Seeing in the Dark

I saw something this month which I do not remember seeing before. A strange creature? An unusual plant? A Yorkshireman opening his wallet? No. I saw a dark sky. I don’t just mean a night sky, I mean a black sky, unspoilt by cloud and light pollution. When I go stargazing at home, I take my little telescope to the chapel where the sky is darker. But even those clear skies above Rimington are nothing to the black skies of deepest Australia. Though the chapel is rural, its skies are blighted by a hundred thousand streetlamps in Manchester, Burnley and Blackburn. See the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s chart for England’s North West here (though it is a little old). The orange glow from those sodium streetlamps masks the heavens, obscuring all but the nearest and brightest stars. Tamworth, New South Wales, is 65 miles from its nearest comparable town and over 260 miles from Sydney, the nearest major population centre. Consequently, the night skies are unsullied by the ugly, orange glow of human civilisation. There were so many stars to be seen! And the jewel in the crown? The Milky Way. I honestly thought that this could only be seen through telescopes, but there it was, straddling the sky. This great belt of gentle light is made up of several billion indistinguishable stars of the galaxy of which we are part. It is truly beautiful. It is present in the sky above our chapel, but our eyes cannot see it.

There is some irony in all of this. Tamworth was the first place in Australia to use electric streetlights in 1888; at the same time, Hapton, 20 minutes’ drive away, was the first village to obtain electric lighting in the United Kingdom. The skies of one remain dark and beautiful, the skies of the other orange and dirty.  

The second irony is that the more light we have, the less we see. The blacker the sky, the greater the stars’ beauty. Manmade light clouds and obscures what God intended us to behold. I’m not objecting to street lighting per se; we need it to limit our propensity for thievery and violence as well as to prevent accidents.

Human wisdom and knowledge, what we might describe as ‘light’, often prevents us from seeing eternal reality. Take science, for example. Scientific enquiry, which seeks to measure and discover the intricacies and complexities of the natural world, ought to lead us to a knowledge of the Creator. That data can be gathered, and experiments repeated, demonstrates the order and precision of our universe, belying the idea that it came about by random chance and cosmic accident. It points to an orderly, precise mind, which is the God of Genesis. Instead, the scientific knowledge we have is used to erect barriers between humanity and the its Creator. “I don’t believe in God because of science”, I hear people say. It’s like saying you don’t believe Clitheroe exists because you’ve seen a signpost to it. Here, the dim, orange haze of our limited information obscures our understanding of eternal reality.

There are those who cannot believe the Bible. Oh, they’re clever enough, with more letters and degrees after their names than I’ve had hot dinners. They speak ancient languages and have studied all manner of philosophy and ideas. But the simple meaning of the gospel is beyond their grasp. Their minds are too cluttered and their eyes too cataracted to see the plain truth in front of them. I’m not proposing that that we should all be ignoramuses, terrified of gaining knowledge lest our faith be exposed as a sham. Quite the opposite. Like the stars of England which are masked and hidden by artificial, manmade light, so the spiritual truths of the gospel are often hidden to the learned. Without the fog of human wisdom, we can see far better and further.

Thirdly, I think this point can be applied to out personal lives also. The Lord knows the day I’ll die, He knows the problems and difficulties I’ll face next week and everything else beside. Yet He chooses not to share this knowledge with me. The Lord does not want me to fill my head with details of the future; He’d prefer I remained in the dark. Instead, He asks me to gaze at His tender mercy and providence, which I can see more clearly in the darkness of my ignorance.

We often see more in the darkness than we do in the light:

I will bring the blind by a way they did not know;

I will lead them in paths they have not known.

I will make darkness light before them,

And crooked places straight.

These things I will do for them,

And not forsake them. 

Isaiah 42:16