The Second Discourseman
I don’t think I had ever noticed moonlight until a couple of years ago. This is strange considering the part it played in so many stories of my childhood: poachers, smugglers, spies, all making their dubious ways under the silver gleam. But though we see the Moon, it is rare today for a city-dweller to notice its light. Tonight there was an especially magnificent Moon, white in its brightness and orange in its warmth. I caught a glance of it from my bedroom window, and went looking for it in its fullness amongst the fields.
I would recommend everyone to go Moon-hunting. Find a place where no other light shines, and there you will see moonlight. It still surprises me to see the shadows cast by this light. It has travelled all the way from the Sun to the Moon and then back to Earth, and yet it still has the energy to dance across hedges and walls. It is a slightly strange light, an unexpected arrival at a countryside inn, worn from the journey but welcome company nevertheless.
On a night like this, one wonders that we have dispensed so efficiently with the Moon. Its brightness is almost sullenly insistent. But of course in a week or so its reign over the night sky will have waned and human illuminations will reassert themselves, though not without a wounded pride. After all, they cannot compete with that old and infinite beauty.
The Moon may put on a great show on nights like this, but its wonder is not in itself. One cannot stare at an electric light, but you may do so at the Moon. See those rougher and darker areas? They are colossal scars on its surface. We are not so blinded by the light that we do not see them – as perhaps with a scratch on a lightbulb – but nor is the light so weak that we cannot make them out. No, this long-suffering light reaches us from every nook, so that we have got to know the Moon and her blemishes. We even name them, with affection – thus, the Sea of Tranquillity. And she blesses us. Though we have mostly scorned her light, she does not cease to guide and cajole our own seas. What character, in an orbiting rock!
This is the power of light, when it dances upon a subject and makes it a living light itself. This is the power of the Light of the World, sustaining creation in its beauty and shining forth upon man, that we may be a blessing to others. I remember looking at the Moon with a friend, and considering together the preposterousness of it one day being swallowed up at the coming of the Lord. But that is the ultimate promise of the Moon – that there is a Light coming, and the Moon is not the Light, but is here to bear witness about the Light.
Thou, silver Moon with softer gleam,
O praise Him, O praise Him.
The Four Discoursemen 