The light runs silent, a muted triumph won at the ribbon of a horizon, a flame in heliotrope. The victor is cheered only by the rumble of a bee, and except for that bee, the entire street is empty. What are you doing eating this late in the day, little creature? Don’t you know that far to the West burns a raging light that never consumes itself?
The light resounds. You can sense it, but his groans and heaves, the breathing of a strong man who has won another day’s race, is muted by ninety-three million miles of cosmic dust, the pebbles of planets mixed with my skin cells and yours and perhaps, Methusalah’s; according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). We call that space between earth and heaven the atmosphere, but it's really just humanity muffling the light.
Over there, the trunk of a crepe myrtle reaches like a claw to the light, grey and stark as a Winter day against rich blues and purples. In its center rests a fat, red cardinal. He is sleek, still, like an apple on a dead limb, highlighted in silent light. It's as if the sunset has turned his eyes on this one frail creature, and the creature holds his gaze.
I am intruding. I realize this too late. My noticing this moment becomes the noise, the unwanted friend at a lover’s table. Without saying a word, I have brought something loud into the scene, something almost akin to doubt. I have questioned it.
“Quick,” I think. “Look away.”
I shift, turning back to my book, but it’s too late. The cardinal sweeps out of the light and into the safety of a nearby holly, breaking heaven’s gaze.
I am not a painter, but if I was; I would paint the silence. It would look like moonlight on a bed of cabbages, like a cat splayed on my backdoor mat in the morning sun; like the leaves of the oak shaping shadows on my wall as she breaks the afternoon rays. I would paint conversations, two friends peering into each other’s pain over coffee, quietly sharing the unknown. Or, if I was very clever, I would sketch my frantic mind quieted by a tremble of eighth notes that a black capped chickadee gives when sitting at the center of a sunlit, winter rose. I would paint the life inside the light because the light is silent. Silence is light.
Over here, I kneel. I, like many a Mom, am between tasks. The dryer dings. A child’s voice calls for help. I rise to rotate and reassure before returning to kneel, but first I set a timer. I am determined to spend at least ten minutes of my day in prayer.
I kneel in part out of reverence, in part to signal to others the work I am about, and in part because here is where the light falls. I am cold, and from ninety-three miles away, I find its flames comforting.
What does the sun consume all the way up there with nothing but a dusty space between it and the trees? Who is feeding logs to its center? Does the sun burn?
NASA uses the term nuclear fusion, which is the immense tug of gravity working to smash hydrogen into helium, which in turn releases energy. The hydrogen store within the sun is so vast that it will, as far as we know, never be used up. The sun then, if I understand the NASA essay correctly, is a nuclear reactor, creating energy that keeps the entire earth green. It’s not on fire at all. Those aren't flames warming my face. I have imagined a sun too like a fire.
For most of my childhood, I assumed the sun was burning, that it was something like the fires we built on our farm. These were not your average, marshmallow campfires, but vast piles shoved together with the help of a backhoe. Trees were strategically dropped onto its flames, and whole cedars roared while we cleared our land. Little fires would volley themselves out of its perimeter, and it was someone's job to put them out before whole fields were consumed. Despite its size, even these went out if you didn’t feed them.
I thought this was the nature of the sun, a flaming mass that needed something from me. I completely missed the way it works, assuming it was like our raging fires, when it is actually a light unlike any of my own.
I thought I grasped the essence of prayer too.
For years, I misunderstood prayer. I thought of these moments with whispered words as a recitation of my problems, the way I could get things fixed. This resulted in a talking to myself, of sorts, a remembering of what needed to be done. It was me pleading, wriggling, angling under the Almighty’s silent stare.
I suppose I assumed God was altogether like me. He existed as the muscle behind my longings, with a vision of the outcome as limited as my own. He existed in this capacity because I sought good, holy, sacrificial things, truly. For this reason, he would be on my side. Prayer, though I did not realize it, was the act of me reminding him of this. This was noisy prayer at best, intrusive into the Light.
Sometimes, when he didn’t seem to hear me, I snapped. “Where is God when I need him most?” I accused with the words of the author of Psalm 10.
But I am a woman of misunderstandings, thinking sunsets gaze at cardinals and flames burn in space where there is no oxygen. Is God not more than the listener of my wants?
If I lived several thousand years ago, I might cry out: “Unclean, unclean! Have mercy on me, Son of David!” And then I would join the cardinal, who is not holding heaven’s gaze, but merely warming himself in the light that roars where we dare not go.