The radiance when God comes close

I saw it in the rearview mirror while headed to serve as a deacon at the 5 p.m. Christmas Eve service last year.  

The full moon was rising over a hill, light spilling into the atmosphere, though the sky was still bright. Was it the moon’s enormity, or its silence? Something was changing. The houses began to look tiny. The din of humankind was but one part of this larger landscape presided over by the moon—the ducks on the pond already knew this. Stillness was setting in.

Unexpectedly, I sensed something, a quality to things we passed. The words of Abraham Heschel clicked: “Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.” Perhaps I was primed for this on Christmas Eve, when Christians are tuned to the mystery of God not as an abstract concept but as a babe in a manger within the ordinary, earthy, created world.