An Encounter with Sol. . .
October 15, 2024
This evening I was watching for the Tsuchinshan ATLAS comet. I decided to go out a little earlier before sunset as I didn’t want to miss one chance at seeing this comet! This shining Herald from the Oort Cloud, a Messenger from the deep heavens, it is so exciting for me to witness such an astronomical event! I feel transported to another time, one we may have read about or seen on the silver screen but never fully experienced.
As I was watching the sunset, suddenly the sky opened to me! The light was not overtly colorful, it had the soft, shimmering, pale yellow hues and dusky purples, but the light seemed to contain within it an entirely other quality. It had a new dimension to it, a new weight; it permeated the pillars of the sky like incense permeates a room. It was as if the sky transformed into the grandest cathedral with the Sun becoming the most brilliant, warm Lamp hovering in the center of the Room like an immaculate, solar chandelier that burned and dissipated around me. I could not see many other celestial objects, but Venus shone bright as a diamond beside it, and so it became part of that heavenly mobile procession and diffusion of cosmic scents!
I had always seen the Sun, felt the Sun - its heat and brightness, warmth and yellowness, but I had never ever smelled the Sun, the light becoming part of the very air I breathed. It wasn’t something I literally smelled with my nose, more like an awakened awareness that behaved like a waft of scent suddenly hitting your face. And it was also the knowledge that this new dimension would have fully made itself known to me if not for the veil of earthly atmosphere that hung over me. Yet even still, I felt the space of lightyears disappear around me (although not excluding that dimension entirely - for only the largest of spaces and grandness of distances could house such splendors as the Sun and Earth. . .) and now the cosmos had walls, and the Sun so close to me as to be a tangible object upon which I could contemplate and experience just as intimately as a person sitting next to me in a room.
To have the dimensionality of sunlight shift in this way, to feel the sky and cosmos transform where I am no longer looking out but in, this is profound. It makes Heaven feel so much closer to me than ever before. God’s works are utterly marvelous to me and they never cease! They leave me in such awe and full of His love and beauty in my heart. . .
Oh, and I did see the comet, albeit so faint as to be almost imperceptible, but it was there! Unfortunately, living in a sprawling metropolis is not very conducive to having your senses transfigured by the cosmos. 🌞
