Advent Meditations with Spectacular Auroras and Comets
It’s that time of year when wise men look towards the heavens.
As Advent is about to unfold in full swing, I love the solitude of what long winter nights bring and have been extra inspired by the magnificent celestial sightings of this year. Over the last several months especially, the northern lights and a rare comet have been gracing our night skies in spectacular fashion.
As always, I’m deeply sensitive to the built-in metaphors in nature that reflect something about how we are wired for Beauty and that the whole created world is a kind of sacrament through which God reveals something about Himself or the spiritual life in subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways.
Taking time to slow down and attune to the sacramental nature of created beauty and the seasons is a great way to get a jump start on St. Paul’s directive to “pray always and without ceasing.” [1 Thess 5:16-17]
It’s so intuitive, if we just tap into it, to be moved and elevated by the beautiful in nature. That kind of attunement is a very useful habit to practice often. That same mechanism, or neuropathway, that attracts and connects us to Beauty sets us up for seeing Grace offered to us in the spiritual life. The more we pause and let ourselves be enriched by the natural order of God’s creation, that is covered in His fingerprints, we are less likely to miss cooperating with His creative work in us.
The good news is, it’s a habit we can build -to sensitize the soul to Beauty!
Since God is a generous God with new graces every morning, He gives us plenty of chances to practice that habit if we feel we might not be very efficient at it now.
Engaging in that development of attunement to Divine movements through beauty, is a worthy and prayerful spiritual exercise whose precious fruits are a recollected soul always at rest and at prayer.
An Exercise in Divine Attunement
Driving out in search of dark skies, (i.e. away from light pollution) can itself be a physical prayer like an allegorical pilgrimage.
To see the subtle light pillars of an aurora, especially in the lower contiguous states, even during a solar maximum year, usually requires intentionally distancing oneself from competing bright city lights.
Light pollution is a great metaphor for the constant white noise of our world at best, or deadly sin at worst.
I took the time to study apps and dark sky finder sites1 to calculate just how far I needed to go to position myself favorably for a shot at seeing these rare sightings. Then, once at my location, I turned off all car lights and let my eyes adjust to the darkness and sensitize myself to the more subtle glows in the night sky, quietly waiting and scanning the northern horizon for any changes in light or color.
The first time I tried I thought it was a bust; I couldn’t see those bright colors I had seen in photos and almost called it a night and went home. I convinced myself all I was seeing was more light pollution, like those search lights that point upward at carnivals. Then I remembered someone said to try pointing your phone’s camera northward and see if it picks anything up because the camera is more sensitive to light. Still skeptical, I tried that, and I almost fell over!
I saw bright red pillars and was speechless while simultaneously jumping out of my skin breathless, fumbling for my big camera. I couldn’t believe I almost went home and missed it all. It was a gentle and humble reminder that sometimes we need assistance, a spiritual guide, to help us see grace working like the camera helps confirm the presence of the aurora. (I now, by the way, fondly think of my phone officially as aurora vision goggles!)
These aurora photos are from the big solar storm during the night of October 10/11, 2024 (seen as far south as Florida!), and I believe were the fourth time I saw the aurora in the span of six months of hunting. While none of these photos look exactly like was what visible solely with the naked eye (except the first one is pretty close) and were not enhanced beyond basic processing from raw files to jpeg, they were still noticeably visible as pastel or white pillars that quietly moved like ribbons through the night sky. So, it was easy to mistake them originally for mere search lights.
Most of these are about 8 second exposures on my Canon R5 mirrorless camera mounted on a tripod. (Settings: F2.8, ISO 400, 14mm lens manually focused on a bright star in case anyone wants to try their hand.) What the camera can do as I understand it, and very crudely explain here, is that a camera is able to hold the visual information in a stacked way versus our eyes’ lack of storage capacity which sees light information and discards it for the next bit of light hitting it, and so on. Our just eyes don’t have the capacity to store certain light waves like a camera can, especially in long exposures and this far away from the poles, to see those most vivid aurora colors at night unaided.
That’s quite another humbling reminder of our frail mortality and that if God really revealed Himself in full glory, we simply couldn’t take Him in. We’d be overpowered. Consequently, this is why we need the sacramental world of Faith we live in and by.
If we think of the northern lights as the movement of the Holy Spirit in our soul, we can easily see the natural parallels of how we need certain conditions to be able to see the work of God animating everything in and around us.
If there is too much white noise or light pollution in our lives, the auroras might be dancing all around us, but if we can’t see them, we might think they are not there or that people who said they can see them are lying or somehow ‘special’ with some insider information.
When in reality, all the information is already out there, but how many take the time to go on the metaphorical or actual aurora hunt: to assess whether their environment is dark enough and know how to find a north facing view, with an unobstructed horizon.
The keys here are to be intentional about learning the information out there to set ourselves up for success and then have the patience to wait for the magnetic fields to do their thing as they interact with the solar winds hitting the earth.
The parallels here to the spiritual life couldn’t be more direct and spectacular, underscoring the sacramental nature of creation. I’ll try to highlight a few since there really could be book about this.
Prayerfully Pondering Our Interior Life
1) God’s way of speaking to a soul that longs for Him are tender and soft, which is why we need to get interiorly quiet to hear Him. It’s the accuser who belittlingly shouts, making us feel hopeless, and may well be why so many fill their lives with noise to avoid hearing him, but in doing so, also drown out God. This is another reason the evil one wants us to avoid silence, to avoid having these intimate encounters with a loving God.
Can we sense the breath of the Holy Spirit dancing all around us like the pillars of an aurora trying to revive a weary and wounded soul? How often do we do a deep self-examination to evaluate the white noise, wounds, or sin in our life that can be drowning out the voice of God, even a little bit in some hidden corners? How often do we sacramentally do a major purge or even just go away on a silent retreat to reset the system?
In other words, how much time do we spend drenched in the metaphorical light pollution versus intentional time in rich, dark sky locations?
An example of a spiritual dark sky location would be the silence of Eucharistic adoration. When we make it there, (which can be a victory in itself!) how much time do we spend, and do we give ourselves enough time to let our spiritual eyes ‘adjust to the darkness’ by becoming interiorly receptive to the Holy Spirit’s whisperings?
Often, we can be so edgy and scattered (at least I can!) that we might fidget or even look at our watches because we’re not used to being in that much silence like in the darkness of an open field waiting for the aurora lights to appear. It could be tempting to just leave before we, 1) let our eyes adjust and, 2) wait on God’s timing for the graces He chooses to give us.
The first time I went hunting for the northern lights I almost left too soon, but then thankfully remembered to do a scan with my phone’s camera and that aided me in detecting my first aurora. After that, I was better able to start spotting them appearing with my own eyes. How often might we dismiss something as not being of God when He might in fact be sending us little nudges? Maybe if we are feeling empty in prayer, we can look to the saints or a spiritual mentor that can help identify how and when God is reaching out to us and offering tailor-made graces.
Perhaps He sometimes just wants to make sure we don’t miss His full measure of Grace and that is why He withholds something until we’ve sufficiently let our spiritual eyes dilate, especially after being drenched in the light pollution of the world. We might only just need more time to be still. [Ps 46:10]
This is why Advent is like time spent in a dark sky location; a time to shut out the noise and refocus on Christ within us, letting Him take full reign again and repent of habits that derail us.
Take a few moments with the aid of these images to imagine the aurora’s light pillars as graces pouring down around you as they did on this lone tree in a dark field. Notice how they quietly come and go. Can you feel them gently brushing past you like a caress?
2) In a moment when we might be tempted to indulge in a vice, we get a gentle offer of grace that can specifically give us the spiritual strength needed to make a virtuous choice.
If our soul is sensitized to spotting God’s subtle divine attractions, we have a better chance to receive and cooperate with them.
If we miss it, it’s often because we lack the sensitivity to recognize these graces and then those heavenly gifts are gone because the moment has passed. Such is the fleeting nature of particular graces and the limitations of time that these mortal bodies are bound to. We only have the present moment’s grace that we can be attentive to and receive. (A pretty literal foreshadowing of Heaven’s eternal now with the eternal I Am, but I digress. Well, sort of.)
While gravity keeps us stuck to and spinning on this earth, these graces are “new every morning” [Lam 3:23] meaning they are different, and we can use that as a motivational fire to not let them slip through our fingers for simply being unaware that they are there for the taking.
At the end of the liturgical year, meditating on the use of our time and attentiveness to Christ’s coming is a most fitting composition of place to begin our prayers in Advent, and every day really, since our life’s nature is to be in a state of Advent. What are some habits you can start or strengthen to ensure you give yourself daily quiet time to be still in prayer?
3) During a highly charged solar event there are many substorms that can form, one after the other, with periods of blazing color to sudden periods of darkness. It can seem bewildering, and I found myself almost doubting my own eyes as to how something that just filled the night sky with majestic moving pillars of vivid color could suddenly disappear.
To reassure myself, I would regularly be scrolling through my images checking that what I thought I saw really was recorded. I would also periodically be taking pictures of ‘nothing’ to make sure my new super camera wasn’t just inventing the whole thing.
It can be the same in the spiritual life, when we receive spiritual consolations, and we feel like we can sense God’s presence all around us and then at other times we feel an arid sense of loneliness, abandonment, and even desolation.
We can often doubt our own experiences of God’s graces, and even outright miracles, during those times of desolation. But isn’t everything a miracle, really, and don’t we often just get used to the everyday miracles and then become spiritually complacent or even think God doesn’t care about a particular problem of ours?
This is why keeping a prayer journal with a running gratitude’s list can be very helpful in learning to spot and increase opportunities for more graces, like my happy collection of aurora images that remind me that I did indeed experience these heavenly spectacles and can study their metadata to even improve on capturing them better in the future. When we take the time to acknowledge God’s gifts, and graciously use them, He gives us more. Think about The Parable of the Talents.
“For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” [Mt 25:29]
I’ll try not to be self-conscious in admitting this, but many times while in sheer awe of what I was seeing, I was exclaiming to God showing off in the night sky, “You’re beautiful, You’re SO beautiful! Thank you!” I still well up in tears just reliving its quiet, stunning beauty in my memory. (Now the bigger virtue would be to praise God this joyfully when trials befall me. Still working on that one!)
4) When these great celestial events are experienced publicly and globally, they can have a natural resetting effect on humanity; and because it’s validated communally, people can collectively reorient on the bigger picture, even if just on the natural level for a brief moment, and that still can pave the road for deeper sacramental experiences of God.
Not coincidentally, this same creative pathway can be spiritually experienced in community during the Holy Mass where we collectively focus on the redeeming, quintessentially reorienting, power of the sacrifice on Calvary.
Just take a moment, or as much time as you like, to go to the elevation of the Eucharist happening somewhere this very moment in the world and orient yourself on Him there. Ask your guardian angel to be your ‘aurora vision goggles’ and help you see Jesus interiorly and elevated just for you. Don’t rush.
Was your heart burning? [Lk 24 :32] Take note of any signs or spiritual sensations and try to keep a look out for them throughout the day. This practice of focusing on being in the presence of the Eucharist, even spiritually, can help in recognizing patterns of God working in your soul.
5) I’d like to conclude by recalling a nice little week of star gazing, chasing the Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS last month that was most recently seen earthside only 80,000 years ago. Its image is a perfect prelude to Advent. The Magi’s trek in search of the newborn King by studying the stars has some scholars believing that what they followed may have been a comet, possibly Halley’s Comet, since that has a fairly traceable and regular orbit. So much so, that when the Italian artist Giotto painted a famous fresco of the nativity, he included a tail on the Bethlehem star, resembling Halley’s comet that would have been recognizable by many in his time during 1301.
The Bethlehem comet star, a star in motion and leading the wise men to the Holy Family is an iconic part of the traditional nativity imagery in Italy still to this day, rather than the stationary ‘north star’ with a tail pointing downward more commonly depicted in the United States.
I rather like the image and symbolism of a star in motion for the ‘sign in the sky’. It suggests it is closely moving with us, keeping us company on this pilgrimage while leading us to the Christchild and this is why it’s an intentional feature in my special Christmas Novena prayer beads.
“And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.” [Mt 2:9]
It gets me thinking about what the ‘comets’ that I chase are leading me to. Can I name them? What is behind them or fueling them? Are they authentic signs and inspirations from God that keep me on the path to greater union with Christ or do they take me on dangerous, or even just trivial time-wasting, detours? Just contemplating a comet and how the Magi gazed on one, can be a great setting for an Advent examination of conscience.
Concluding Reflections
These are the kinds of things I thought about while gazing on these extraordinary dark sky events in Maryland. It was an intimate time of contemplating the beautiful wonders of God and all the ways He can show us His power and glory, while also reminding me of my own relative insignificance, not in a bad way, but rather remarkably, that my fragile humanity can exist at all, in such a vast universe, and that I was willed to exist within it.
Like the quiet predawn Advent Rorate Masses I love so much, these nighttime escapades reminded me of the need to be still, call upon the grace of God, and wait. Waiting on Him, and not me constantly taking back the wheel. It reminded me of the importance of receptivity, how that can look bodily and spiritually. It reminded me how small and powerless I am on my own, and what a folly it is to think I can control anything. Job must have had a special love for the night sky in his later years! It also gave me the consolation that in the end God always has the last Word and His Word is beautiful, and that I really can let go when I feel most anxious to just rest and let myself delight in Him, as He gazes at me with love.
Closing Prayer
Let us close with the Collect prayer from the Traditional Latin Mass for the last Sunday before Advent that fittingly calls us to sensitize our hearts to the signs of His healing graces.
Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful to seek more earnestly this fruit of the divine work, that they will receive more abundantly healing gifts from Thy tender mercy. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.
Self-reflection
Was there anything that struck a chord and helped you find a way you can be more intentional about building the habit of sensitizing your soul to God’s divine attractions? Where do your natural sensitivities lie? Perhaps in music, gardening, athletics, cooking… It’s not a coincidence that you have certain tendencies for favorite pastimes. God has designed you a certain way to experience Him like no one else can. Perhaps there might be too much ‘light pollution’ that keeps you blinded from truly seeing those God given desires planted deep within you. Spend some time simply enjoying your wholesome natural interests and see how they might be setting you up for not only ‘praying always and without ceasing’, but also bolstering the sacramental character of life by connecting the subtly veiled dots that lead you to deeper intimacy with Christ.
Advent Resources
My favorite Advent devotion is the 25 day Saint Andrew Christmas Novena. It’s my go-to Advent prayer, and you can find out all about its unique meaning HERE. The nature of the short, yet poetically simple repeating words are a great tool for building the habit of keeping the blinding ‘light pollution’ of the world out of December, so I can really keep my eyes fixed on my authentic ‘comet’ leading me to Christ.
Please share your favorite Advent traditions that help you stay focused and prayerfully preparing for Christmas.
Free Gift
After reading this essay you’ll know more of why I designed my novena prayer beads the way I did! As a subscriber, (thank you!) any purchases at my shop this week leading up to the feast of St. Andrew on November 30th, will ship out with a free Icon Sampler Pack - Set of 3, a $15 value! Use code: SUBSTACK
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All content and images are © Renata Grzan Wieczorek 2024. Review permissions.
Aurora Resources
For those interested in making the most of this solar maximum year, here are some sites I found helpful that lead me to seeing and photographing the aurora now multiple times without having to fly it Alaska or Iceland, not that those places still aren’t on my bucket list though!
Northern Lights Alerts and Pictures | Facebook (Easy way to get notified and be part of a learning and chasing community to decipher the technical data.)
Dark Site Finder (Great resource to assess light pollution in your area and how to find an adequately dark sky. Click on the Map – Dark Site Finder and you’ll notice how big cities and highway routes are drenched in white. I saw the above auroras while only getting out of the white and grey zones.)
Aurora Alerts - Northern Light (One of several free apps I use to check my chances. FYI, even a <10% chance on the horizon forecast can result in a sighting in a dark sky location.)
SpaceWeatherLive.com | Real-time data and plots auroral activity | SpaceWeatherLive.com (Lots of technical data if you really want to get into it!)
Webcams – See The Aurora (Real time webcams can be a next best thing and give you great notice for when it’s time to drop everything and go hunting.)
Sky Tonight - Star Gazer Guide on the App Store (Very helpful free app I used in locating the recent comet, but also great for general star gazing and finding, planets, moons, and other night sky activity.)