The Perseid meteor show should peak around August 12 this year.
The Perseids show up every August, reaching a rate of nearly 90 meteors per hour around the peak. They tend to be colorful and leave trains, so that they are especially beloved by sky watchers. The meteors are actually bits of icy debris from the comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.
I always take a week of vacation to the mountains in West Virginia in August, usually around the peak of the Perseids. I am not an intense lover of watching the night sky, but I do enjoy seeing the stars of the clear night sky that the mountains provide. As a family, we generally take one night or early morning of vacation for stargazing, and since it is in August we usually see some shooting stars while we are at it. This year we will be there the week after the peak, but there should still be plenty to see.
Looking into the depths of the stars has always been an important spiritual experience for humans. On a clear night when you can look into the depths of the stars, you can’t help but recognize the vastness of the world beyond us. We can recognize how small we are against the heavens. The night sky is both constant and yet ever-changing, moving predictably through the night and the seasons. At the same time, the brilliant flickers of shooting stars streaking across the sky for an instant reminds us that even against the steady backdrop of this immensity, individual moments matter too. The brief streak, so easy to miss with so much else going on, brings an exciting and dynamic moment to the ponderous depths of the seeming infinity that we peer into in space.
Most night skies today have few stars, except perhaps a few of the brightest if you look a long way from the horizon. Looking into it is not so exciting, and so many people no longer gaze at the skies. Many of the meteor flashes are obscured by the levels of light our society produces. I can’t help but wonder if losing the ability to peer into the heights of the stars means that we lose our spiritual depth as well. Instead of knowing how small we are, we begin to see ourselves as the center of everything. We then become too busy with ourselves to notice the vastness of the universe around us and the brilliant excitement of a meteor shower. I suspect that we are more spiritually shallow for keeping our heads down and looking around rather than ponderously gazing up into the skies.
Perhaps this August you might be able to find a clear sky and a few moments to sit before the stars and the Perseids. Perhaps in doing so you might be reminded that we are not the center of the universe. Perhaps in that realization you can hear anew the wonder of the promise that the God who is within all of this vast universe and extends beyond it is also a God who loves you, as an individual person, and reaches out to you in that love. How amazing that promise is!
– Pastor Eric J. Trozzo