This Shining Night

Colorado, where I live, is a great place to go stargazing. Up in the mountains, the heavens are particularly vibrant and clear. I go out at night when I can, and, like millions of others today and certainly before me, look up and marvel. What do we see? We see truth, of a sort, for the Psalmist writes, “night unto night sheweth forth knowledge” (19:2). We look up and behold a universe cast abroad in infinite variety and beauty. We are at the edge of a stupendous mystery. Or are we at the center, living in the midst of its marvelous splendor?

The night is sometimes associated with the sorrow and the anxiety of darkness. Blaise Pascal famously saw himself in the midst of a universe and an eternity without bounds. He was unable to grasp his place: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” But even more so, the night is linked, in its vast openness and unbounded vision, with the power and majesty of God: “My mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips . . . when I meditate upon thee, O Lord, in the watches of the night” (Ps. 63:5–6). The deep speckled skies are our story in this sense, too, tied as we are to the shepherds millennia ago. Together, we watch by night.

The earliest Church, at least from the time of Justin Martyr, held that Jesus was born in a cave—a hollow in a hillside behind a dwelling, where animals were supposedly often kept in the land of Judea at that time. It was a “stable,” but not of the kind we imagine on Western ranches or New England farmsteads. It was a place pushed away into the dark, away from sight. The “grotto” of Jesus’s birth became a central feature of the church built on the site of his nativity in Bethlehem. Visitors and pilgrims can still climb down the stairs into its dungeon-like cavity.

Well into the eighteenth century, spiritual writers mined the cave image in their devotions. Why, they wondered (as did St. Bernard), was Jesus not born in his regular home in Nazareth, with relatives and friends, surrounded by some degree of familiarity and comfort? Instead, he comes into the world as a stranger and sojourner. The moral drawn often aimed at the ascetic goal of worldly dispossession. Some writers stressed the figural parallel between Christ’s birth grotto and the grotto of his entombment: We come naked, wrapped in some primordial darkness; and we leave its shadowed sorrows bereft of the transitory goods of the world. To imitate this dispossession in faith is to follow the cross of this twice encaverned savior.

The cave’s gloom is compelling. It both describes the truth and evokes our finally humbled or even frightened sensibilities. But perhaps the cave misleads as well. After all, it seems to put a ceiling on our gaze, hemming us in, weighing down upon us. And the Christmas story is, by contrast, unroofed. People are wandering about the hills; the air is open, and in one explosive instant the sky is filled with glory, making visible every detail across the landscape in a flash of light (Luke 1:8–14). Nothing is hidden, whether dug into the hillsides or burrowed underground (Luke 12:2–3; Ps. 139:7–12). 

In that instant of the nativity, we can recognize, under the canopy of the night’s mystery, true lights shimmering forth rather than an enveloping dusk. We dwell beneath the stars in our small homes. By comparison to the vast night sky, they seem but humble places of gathering. The great starlit dome rightly reminds us that our lives are limited and brief. They echo us (or do we echo them?) in the most basic ways: We sleep and rise, we eat and rest, we wash and organize, we laugh and weep, we raise our families and sometimes sit alone. Yet “Bethlehem,” cave and all, means “house of bread”—that is, it means “home.” A small home, perhaps, within the vastness of the Lord’s creation, but one wherein the daily food of life is found. 

From out of our homes we go and labor. That is the human way, the human call, from time immemorial. “And Adam and Eve bore a child of the Lord, Cain . . . and again another brother, Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep—a shepherd—and Cain was a tiller of the ground” (Gen. 4:1–2). We are all in that primordial venture of life and life-making: workers seeking bread for the home, husbands and wives seeking the stay of the family, children finding ways to live and make their way, all of us seeking to show our love, to get through, to fill our lives with something. We are builders, office workers, teachers, doctors, nurses, ranchers, writers, readers—types of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. We accompany the shepherds, who are but workers keeping watch beneath the vast night sky. There is one story here that binds the myriads of sky-watchers to the small village of the Incarnation—not in darkness, but in the rising gleam of an unanticipated dawn.

Our work is what holds us to the earth, makes us part of this world in which we live, which we share with all creatures, with all the dust-made parts of a creation thrown out into the midst of an endless universe. Many caves, of course, are scattered with debris, signs of life that has disappeared. But there, in Bethlehem, the air is filled with the visible breath of living creatures. “They laid him in a manger,” the place where the sheep, cows, goats, and asses gather for their fodder or their drink—their bread. The manger is where the farmer throws his slop, where beasts and men find their common place within the scheme of God’s creation. “The ox knows his master, and the ass his master’s manger” (Isa. 1:3), the prophet writes. We too know our place, which is why, yes, we attend to our daily duties and needs, but in the evening look up at the sky. And we know our master’s crib, not as a tomb, but as the first moment of the gift of our being, not just life, but life in full, life abundant. 

And this shall be a sign to you: ye shall find the babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes”—a “babe,” a small creature, like all the rest, with a time set for it still unknown, with a life before it, unrehearsed. He is the creature of all creatures, so small beneath this vast night sky. And to this small child, God calls out through his prophet: “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the child of her womb? Yea, they may forget; yet I will not forget thee” (Isa. 49:15). Here, in this vow of remembrance by God, even of our small and distanced gaze, our own story takes wing.

Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.

James Agee’s youthful poem was, I dare to hope, a promise that overtook his own sad and shortened life (he suffered a heart attack at forty-five)—a promise of surety, even under the sky that some have worried is a vast, annihilating tomb.

For “there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God.” There was, in this night, in this home, amid this toil, among these small creatures, upon this infant, in the midst of this brief time, “a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reaching unto heaven, and behold angels of God ascending and descending” (Gen. 28:12). Out of infinity and its shadows rose the light of all lights, the glory of all glories, the face of God himself shining into this place, this person, whose face is turned, like all our faces on a clear, star-strewn evening, upward.

The story of God’s incarnation, the story of Jesus, contains the world. In this story the whole world is taken up by God. We know this story well, not because it is ours to tell, but because it is God’s story now made our own. “In and through you I will make it all my own,” God says in this child. Thus could James Agee be sure on this shining night—and so can we.

Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College.

Image by Georges de La Tour, public domain. Image cropped.