The One Needful Thing

“One thing is needful” (Luke 10:42)

     With fear I begin to write this. For in many ways, what I have next to say is too hard for words, and can so easily be taken the wrong way. I ask in advance your forgiveness if I fail to hit the mark.

     Ofttimes a friend or family member not active in amateur astronomy might express surprise at the exacting conditions necessary for a good night of observing. Far more than merely cloudless skies are called for. Overly high humidity can cause one’s lenses and mirrors to dew up, rendering them useless. Even on nights of relatively low humidity, surface temperatures falling below the dew point can result in eyepieces fogging up, making further observation impossible. Winds of greater than a few miles per hour can make telescopes too unsteady to operate or induce vibrations that make the image shake intolerably. Even when the air is calm and steady at ground level, high winds aloft (as when the jet stream is passing overhead) can result in a view similar to looking at a river bed through swiftly flowing water, with the stars or planets appearing to boil and dance before one’s eyes.

     In my own astronomy club, when one member wishes to make a night of it, he will send out an e-mail to the others to see whether anyone else is interested in joining him. Frequently on nights of less than ideal conditions, it’s not surprising to see most people responding “some other time.” I myself, if I’m left uninspired by some not quite perfect evening, have been known to turn down the chance for a night out under the stars, knowing that a better one will come along soon enough. And to be honest, stargazing is a hobby. There’s no obligation to go out when you’re tired, the conditions are lousy, or even when you just don’t feel like it.

     But there’s a curious flaw to our reasoning when we reject some nights as unacceptable for viewing. We confuse ourselves with our stuff – our lenses and mirrors, our telescopes and tripods, our eyepieces and mounts. The fact is that some of the best nights for stargazing are precisely those worst for our equipment. For one thing, it forces one to concentrate on those objects that cannot really be observed with optical aid, or are best looked at without it: the constellations themselves, the giant arch of the Summer Milky Way, the Pleiades, the occasional meteor, or planetary and lunar conjunctions. And while a bit of wind up there might make the view through an eyepiece a singularly frustrating experience, by naked eye alone it adds greatly to your pleasure by putting that extra twinkle in the stars.

     Such nights are times to get out into an open field away from the lights and just look up. It’s amazing how there’s always some new insight to be gained by “taking it all in” instead of boring in on some small detail of the sky. Rather than hunting down a single very specific star, I can glory in the massed splendor of the entire galaxy, as seen from the inside. And I still find myself trying to make out the larger and brighter Deep Sky Objects, such as the Beehive, the Great Nebula in Orion, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Lagoon Nebula, or the Double Cluster in Perseus. Finding one of these always causes me to marvel that I had never noticed them in all the years before I decided to take up this hobby. Once you know where to look, they seem so obvious.

     So while I can’t deny the very real value of astronomical gear, I have to admit that it is not the one needful thing in order to appreciate the sky. And it’s not just true for stargazing. I literally cannot count the number of times in my life where I’ve convinced myself that “all I need is to have [fill in the blank], and I’ll be so happy.” It’s just that the results are so much more painfully apparent with this particular pastime. My equipment boxes are littered with “had to have” eyepieces, tripods, and various other accessories that seemed so essential at the time, but now take up room and gather dust. It was a hard lesson to learn before it sank in that more stuff did not equal more happiness. I would have done better to have taken earlier heed of the words “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15).

     But so far we have only scratched the surface of the real issue here. This has been the easy part. Learning to rein in one’s acquisitive impulses, to realize how little we truly do need (as essential as that realization is) is but the merest prelude to the Main Event. And that is how we deal with loss.

     My heart breaks every time I hear an account of individuals and families who have lost everything they own (or worse, everyone they loved) in a fire, flood, hurricane, or some manmade disaster like war or other violence. And always, just one step behind that vicarious grief, is the feeling of relief that such hasn’t happened to myself. For I have somehow escaped in my own life the catastrophe of losing everything. The closest I’ve come is when Diane died seven years ago. But even in that blackest of moments, I still had my two wonderful daughters, my utterly indispensable sister-in-law and the rest of her family, and the invaluable support of my brother. My loss was real, but it was far from total.

     In the final analysis, no one’s loss is ever really total. Yes, we can lose our property, our livelihood, our family and everyone we love. We can see the defeat of all that we cherish and hold dear. We can (and will) eventually lose our own life. But we can be assured that on that other side of death, there is Someone waiting to welcome us in, to console us beyond our imagining, to truly make all right once more (and forever). There has really been only one Person ever of whom it can be said that He lost everything. We read in Paul that Christ “was in the form of God” (Philippians 2:6), but that rather than clinging to His status, He “emptied himself” and willingly embraced poverty, pain, suffering and death itself. Just ask yourself this – when God dies, who is there on the other side to welcome Him? This is a great mystery beyond our comprehension. It is so simple to recite the Creed, and to say the words that the Son is submissive to the Father unto death, but it is impossible to understand the greater part of what such words really mean. And when we realize that we are probing into the very nature of God Himself, that suffering and loss are fundamental to the very source of existence itself, then we see that the experience of loss is baked into the DNA of the universe. It is an essential part, not only of the way things are, but of the way they are supposed to be.

     At my wife’s funeral, I somehow managed to speak a few words:

     These past 14 months, I have every day been consumed by a grief I never knew it possible to experience. Those near me could see that it was at times all but unbearable. And I am fully aware that I am nowhere near the end. 

     And yet I would not trade that grief for anything in the world. For if there is one thing that I have learned from this, it is that grief is the price we pay for love. The only way we can shut grief out of our life is to shut out love. And such a life would not be worth the living.

     These words come back to me whenever I stand out in that field sans appareillage, looking up at the Heavens with nothing but my own two eyes. “God is Love”, the apostle John tells us, and it appears that love requires loss. And if anything at all can be called the One Needful Thing, it is Love.

Jupiter (near bottom, through the trees) and Mercury (at upper right) seen just after sunset, 19 March 2011