Sunday Morning Meds--Heavenly Preaching

“The heavens declare the glory of God. . ." Psalm 8

In a sense, you could set your clock to the sun. I’m not sure who determines such things, but if you’d like to know exactly when dawn will arrive eight years from Thursday, you can check any of a dozen readily accessible sources. Count on it.

What you can’t know is what it will look like. A dawn is a dawn—the sun nudges itself up from the eastern horizon and spreads its glorious gold over the world. But no two dawns are exactly the same.

For years, I’ve been a chaser of the dawn. I leave home in the darkness, camera in hand, to hunt dawn’s early light the way some folks hunt deer. I chase down empty country roads, gravel cracking up in my wheel wells, trying to get to the best possible place at the best possible time for the best possible shot. Dawn is, after all, fleeting. 

More often than I care to admit, I come home empty-handed. Last Saturday, rain fell about an hour before dawn. When I stood outside and looked up at the sky, it was perfectly clear above me and all the way to the west; so I loaded up the cameras, made some coffee, jumped in the Tracker, and took off west to where the land rolls like a bunched up carpet and the landscape’s yawning breadth is huge.

But the clouds that had dropped the rain kept up a thick curtain, so when I stood out there in an open field I had nothing to shoot at. I got back in the car and headed home, slowly, thinking maybe something worth shooting would appear, as it often does.

Some mornings, even out here, miles from open water, mists lounge in low spots like gossamer, like satin left behind. Fog make the sun look as perfectly cut as a communion wafer rising like something offered mysteriously from the night. 

On windy mornings when the skies are clear, the sweeping light of dawn can be overpowering. The moment sun rises, it washes everything out as if it were midday. The only place to shoot is west, where shadows run long and deep.

The most beautiful dawns are not perfectly clear because what turns the sky into a palate is clouds. They break the intensity or create immense crowns of shimmering rays leaping up to heaven. They take what the sun offers in innumerably different ways, to offer a light show that’s new every morning. Dawn is the most incredible show anyone will ever see, and it happens every day on a limitless theater screen just outside our door. 

Dawn is God speaking—or so says the psalmist here. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” he says, which is to say, the sky is a preacher whose sermons are never derivative nor stultifying. What the heavens tell us is big and glorious, ever-changing, and always new, even though themes never change.

What the dawn says is that God is God. When we acknowledge him to be the Supreme Architect, the creator of the very fabric of the universe, says Calvin, then we can’t help but be ravished with wonder.

I’ve been a church-goer for most of my life. I feel guilty if I don’t go. I wonder why I don’t feel the same about dawn. The heavens declare his glory, after all. Just outside my window, God himself, a noted clergyman, is on the pulpit. His sermon is the sky.