I caught the tail end of the blood moon in November. It was a fat crest of bright red against grey rock turned immaculate by the sun. It hung low in the sky above the country church that floated atop a black sea of asphalt, built in the spirit of growth and then abandoned by the congregation’s children and their children’s children. My wife’s family’s grey-white horse galloped across the pasture below the moon like a spirit bringing messages of things from the coming year. The blood moon was in Taurus.
I don’t know if it meant anything. I didn’t know if there were symbols in the trees or in the moon or in Lark, the horse. If there were, I don’t think I’ll ever be wise enough to interpret them and certainly not important enough to share their meaning with the world, if they were meant for the world (if they were, we’re in big trouble. I know no one feels like they’re ever meant to be a prophet, but I really should not be a prophet). All I know is that, for a moment, I stepped out of ordinary time and into a time where the linear is not real and wind, breath, and spirit were the common tongues.
It was Awe incarnate and I was not afraid.
For all the talk of “spiritual warfare” I heard while growing up, we never had much time to celebrate or bask in the otherness of spirit. Every prayer or moment of silence in the evangelical world I grew up in was about sin and what God needed to fix in us. Only practical spiritual gifts were worth honing and celebrating. Mysterious and mystical gifts and matters were brushed under the rug lest Satan uses them as an in. The unexplainable was used to scare you into behaving (see: the Left Behind series) or shrugged off as a gift meant for another time.
And yet we speak of a God who made Man. We speak of parted seas, risen dead, monsters from the deep, and angels who break seals to end the world.
Christianity is as much a religion of mystics, myths, and magic as it is a religion of theology, argument, and philosophy. The later things are well and good, and I enjoy them, but it’s the mystery of Christianity that holds me and calms the angry, painful redness that is my religious trauma. A “Christian worldview” means that we live in a Kingdom of God both here and arriving—a world where love and grace are divine and there is so much more goodness in store. Good deeds are not only asked of us; they bring us face to face with God, for God became the least of us.
I can’t tell you to go out and hunt down a mystical experience. One, that would be weird and off-putting. Two, that’s not how they work and that’s now how everyone’s faith works, but I would encourage you to sit and ponder your relationship with the spiritual unknown and why it is the way it is. You’ll probably be surprised by what you find. I always am, no matter how many times I come back to questions concerning it.
And who knows? You might find something equally-awe worthy in your own backyard.
Finnely King-Scoular (’14) is stationed at Naval Station Norfolk in Norfolk, VA, where he lives with his wife, Rosalind (’13). His writing, including the Faerie Court Chronicles series from NineStar Press, focuses on contemporary fantasy with an emphasis on LGBTQ+ representation.
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Finnely, you’re reminding me a little bit of a Rob Bell profile I read this morning– something about how the big questions and mystery of existence is exciting, for him, and that’s how he holds on to faith.
Link here because I can’t figure out how to hyperlink in this comment box:
https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/fallen-fundamentalist-rob-bell-venice-beach
This is lovely and soothing and affirming. Thank you for your beautiful words. Agree with the Rob Bell reference above—his expansive view of our spiritual life strikes me as widely courageous and as something much closer to the broad, radical Christianity with its fierce hope and mystery.