How Do The Heavens Declare God's Glory?

This was originally posted at The Master's Artist back in 2006, following the Calvin Fesitval of Faith and Writing. I've just gotten back from the 2008 Festival, so it seems apropos.

The heavens declare the glory of God. So begins the nineteenth Psalm. Since so many of us conceive of our life calling along similar lines -- bringing glory to God -- it seemed only natural for me at the time to say what I'm about to share. I was at Mick Silva's blog, reading his report on the Calvin Festival, and I came across this comment from Susan Meissner:

We've (myself included) allowed the message to mess with the mechanics 'cause we think it's "the message" that makes the book Christian. Why can't it be the other way around? Why can't it be astounding literary style that points to an astoundingly creative God?

To which I replied: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and if we aspire to something remotely similar for our work, we could learn something from how the heavens do this (and don't)." So far so good. When I went back later, though, I found that Kathleen Popa had left a message for me. "Yes, go on...."

So I'd been caught! I should have known better than to proof text.

That question rattled around in my mind. How do the heavens declare God's glory? The Psalmist elaborates in the following terms:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
Their measuring line goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,
and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them,
and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

I read these lines, as I have many times before, but now there was something new lurking under the surface. "Emulate that! Learn from that!" And I was stumped. It's much easier to say we should learn from the heavens than to say how such a thing might work. Not for the first time, Scripture had humbled me, tarnishing my glib utterance.

Or so it seemed until Allison Smythe came to the rescue. She's a poet and a good friend, a long-suffering reader of my work, and she's on the verge of leaving Houston for the wilds of Missouri. So last Friday she invited me and Deeanne Gist, the third member of our local critiquing trio, to dinner (along with all our non-writing spouses) at Cavatore, and beforehand we visited the Friends Meeting House. Imagine a church where the pews are arranged in a square. Overhead, the white vaulted ceiling is pierced by a square skylight -- but it's unlike any skylight you've seen before. The cover winches back like a spaceship hatch to reveal the sky above. The opening is beveled, a clean cut that seems to have no depth -- one moment there's roof, and the next is air. It doesn't look quite real. Sitting in my wooden bench with my head cocked back, I feel like I'm watching clouds on the neatest flat screen television on earth. Only this is nature.

Every Friday, weather permitting, a motely group of Houstonians gather to watch the sunset here. They come in groups, they come in couples. For some it's a spiritual end to the week. For a few, I suspect it's a cheap date. Cheap but extraordinary. I for one have never experienced anything quite like it. You sit. You wait. You think there's going to be a meditative silence, only there isn't. Somebody whispers. Somebody shifts on a pew. You're amazed how difficult silence is to achieve, and you realize how little of it there must be in the world. (Given its scarcity, you'd think it would be more treasured and sought after than it is.) The sky, when it changes, doesn't change quickly. You have to watch until small things seem large. The shifting clouds take on a volume you didn't notice before. The gray and blue above is subtle, low contrast. Occasionally the sun will electrify the edge of a cloud, hinting at the intangible vastness overhead. But at first, you have to force yourself to pay attention. You get a little bored.

It's amazing, though. This is the sky over my head every day, but I haven't noticed it before. I would have paid for this experience, which is ironic, because it's free for us all. Put a frame around nature, and suddenly art seems quite small. Time passes and, ironically, as the sun sinks the scene above grows more -- not less -- vivid. There aren't enough words for "blue" in the English language. At one point, Allison's husband Wayne leans over and says: "That looks like my Macintosh screen." He's right. Put a few clickable icons on the sky, and it would look like my computer, too. How artificial nature can seem, how natural artifice. After half an hour the clouds are invisible and all that's left is an intense royal blue, an unreal, beckoning mass that seems as close to my face as anything has ever been. If I were more of a mystic, I could imagine myself being drawn into it.

At one point a bug buzzes through the opening. Later some kind of twig comes spiraling down. We were a room full of strangers, whispering awkwardly, just forty-five minutes ago, but now we have something in common. Not just the sunset, not just the sky, but an experience of presence, as if the heavens above, vast as they are, were somehow personal.

Allison has written beautifully about the experience, dubbing this "the canvas of infinity." The photograph I've borrowed here is hers.

How do the heavens declare the glory of God? That was the question in my head, and this experience answered it. I barely know how to put the answer in words, and I don't pretend to know how to apply it. The heavens are vast and complex, subtle and shifting. They reward close attention. They demand patience. When you gaze at them, sometimes you see things that aren't there and miss things that are. You feel a presence in them, behind them. They are speaking, but you don't know how to repeat what they've said. You hear it, though -- not so much with your ears as with your nerve endings. They lead you to suspect so much, but they also humble you. They make you wonder if you know anything at all, or ever can. And yet, you do know something, without being able to account for how you know except that you experienced it. Except that it was there with you in the room, when the distance between you and everything else seemed to contract.

To call this a mandate for writing big, complicated, serious books would be idiotic. It's a mandate for much more. A mandate for everything, because it is everything, and it points to what Paul says everything points to, whether we realize it or not. My question is answered, though I cannot answer it.