for Eustace's conversation and see if it's Barfieldian!)

I wonder how much understanding of the stars is shaped by how well we can see them. They're so easy to abstract when we're thinking about the science, but faced with thousands of glittering lights above, I find it hard to remember the "facts" and am much more drawn to their beauty. It's almost like two separate things -- the stars I see and the stars I've read about in books. And even though the science is wrong, I think the woman in Kentucky has something right -- if we forget that these big balls of gas thousands of miles away are also points of light in the darkness, we've lost something important.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's lovely. Thank you for finding it! (I'm always delighted to see I'm not the only one who mucks up formatting. And I'm very tickled at how many comments I've gotten from you today! I always delight in reading your blog, and your responses here have certainly helped to deepen my original post. *g*)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I truly believe things can be more than one thing at once--I feel it about myself, and I feel it about the things I experience--and this story of the stars shows exactly how. (As does Alana's original remark...)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can imagine him saying that ♥

[lyster.livejournal.com]

It's a beautiful thought. I did something in a book a while ago about stars being giant balls of burning gas and also holes in the sky -- reality being a flexible construct.

When I've been in places with an awful lot of sky (Mongolia at night, the Everglades, my backyard), I've always found knowledge of astronomy and astrophysics to be an aid to awe. Rudolph Otto says that overwhelming difference in scale ushers us into the experience of the holy, and nothing bears him out for me quite so much as seeing the dust of the Milky Way and thinking "These are all as big as the sun or larger, and some of them are millions of years dead now."

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a good point, too -- the sense of awe and its relation to the sacred. I've heard people talk that way about their religion as well, particularly Catholics -- knowing that thousands of people over maybe fifteen hundred years have performed the same ceremonies with the same words. That sense of smallness, and being surrounded by something larger, is easy to lose in the midst of going about normal, every day lives.

[lyster.livejournal.com]

Absolutely! This is one of the things I love about high church. The sense that the rituals have been done this way down the generations adds a sense of scale in time that may or may not exist in space (depending on the size of your church). Confucius & his descendents also stress the need to not only carry on the rituals to the next generation, but to 改 (gai) them, or "correct" or "reform" them: keep them alive for the next generation, so they continue to be relevant and profound, rather than just something we do for the sake of going through the motions.

This is also one of the things I like about martial arts. The basic Taiji movements have existed for at least 400 years; basic Yoga movements for even longer than that. Most of the I-form Karate katas are at least 100 years old. Of course, sensei still needs to 改 them or else they don't work so well in reality... This is why good teachers are so important.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You've been in Mongolia? *jealous*

[lyster.livejournal.com]

This was a little under two years ago. We'd gotten lost on horseback on the steppe, our water was low, and we didn't have a flare gun, so we were pretty rightly boned. Finally, we started making our way back to the last ger camp we'd stayed in; just as night fell like an anvil, we saw the campfires over the ridge of a small hill.

We were exhausted, but man the stars were pretty that night.

[judo100.livejournal.com]

To me, the universe has so much light and energy that we can't grasp it all - or even nearly all - because it overwhelms us. A sunrise like you describe is a good example, and that's only a sunrise, not the whole universe. One aspect of being human is the tension between feeling like a meaningful individual and sudden experiences of the vast divine that can make us feel less than nothing. Reconciling the two is a task worthy of a lifetime...

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Reconciling the two is a task worthy of a lifetime...

And what a joyful path it is to travel. :)