Dominus Illuminatio Mea

I think it began with the sunset. As I descended Highway 50 over the El Dorado Hills, there it was, this magenta orange explosion of the horizon being swallowed by a distant peak. It was a gift, which 30 seconds later I would have missed. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata had begun on the radio, and I smiled at the symmetry of it; sun and moon in the same thought.

Or, it could have begun with the pensive wave and intentional meeting of the eyes with my father from his porch as I drove away, moments earlier. Nowadays, every gesture, every glance from his 89-year-old frame seems pregnant with meaning, or potential, or sometimes a gnawing feeling of something missed. My mother was in tears at seeing me go. She’s in tears a lot these days, the confusion of dementia, the hardness of life at 87. Perhaps something about this parting made me susceptible to being stunned by the magenta-orange spectacle around the bend, which, with the brooding music roused something in me. I instinctively prayed to the God of Spectacle – heartfelt prayers for my parents whom I had just dropped off, for each member of my family, for our future.

But perhaps, actually, it began nine hours and 450 miles earlier that morning, with the hymn I sang with my father and mother and my wife at the ocean. I Cannot Tell Why He, sung to the Irish melody known popularly as O Danny Boy, had stung me with its simultaneous acknowledgment that there are things we don’t understand about the story of God yet there are things we hold in surety, His love for us, his sacrifice for us, our future with Him. I began to weep as I sang, providing a spectacle of my own for the moment. But they accepted my tears at these words. In fact, words have been the only things I have ever seen to make my father cry, most often the words of a poem. I think he understood.

So now on the road with dusk descending and the Sonata ending I continued on my three-hour journey home, when I was blindsided by the “it.” A full, yellow moon rose at three times its normal size, through Halloween clouds that lay in horizontal lines before it. It was interesting, but I have seen this before. Every few minutes I checked it out through my left window as I headed south. On the radio the music had been replaced by a reading of the book of Ephesians, no commentary, just the poetry of the King James translation read by someone with a voice that made you realize how true and beautiful the text was. As the night deepened the moon ascended above the clouds and brightened and then strangely took up residence dead center in my front windshield. At first this was a mere curiosity. How long would the straight road allow this? But after twenty minutes of driving into the moon the bewilderment of Spectacle returned. I hardly looked at the road. The truth of the text and the brilliant sphere illuminating my face – like a Mag Light in the teeth of God – stirred something in me and I found myself pouring out my condition to God as one does a doctor. As if God had said “open” I let Him look inside me with his lunar scope, let Him see what I was I longed for most. Holding nothing back I prayed urgent prayers of confession and the depth of longing for focus of one who has felt pulled in a thousand directions for too long. Through new tears I prayed that for the rest of my life, for the rest of my children’s lives, we would center on Christ, make Him our single-minded focus, sense His illumination, seek Him through our wind shield wherever we go. And I knew, as the brightness of moonlight blurred and refracted through tears, that the doctor was listening.

The moon shifted slightly after that, the curve of the road moving it left or right, still always dominant in my view. I was breathless for the rest of the trip home. It is impossible to express how focused and unique this encounter was, but I felt both examined and heard and healed.

When did "it" begin, this encounter with a God who took a thirty-minute, loving look at me? With the hymn? With the wave from my Dad? With the sunset and Sonata? Or perhaps, when my mother pushed for the last time and the doctor said, “it’s a boy.” Has there ever been a time when His light has not been on me, even if I am unaware?

Dominus Illuminatio Mea. The Lord is my light.