MoonDay

Thursday (ThorsDay) seems in some wise to have evolved into my Sabbath with naught on calendar. I had so many years of it being Monday, from 1984 to 2009, what’s that, 25 years, a quarter century if my math is still good, that it’s been both a psychological and physical struggle to change. Perhaps also a spiritual struggle. But I have done, and am doing, and it’s starting to work for me except those weeks when I’m preaching. So Thursday becomes my occasion to think. Or take a furosemide forty and wait.

But this week Tuesday afternoon a few hours of Sabbath showed up and, instead of reading, and against all habits and inclinations, I picked up an unfamiliar object, the television remote, and worked out what it basically does: changes channels and volume. I knew about the volume actually, that it has a mute button, which is my favorite if the damn thing has to be on, I can keep it from invading my brain and tormenting my being; but I found out that one can change the picture too: there are numbers to press if one knows a desired channel, and there’s also a set of arrows such that one can browse. Now you’re talking. I browsed and found out that my favorites are the many channels that say like, “... is not included in your present subscription.” But feeling adventurous, I kept pressing the up arrow, found lots of skybalon, then b-i-n-g-o, a channel with an astronomy program with internationally known cosmologists discussing the moon, its origins and development — not to say evolution, a four letter word in some quarters of abysmal ignorance — and, lo, discussion of the moon’s possible, probable, logical role in earth’s own development — again not to use the e-word.

Here’s the deal, and from an armchair theologian’s perspective, this really sounds to me like something God who, not sharing the human concept of Time, is never in a hurry, would do. I mean, four billion years to God are the same as my ten minute nap after lunch. To get a better grip on the notion, watch The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and notice how long the Pevensie children were gone from here all those years they escaped out the back of the Wardrobe into the forest and grew up to be kings and queens of Narnia: barely the blink of an eye. Narnia isn’t where I mean to go with this, but anyone who thinks seven days and four billion years are not all the same to the Logos is an idiot.

At any event, here I am incredibly in possession and control of the TV remote for the first time in memory, and discovering a Science Channel. On WOW! formerly Knology, it’s channel 933. My God, I thought we only got Channel 13 and the Cooking Channel here, but lo! idou!

So here’s some of what I discovered in my Sabbath hours this past Tuesday afternoon. 

The moon is of the same composition as the earth, logically suggesting it was broken out of the earth, possibly the result of a glancing collision of an enormous body with earth.

In that first period there was a time when the moon, instead of being 240,000 miles from earth, was as close as 9,000 miles. Earth and moon were both molten hot. Very early on, the moon locked into its place of rotating as it revolved round the earth, with the same side of the moon always facing the earth. The moon and its orbit slowly receding from earth, still receding and now some 240,000 miles distant and still receding from us. The far side of the moon cooled quickly with its white surface growing very thick. Facing the hot, molten earth, the near side of the moon long remained also molten hot, cooling slowly as volcanic bursts continued to pour ash and lava out on the surface, marking the surface with the large areas of dark lava that are visible to us.

In that circumstance when the moon was very close to earth, an enormous object taking up a huge part of the sky, instead of ocean tides being measured in “feet high” as they are now with the lunar pull that controls ocean tides on earth, tides would have been “miles high.”  The force of the ocean washing back and forth so violently likely created the conditions in tidal pools that caused life to develop on earth. God moving in mysterious ways, if you will. In time as living cells grew and developed — again skipping the four letter e-word — sea creatures crawled out of the oceans, onto the beach, back and forth, eventually ashore and inland, sooner or later roaming the earth and into trees, as the e-word continued to work from the shadows, Linda’s forebears came down out of the trees and started fighting among themselves about Auburn vs Alabama, as I’ve heard them still doing, and here we are. 

The moon giveth.

In Time, the moon will take away. Nothing is forever, including our Sun, which in Time will cool and expand, slowly filling space with bits and pieces that will inhibit the moon’s ability to move through space. The moon will slow down and begin drawing back closer to earth. Tides and other earth features will be magnified increasingly. Again in Time, forces of mutual gravity will draw the moon to crush into the earth, not unlikely breaking both bodies into pieces, but in any event extinguishing the life that the moon once gave.

In the Science Channel program one of the scientists who narrated the story did say, “The moon giveth, and the moon taketh away,” which our resident theologian here completed, “blessed be the Name of the Moon.”

When all is said and done, two thoughts come to mind, three actually.

One is that the gnostics were right in thinking that matter is evil, as witness life on earth today, and could not possibly have been created by the good and just God, and the creator is actually a lower level demiurge, a half god, which turns out to be the Moon, which I learned Tuesday on Science Channel, is still alive with a molten core; thus, the pagans also were at least partially right in worshiping natural objects that they could see, including the Moon god.

It turns out that instead of Satur(n)Day, or SunDay, our sabbath day of rest should be Mo(o)nDay after all, just as I though in the first place.

The third thing that occurs to me is that if you had a few minutes of personal sabbath this morning, and wasted that time reading this nonsense, you really need to get a life!!

Thos+