Neon Moon
The power in my house has had a few surges lately. You know, those weird instances where the whole house goes quiet and dark for a split second and then the microwave (devil box) beeps and your fridge starts humming again? Something else weird has been happening in my neighborhood: the streetlight across the street from us now turns on for about 3 minutes and then turns off for 30 seconds, all night long. It used to just come on at dusk and turn off at dawn, but now it has this strange habit. I don’t really know why, but it makes me think.
It makes me think about lights. I live in a pretty rural area, but I can still see a glow on the horizon toward the larger “city” in the distance. The university where I serve students has an outdoor field that backs up to my house. During the academic year, their field lights are so bright that I need blackout curtains if I want to go to bed before 11PM. Sometimes I get upset because they leave these on while nobody is there and all I can think about is the energy they’re wasting and the stars that I can’t see because of their confounded lights.
I’ve always lived in a place where I can see the stars at night, even when I was growing up in the suburbs of a mid-sized city. Until a few years ago, it didn’t occur to me that in most major metropolitan cities, you can’t see any stars at night. Not a single one. Just the moon, if he’s up and the skyscrapers aren’t in the way. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, fifty-five percent of the world’s population lives in a city. But that’s not all. By the year 2050, they estimate that that number will grow to sixty-eight percent. Two-thirds of the world’s population will live in an urban environment in under thirty years.
Do you know what a megacity is? I’d never heard of this until today and I was doing some research. A Megacity is an urban environment in which more than ten million people reside. TEN MILLION PEOPLE. Today, there are thirty-three of these on planet Earth and, you guessed it, that number is supposed to go up. By 2030, the UN projects that there will be ten more megacities. If you’re doing the math, that’s forty-three. Forty-three places where more than ten million people live on top of each other in over-priced apartment buildings where the air is polluted and you can’t see the stars for all of the “light”.
Since I’ve already tipped my hat, I’ll just come out and say it: I really never want to live in the city. Not because of all the things I just listed and because I’m an introvert, but mostly because, in a city, there’s so much light that you can’t see the stars.
In a city, there’s so much light that you can’t see the stars.
Anybody else clueing into the irony? What is light supposed to do, after all? If we were to go back to the dawn of time, we would encounter human beings, who worked and lived during the day time, but went home to rest at night. For centuries, people have been afraid of the dark. It’s even a troupe in most ancient world literature and many children, to this very second, are afraid of the dark. I’d wager there’s plenty of adults in the twenty-first century who would be afraid of the dark if they ever really encountered any, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
What’s scary about the dark? If you ask my four-year-old, monsters. If you ask someone who has been abused or traumatized, their abuser could be coming for them and they wouldn’t know it. If you ask someone who has been watching too many scary movies, vampires. If you ask someone who has lived in an unsafe neighborhood, people coming to harm and/or steal from them. There’s plenty of legitimate reasons to be afraid of the dark. And that’s why people have always been inventing ways to eliminate it.
First, we had fire and candles. Then, oil and gas lamps. Next, electric light bulbs. Now, we have LED lights on just about everything and there’s hardly an inch of our planet not touched by artificial light.
Now, most of this is a pretty good thing. If a streetlight keeps someone from getting harmed or robbed on their way home from work, I’m here for that. If a lamp keeps me from stubbing my toe while I’m trying to feed my newborn in the middle of the night, I’m grateful. If a nightlight helps a child or abuse victim sleep soundly, let’s plug it in. However, I can’t help but wonder, do we have too much of a good thing?
Do you think it’s good for over half of the world’s population to live in a place where they never see the stars? Where they can never ponder what’s up there, out there, and far beyond them? Where they never experience a dearth of light and, therefore, are never truly grateful for it? When we experience artificial light all of the time, do we ever wake joyfully to see the sun? No. We don’t. With our aforementioned black-out curtains and artificial light sources, we shun the limitations of day and night, screw up our circadian rhythms, and forget about God, thinking we have become him ourselves (we are, after all, the masters of light and dark).
I don’t think artificial light, at least in the modern, ubiquitous usage of it, is a net positive. Perhaps, if we could learn to only use the fake lights when necessary, when they kept us safe, or prevented accidents, or made it so good, necessary work could be done, then, perhaps, we could make a case for the artificial light. But, please, somebody tell me what benefit there is to the human race from all the lights of Las Vegas? (Don’t get it twisted: I’m not some sort of Bible-thumping, prudish, tee-toler. Go see someone else, if that’s what you’re looking for.)
What I mean is: there are lights and lights.
At the beginning of the biblical narrative, God makes the Sun, Moon, and Stars (among many other things) and he calls them good. He gives them purpose and he also gives them limitations. There’s a time to shine and a time to dim. A time for work and a time for rest. A time to shine on one part of the Earth and a time to shine on another. Light and Day. Dark and Night. Light is not bad. It’s not the enemy. We were made for light and we rightly fear the dark.
Perhaps it was listening to our fear that gave us the impetus to create so much “light”.
I put the quotes around it because, let’s be honest, we all know the difference between light from the sun, moon, and stars and light from an artificial source. Even candle light, which I think is wondrous and much closer to the natural order of things, has a different quality than sun or moonshine. Has any poet ever sung the praises of the fluorescent light? Any hymns been written about the virtues of incandescence? No? Shocking.
There are lights and there’s light. We were made for light- good, quality light from space that no man could make or fathom. We weren’t made for this tiresome, humming, artificial stuff. Light and day, dark and night, in season and out- we were made for the real thing.
The problem with artificial lights is that they’re, well, artificial. Even though we’ve found wonderful uses for them and they have their merits, we’ve traded them for the real thing. We’ve traded the wonder of a starry night sky for safety, security, limitless work or play hours, and convenience. In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul, the apostle, says, “...the truth of God for a lie…”
The truth is that you and I were made with limitations. We cannot do it all- the rhythm of seasons and day and night (side note: that’s what God said the purpose of the sun, moon, and stars was in Genesis) were meant to teach us this. But we’ve forgotten our lessons, if we ever learned them.
You were made to see the stars. You were made to wonder who made them. You were made to see them in their infinity, consider your finity, and find rest. They were made to help us question and discover who we are and what we believe.
But we’ve settled for a neon moon.