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Tuesday, July 03, 2007

submitted by hillary mohaupt...

It’s just aft midnight, and I’ve just come in from a long late-night chat with a friend under the stars and over bubble tea. While the two of us have gotten to be close through Protestant activities at Macalester, we have each been navigating very different—and yet in some ways, very similar—questions of faith lately. One thing we’ve both learned from our time on campus is that there is power in being able to name our thoughts, that by saying aloud our anxieties and our hope we might be able to push forward beyond the obstacles and the limits of our imaginations. So I think the conclusion we parted with tonight will be fulfilled soon: we’ll talk again, and we’ll keep talking.

One of the things I like best about summer is being able to lie under a warm night sky and to look up into the constellations. The goose bumps I get aren’t from being chilled by the temperature; they come from being awed by the vastness. Which is so cliché, of course. But at the very beginning of the summer, I finally finished reading Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, which had been sitting on my night stand for months. One line struck me, a college student trying to get back down to earth after a semester abroad: “They say the sky is the same every where. Travelers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying take comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you are of the mystical tendency consolation, and even explanation, have showered down from the unbroken surface.”

While the vastness of the sky can be overwhelming, I also love the immensity and the depth that hangs over the wandering and the restless like the kind of gigantic black umbrella a proper English gentleman might tuck into the crook of his elbow in case of a storm. It’s hard not to believe we are all interconnected and interdependent when we look up and see the same sky that shelters both our closest friends and people we will never meet.

One of things that I brought back from my recent travels is a 2x4 note card with a beachscape and an inspirational quote on it. The scape, as you can probably guess, is really mostly sky, and the quote in English goes something like this: “If you go to the ends of the earth, you will find traces of God; if you go to the deepest part of yourself, you will find God.”
I like looking up and knowing that the land on which I plant my feet is not the only place from which I can see the Big Dipper and the North Star. I like knowing, too, that God is nearby, whether I look for God in the penumbras and supernovas, or simply in the deepest questions shared between friends.
posted by Noelle at 10:26 AM

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