My Spiritual Experience

I had a truly spiritual experience this week.

A little background:

When I was a b oy I slept in a room we called the sun porch. It was a long room off the hall with a doorway into a bedroom (my sister’s). It had windows around the three walls: the end walls had two windows each and the long wall at the back of the house had ten windows. Actually, all these walls were windows. The depth of this room was about 6-7 feet. My bed was in one corner along the long wall, which faced east. I had “the sun in the morning and the moon at night,” as the song says.

The result of this set up meant that I went to bed every night was a view of the sky in the east, mostly after dark. I saw, studied, and was taught about the stars occasionally by my brother who was a sailor in WWII. I had a pretty good knowledge about the stars, planets, and sky “events” from my six years at that house. I was there for 2^nd – 7^th grade.

By the time I got out of college I had learned a lot about astronomy, and had a few great books and had gone through a small telescope and some pairs of binoculars in studying the stars and the moon. During college I took the opportunity to photograph the pages in an old book from the library (Ball’s Handbook of the Heavens) and print up two copies of the pages in the darkroom at school (I was photographer for the school newspaper and yearbook). One copy was for the chemistry teacher and the other was for me!

I didn’t realize I had taken the sky for granted. It was just always there. As a radio amateur I participated in “field days” when we camped out for weekends and made as many contacts as we could with our mobile and portable equipment. There were sometimes great places to observe the sky on these trips, like my favorite on the top of Mount Joy in Valley Forge Park.

I worked one season during the Geophysical Year (actually 18 months) doing meteorite watches on various nights and sending observation data to a processing center. (I think it was in Montreal, Canada, but I’m not sure I remember that right.)

As the years ground by I also changed. Although I still thought a lot about space and the sky, my activities shifted to science fiction and more worldly concerns, mainly music, magic, theater craft and drinking. The world, in return also changed, sadly enough, to greater air and light pollution across most inhabited areas.

Any night I went out I would glance at the sky, but frankly was sometimes upset to find I could not find any constellations, but only the brightest of stars and planets. Sometimes I wasn’t sure about what star I was even seeing without the “reference” stars around and asterisms to see entire areas. I tried using binoculars to enhance my viewing, but the reduced field of view left me with more stars in a small area of sky than I was familiar with using the naked eye. (Comet hunters, I might add, get to know small areas of sky in more detail in order to “catch” a point of light that doesn’t belong there due to its relative motion; they know the less bright stars that the casual observer never sees.)

Slowly but surely I was losing my fascination and love of the stars! The actual conquest of space from the major rocket launches spoiled my enjoyment of science fiction (and I never got much into fantasy) so I faded out of science fiction activity. I had become Earth-bound.

So, what was this spiritual experience? I was outside a night this previous week, checking the sky as I do from time to time when there are some nice alignments of planets (still visible for the most part) and the moon. The total eclipse of the sun, the shadow of which swept across the United States in 2017, brought me out with a quickly thrown together pin-hole projector to watch it on. (Never, NEVER look directly at the sun; I don’t even trust the glasses they sell because the heat and production flaws can sometimes cause them to crack and let the sun burn your eyes; you can become blinded by this.) These small visits with my old friends in the sky were all I had left of years of observations.

That night, following a few days of light rain, was clearer than most. I was out later than usual, even for me, to take our dog out. I had our outdoor lights off, and so did many neighbors. (I hate it that so many leave theirs on all night!) But it was clear enough and dark enough, even in my front yard, to see the sky as it should be seen. There was the milky way, which I rarely see, and all the current constellations filling the sky not obstructed by trees. I walked the dog around a little just so I could view different areas. There was no moon, also, which was a help.

As I stood and looked up, absorbing the overwhelming beauty and memories of the myths, folk stories, and human history associated with the creation and meaning of the sky story I was struck with one thought. These were only the stars I could see (maybe 30,000 in one hemisphere of the sky on any given night) and they are all in our one galaxy (unless you are acute enough to see, naked eye, the nearest galaxies in Andromeda). And yet, there are billions and billions of other galaxies everywhere humans have been able to look and capture their light. And there are probably more and more galaxies we have never seen yet. And each galaxy has billions and billions of stars. And who can guess how many planets exist around some per cent of those stars. And life …. how much of it is there?

We are such a tiny, tiny piece of the universe. We take ourselves so seriously even though we are truly nothing special; our planet is ordinary, our sun is ordinary, our galaxy is ordinary. Everything we do, have done, and probably will do is so unremarkable and so temporary both in memory and in fact when considered with what is going on “out there.”  How can anything we are be anything but the fact that we just are. Just our being is remarkable, but to whom?

To what society? To what country? To what planet? To what galaxy? To anything in this universe?

I was transfixed, knowing definitely that I am just “stuff” that some forces have come to form into …. me.  From my parents, theirs, back to man, back to development of life, back to formation of Earth, back to formation of our sun, stars, galaxies, particles of matter, back to primary creation by primary force, by what? Unconditional love,  I call it. God. It.

Now, is that spiritual, or what?