Different Mercies of the Same Light

It is a rare occasion for me to be truly solitary. However, two Fridays back, an unexpected stillness settled in: my wife was away on her routine trip to California, and my children were either out of town or staying with their mother. I hadn’t anticipated this sudden isolation, and the realization hit me with a sense of urgency. The prospect of returning to an empty house and sitting in silence felt suddenly unbearable. Not because I didn't want to be alone, but because the gift of true solitude was too precious to discard because of my own lack of forethought.

There is a difference, I think, between being left alone and being invited into solitude. One feels like absence. The other feels like a door left open by providence. I did not yet know which one I had been given, but I knew enough not to waste it on the couch.

After many sessions of back-and-forth with ChatGPT, I came to a decision. I would camp in my car somewhere, but where that would be was a mystery. I had no desire to drive all the way to Payson after a long day at work, and anything local would be too warm, too loud, and too polluted with city lights.

The problem, then, was not merely geographical. I was not looking for a place to park. I was looking for a place where the noise of my normal life might lose its authority over me for a few hours.

But after prompting ChatGPT into a corner, she finally revealed the answer to me, and it was actually embarrassing how obvious it was. Gold Canyon holds its own as a place apart; it's close enough to make the drive tolerable, but tucked up against the Superstitions and desolate enough to allow for stars to shine. Plus, there's a Maverik gas station on the way there, so...undeniable decision.

I made it home, packed up the essentials (BT speaker, iPad, blanket, pillows) and headed out. The weather was absolutely divine. By the time I reached the town of Gold Canyon itself, the temperature was already a lovely 85º, and falling rapidly. I stopped at the Basha's grocer off the 60, got a few morsels to tide me over until morning, and kept the journey going. Alas, the 2nd stop, the Maverik gas station just a few miles further, proved fruitless and marginally frustrating, as they were out of all of my fountain beverages. I believe it was all for the best, as I didn’t need any more caffeine at that time of the day.

It is funny how often the sacred begins with errands. A grocery stop, a failed fountain drink, a few snacks in a plastic bag, the hum of tires on the highway. Nothing announced itself as holy.  I was simply driving east with pillows in the car and a half-formed hope that the desert might have something to say.

I arrived at the campsite at Peralta Regional Park shortly before 7pm. This allowed me the opportunity to explore my surroundings, and what I found was the most remarkable silence and solitude I had experienced in a long, long time. Marching up toward the peaks of the adjacent hiking trail allowed me the opportunity to contemplate my surroundings, which confirmed exactly how alone I truly was. No other camping spaces were occupied. Not a soul nor vehicle could be seen. I kept along the path and, as the sun sank ever closer to the horizon, I silently hoped to myself that my instincts were true, and that the trail would dump me off somewhere close to the road, down a ways from where I had parked.

There is a kind of silence that merely removes sound, and there is another kind that begins to reveal what sound usually hides. This was the latter. The desert was not empty. It was simply unbothered by me.

There was a momentary window of panic as my faith abandoned me; the sun nestled itself beyond the measured west and I imagined myself stumbling back along the mile path I had followed, daylight abandoning fools who reckoned upon good fortune over solid plans. My instincts eventually proved the better, as the trail ultimately turned south and planted me beside the gravel path back to my campsite.

That little panic mattered more than it should have. It reminded me that wonder is not always soft. Sometimes the soul opens because the body realizes it is small, poorly prepared, and dependent on mercies it did not arrange.

Having no further ambition for the evening, I broke open the box of Triscuits I purchased for myself and sat with my thoughts for a half hour or so. The vestiges of dusk trailed away completely, and having no better plans, I settled into my car to prepare my makeshift bed and watch a movie until I fell asleep. The moon rose high in the sky and, while itself only a half circle, bathed the desert surroundings with a pale blue light that magnified in strength beyond capacity and lengthened every shadow in excess of stature.

The moon did not merely illuminate things. It changed their proportions. Rocks became monuments. Shrubs became watchmen. The familiar grammar of the desert rearranged itself beneath borrowed light.

I could not sit still. I could not ignore the situation I found myself in. I left the car and armed myself with my iPhone. I started shooting the landscapes around me, allowing night mode to drench the tiny phone sensor with all the light from our pale friend in the sky.

It felt absurd at first, this impulse to answer moonlight with a phone. But that is one of the small mercies of our age: even our devices, so often guilty of shrinking our souls, can occasionally be pressed into the service of awe.

Why, oh why had I forgotten to bring a tripod? I could have kicked myself in that moment.

Back to the car, slightly peeved at myself, I lay back down and tried to subdue my racing thoughts so that sleep might overcome. Giving up after about an hour, I walked back outside to find that the moon had nearly descended to the horizon. It was placing itself firmly within the scopes of the light pollution of the Phoenix valley; indeed, it was nearly impossible to discern from where the remaining glow came.

The moon had been so commanding only a short while before, but now it was surrendering itself into the haze of the city. It was still there, still shining, still itself; but my ability to distinguish it had been compromised by lesser lights. I did not know it yet, but that would become the first lesson of the night.

Sitting at the concrete bench, I blinked a sleepy goodbye to the moon and glanced at my watch. 1am. I was due to breakfast with my niece the next morning, so sleep was a worthy prescription.

I made it about 10 minutes before deciding upon a new plan. A makeshift tripod involving my iPad, a park bench, and my Apple Watch as a remote control.

This was not exactly the equipment of prophets or astronomers. It was a ridiculous little altar of consumer electronics: a tablet propped at the right angle, a phone trying very hard to remain still, and a watch on my wrist pretending to be a shutter release. But stillness, however improvised, was enough.

What resulted from that arrangement was nothing short of astounding. The Milky Way erupted onto my tiny iPhone screen, captured intently by the iPhone's ability to take in 30 seconds worth of light at a time when it detected perfect stillness. My naked eyes could not perceive it at the time, but what was developing to the south of me was the hidden architecture of our own galaxy.

The glory had not arrived when the camera found it. It had been there all along. The difference was not in the sky, but in the instrument’s patience, its steadiness, its willingness to gather what my unaided eyes could not.

That thought has not left me. Maybe the difference is not always in the glory itself, but in our capacity to perceive it. Maybe heaven is nearer than we suppose, not because distance is an illusion, but because our senses are so easily outmatched by what God has already placed before us.

I shot, and shot, and shot, treating each exposure as an exercise in patience, positioning, and prayer. The tiny sensor of even the best phone camera is a temperamental beast, and can easily become oversaturated or tricked by algorithmic persuasion. Within 30 minutes however, I managed to grab a few shots that made the hair on my neck stand on its own. It was then, as I laid down for the final time in the back of my car to edit these raw images, that I realized that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Not because I had planned it well. Not because the night had obeyed me. But because the whole arrangement had begun to feel less like a sequence of conveniences and more like a conversation: solitude offered, restlessness permitted, light revealed, awe received.

Because in partnership with The Almighty, I made the decision to go camping, right. I made the decision to stay up, right. I made the decision to be alone, right.

And by “right,” I do not mean efficient or impressive or even especially wise. I mean aligned. I mean that something in me had chosen, however clumsily, to move toward the place where God could show me what I would have missed at home.

A few hours later, the sun made itself known to the inhabitants of the Sonora. Birds chimed in and gave their opinion on it, and it was loud and obnoxious. I opened the hatch of my car and dangled my legs out, letting the 60º air surround me and create goose bumps on my skin. I pondered the cosmos, and considered the Plan of Happiness that stitched itself into my culture and consciousness.

I thought of this with my legs hanging from the back of my car, cold air moving over my shins, birds screaming at the sunrise as if they had invented morning. This is where my mind did what it often does when the world grows quiet enough around me: it turned the landscape into theology.

We are told that the heavens above are separated distinctly and purposefully, according to their power and glory. The Sun rules them all. The Moon is the lesser light. And the Stars? They simply round out the equation, an afterthought in the matrices of divine planning.

At least, that is the tidy version I had sometimes carried in my head: three lights, three categories, three degrees, each placed at a clean distance from the others. It is a useful order. I do not reject it. I do not wish to flatten what has been revealed into something vague and sentimental. Distinction matters. The sun is not the moon. The moon is not the stars.

But that night made me wonder whether we misunderstand heavenly glory when we imagine it only as distance, ranking, or separation. The sun, moon, and stars felt less like unrelated kingdoms and more like different ways light reaches us.

The sun had vanished, but its absence still shaped the world. The moon shone with borrowed fire and turned the desert blue. The stars were invisible until stillness revealed them. All of it was light. All of it belonged to the same heaven.

But as I sat with this contemplation and wrestled with the ambiguity and contradictions of my previous night's experience, I bore witness to the realization that whatever God has in store for us, it is certainly beyond our mortal comprehensions and abilities.

I do not mean this as a rejection of distinct heavenly glories. I mean it as hope, and as carefully articulated curiosity. Perhaps the glories are distinct without being alienated from one another. Perhaps the heavens are ordered without being estranged. Perhaps God’s house has many degrees of brightness, but no corner where His love is not, somehow, already at work.

What we as human beings in the 21st century experience as passing for nature is a far cry from the definitive firmament endowed upon Mother Earth from the dawn of time. Our understanding has been whittled away bit by bit, leaving us with crippled appetites and vapid experience. I say 'our' in the limited capacity of one; I may ultimately dissolve in a more solitary explanation, but it certainly feels authentic to me that this is not a novel experience of mankind.

What unsettled me most was not that the Milky Way was beautiful. I already knew, in the abstract, that beauty existed beyond the city. What unsettled me was that it had been present while I could not see it. I had mistaken my limitation for reality. I had assumed the sky was mostly empty because my eyes, exhausted and outmatched, reported emptiness back to me.

That is a dangerous way to live. It is also, perhaps, the ordinary way to live.

I hold firm that the glories of our Father in Heaven rest upon the indistinguishable empyrean realm of the eternities...it is my burgeoning testimony that just as all things are a type and a shadow of bigger things in the hereafter, that the Sun, Moon, and Stars occupy the same great heavenly plane.

By that I do not mean sameness. I mean kinship. I mean that light may differ in intensity, nearness, office, and glory, while still proceeding from the same divine generosity. I mean that the heavens may be more unified, more merciful, and more wondrous than the mortal mind can comfortably diagram.

We will find more great comforts in our Father's plans for us than we could ever imagine. And you may discover this for yourself, too. Should you find yourself peering into the night sky, alone with nothing more than your own disquiet, you may discover that you see God in all his glory, and you will see that He is working. For all of us.

Not always loudly. Not always visibly. Not always according to the instruments we happen to possess at the moment. But still working. Still shining. Still waiting, perhaps, for us to become quiet enough, steady enough, and patient enough to receive the light already given.