Monday, March 22

If we worshipped the Northern Lights

God and the Northern Lights are stunningly similar in some ways. This thought came to me as I was driving to the cabin this winter. Just before I hit Shell Lake I noticed this incredible display in the sky. I stopped the car, grabbed my camera and tried to capture this image digitally but all my camera could see was darkness. I know some photographers with the right equipment and the correct settings on their camera can capture Aurora Borealis, but it was beyond my capability. My mind began to explore the analogy.

The Northern Lights are so much like God in many ways.
You can’t fully capture essence and experience of God with human words. Much in the same way my camera can’t capture the Northern Lights. My half hearted attempt rendered no results at all. There are some that are as skillful with their words as some are with their cameras. They can deliver a likeness, a still shot which captures one facet of the beauty of what they observe but it is nothing like the real thing.

Those that first put words to the experience with the Northern Lights wrote about it. Some are letters from a group of light aficionados; others are historical accounts of the first discoverers. They form the first body of literature surrounding the lights and an organization is formed to experience the Lights. It is called the Holy Church of Lights.

An early church theologian would look at the Northern Lights and say. They are not reflections in the sky, fire, or smoke. They are not the sun, the moon or the stars. They aren’t anything people put in the sky. They dance, they have colour, they are found in the North, and often light up the sky. Some even say you can hear them crackle.

This would be just about perfect because this framework gives people just enough information to go and experience the Northern Lights and know what they are experiencing is the Northern Lights.

Eventually people would develop methods for viewing the lights and begin to define them even further. The lights are green. The lights are purple. The lights are blue. The lights crackle. They don’t crackle. People should watch the lights standing up. People should watch the lights lying down. The followers of the lights would get mad at each other over the other’s apparent heresy and split up.

Then someone would come along and say all this stuff written about the Northern Lights is inconsistent. We need to go back the earliest writings about the Northern Lights and view them as the sole authority over our theology of the lights. The traditionalists will counter by saying if you do that people will begin to interpret the writings themselves and it will fracture the Holy Church of Lights. This is exactly what happened.

A new age of enlightenment came and people began to consider the whole scope and relevance of the lights. People began to live in large cities with electric lights obscuring their vision of the sky. One group looked at the body of literature surrounding the Lights and concluded that the lights are not real because the writings are inconsistent. One person says they are green and crackle. The other says they are blue and don’t crackle. 'These lights are just a superstition' they said.

Some people objected and said 'All you need to do is go to the north, get out of the city and you will see them'. The enlightened people respond 'I went once and didn’t see anything, it is all myth'. The faithful 'No, they don’t appear every night, and sometimes it is only for a short while. You need to make some sort of dedication to see them'. The enlightened answer 'You guys have just tricked yourself in to believing those things are real. I have all the light I need in this little city.'

There were some who were frightened by new critical approach to the ancient writings so they formed a coalition against them. The Perfectionists. They declared all early writings to be total consistent and perfect. They began to study them in earnest. An entire culture developed around this coalition to the point where studying the writings took precedence over seeing the lights. Eventually a culture of organizational success came over these people. They began to build large organizations dedicated in name to the lights. The fractured segments the Holy Church of Lights began to compete earnestly with each other and flocked to conferences that gave them the latest method to build their organizations. The followers of the lights became cogs in an organizational machine.

The faithful began to come in to conflict with the perfectionists. Especially if they didn’t believe the ancient texts were totally perfect or if they thought some of the writings were flavoured by the author’s perception and context. The perfectionists thought that once you gave up on their view of the ancient texts you would slide down the slippery slope to the enlightenment camp.

Some people in the perfectionist coalition began to become disillusioned. They lost faith in the institutions that guided them. Some felt abused. Others questioned the consistency and integrity of the institutions that claimed to follow the lights. Some became so tired of the hollow dogmatism they embraced all forms of light to find truth. They dabbled in electric light, fires, candle light. They concluded that no one can ever be really sure that they’ve seen the lights. No one sees anything perfectly anyway.

Those that had actually seen the Northern Lights said 'You should come North with us in the winter time. If you get away from the electrical light you will see some dazzling Northern lights'. The disillusioned responded 'You guys are just being a bunch of intolerant fundamentalists. Who are you to say that there isn’t truth in the electric light.'

posted by LT | 10:16 AM | |