Beatific borealis
A rule of life and communion with God (part 2)
Most of our social media feeds exploded with photos of the Northern lights. Even here in light-polluted Toronto, last night’s sky was painted with faint pink hues. When I lived in Calgary, Alberta I witnessed far more dramatic shows of the Aurora Borealis. I remember waking up my son one night to clamber up on the roof of our house, sitting in silence mesmerized by the cosmic dance going on.
To witness the Aurora Borealis (Aurora Australis for my southern friends) is a stunning experience. In your mind you can connect the dots of causation - your eye beholds a disturbance of the earth's magnetic field, triggered by solar activity. Clouds of charged particles are flung 149 million miles from the sun towards earth where they collide with our outer atmosphere and paint the night sky green, red, purple, pink, and sometimes blue.
That is a correct but bland explanation. Watching the Aurora you experience something more than causation - you catch this humbling awareness of being part of something so much larger. It’s like a window into the wider cosmos has been opened up, and you are participating in a wild, strange and beautiful reality in, under, above and all around you.
Even more, it’s the shape-shifting dance of the lights. How to describe it - moving layers and ribbons of illumination that morph into circles and arches. Pillars of light fluttering in the sky, as if some finger was creating. Curtains of matter rippling and folding in this celestial origami. Someone or something is showing off.
Other than occasional oohs and aahs, people are often silenced. I remember shivering with chill or wonder, I’m not sure, but feeling utterly at home in the universe.
I wonder if witnessing the Aurora Borealis is a little like what Moses experienced when God showed him his backside from the cleft of the rock. Or maybe it’s a taster of what the Christian tradition has called the Beatific vision.
Scripture tells us that at the heart of the universe is not cold nothingness but a creative community of Father, Son and Spirit. It’s a dynamic community of love and hospitality where the Father delights in the beauty of the Son, and the Son enjoys the Father, and the Spirit thrills to the Father and Son, a spiral of endless joy and delight. The Church Fathers had a word to describe this self-giving dynamic life of the Trinity. It’s the greek word perichoresis, meaning a dance (choresis related to choreography). Which makes me wonder if the dance of Northern Lights is a window into God’s life.
According to the Christian faith, humans are created to participate in this glorious divine life. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13 that “we will see him face to face.” And later in 2 Corinthians 3, he says that “we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory.” It’s a vision of God, having the eyes of your heart opened (Eph. 1:18), the perceptual capacity to see and experience the reality of God.
I recently read an astonishing conversion story. A hardened atheist, living in a mill-town context where nothing was sacred, having absolutely no shred of an inclination to even want God to exist let alone believe in any form of deity, encountered God. As he actively engaged his suicide plan, accepting the inevitability of his death, he found some force reaching out to him, first in the presence of his grandfather, then in an unfolding of reality that the Aurora Borealis only hints at. Throughout the account, he’s reaching for words to describe the ineffable, struggling to do so because he’s trying to describe the very place where words first come from.
Whatever “it” was that he experienced he names as a revelation. His account reads much like Blaise Pascal’s vision of God. Pascal was a famous mathematician and scientist who converted to Christianity and became one of the great apologists for the faith. One evening, on November 23, 1654, Pascal had an encounter with God. We know this because after he died, the account of this encounter was found sewn into his jacket. An experience so real he never wanted to be away from it.
Here is a bit of what he recorded. It’s a stammering account, words of a person undone by what’s he’s encountered. Undone by grace and remade by love. Pascal writes:
The year of grace 1654, Monday, 23 November … From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,
FIRE.
GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He goes on from this but you get the picture. This awareness that the tidy world you constructed is simply not large enough to hold the fullness of what is real. It’s the beatific vision. A window into the life of God we were made for.
More often that vision is subtle and more gentle (grateful that God doesn't regularly undo us with revelation - how would we function if not?). Those moments when something in life shimmers through with grace or shines out with a greater love, a rush of joy or peace that flashes beyond the constraints of the physical. A gentle pulling back of the curtain, understanding that God is always present with love, everywhere.
So if we are created for this, how do we experience this? Poet Mary Oliver writes that “attention is the beginning of devotion.” She’s echoing Jesus who lamented how we have eyes but never see (Matt. 13:14), we can look but without ever noticing. In our age of distraction, this perceptual blindness is only heightened.
Which brings me back to a rule of life. At its heart, a rule of life aims for communion with God (my previous post explores this). The practices of a rule of life are established so that our daily lives might participate in God’s triune life, so that we might find ourselves joining in what the Father, Son and Spirit have experienced from before time began.
However, we are distracted people. Psychologist Richard Beck writes “without visual nudges, our attention is pulled in a million different directions, and we find at the end of a long, busy workday, that we’ve hardly thought of God at all.” (Hunting Magic Eels) A rule of life is a tool for the rehabilitation of our attention, redirecting distracted people to the presence of God who is always in front of us.
Yet doesn’t it seem folly to think that something like a rule of life could possibly deliver the freight of a beatific vision? A rule of life can strike one as rather wooden and constraining in comparison to a charged encounter with transcendence.
And yet we are creatures who need help, people mesmerized by glowing rectangles yet oblivious to the wonder before them. British writer C.S. Lewis observed an important reality about our faith practices: “When we carry out our "religious duties" we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last water comes, it may find them ready.” (Reflections on the Psalms)
The rule is not the end - it’s communion with God. Many times, our faith practices will feel tedious, probably like a musician feels picking up their instrument and practicing scales again. But each practice shapes something in us, making us into the kind of person who is ready for communion with God. A rule of life digs channels, neural pathways for our attention, readying us to behold the God who is always present, teaching us to catch the rhythm of God’s life and join the dance.
PS - if your interested in reading that account of the encounter with God I mentioned earlier, you can find it here. (but fair warning that it contains quite a bit of strong language and content)
Love the line “Undone by grace and remade by love”