Bursting Into Glory

Hello! Are you busy? No? Good. You need to come with me.

I'm here to show you a little glimpse of glory.

Turn off the news, and close up your screen! Go put on your shoes. Grab a jacket - it's turned cool, and the mosquitos are out. Come on!

Let's walk down the driveway. Be careful - give your eyes a little time to get used to the dark. Let your feet tell you when you wander off the gravel a bit into the grass. The cool breeze feels so good after the long, hot day, doesn't it?

Now let's turn north, past the trees to the cornfield.

Hey, you can't look up that way, all bent over with worry! Let it all fall away for a while, that weight on your shoulders. That's better. Now - look up. The stars are sure bright tonight, aren't they?

Now, find the Big Dipper. Got it? OK, look just below it, to the left and down. Can you see it - that bright spot, trailing a long tail of light?

You're looking at a marvel.

Let's talk about glory for a little while here, while we stand in the dark, looking up at that stream of light. Let's talk about moving forward into our destiny, and giving ourselves to the moment, and meeting a great challenge with courage and passion. Let's talk about bursting into glory.

You know, while we stand here, all across the world, millions of people are looking, too, the same way we are. Some of them are driving miles to find a good place to see it, or staying up half the night for one glimpse. And the pictures - have you seen them? This streak of light, over farms and cities and mountains, shining like the high, sweet notes of unexpected music over our weary world, drawing our gaze up from our screens and our hearts up from despair.

No one expected it, you know. It's probably the only welcome surprise this miserable year will bring us. It dropped in on us from the far reaches of our solar system, pulled here by the sun. Very soon it will slingshot back into the darkness, not to return for thousands of years.

Comets are humble things, really. They're small - only a few miles across - just rough, dirty chunks of ice, dust, rock and frozen gas, made of the leftover junk from when our planets formed. They're the sawdust left on God's worktable, really. They're too small to have any gravity, even, so they tumble through space on their long, fragile orbits, nudged and pulled about by passing planets. For hundreds, even thousands of years they move through empty space, pulled toward the sun. Our closest comets visit every 200 years. This one? The last time it shone in our sky was 6,800 years ago.

Just think of that.

I saw a picture online of it shining in the night sky over Stonehenge. The last time it shone in the sky, Stonehenge hadn't even been built yet. There were no cities, no highways, no satellites blinking their way across the sky. Just the dim lights of fires flickering in stone houses. We'd figured out farming, and started to build towns. We'd begun to band together, form simple governments, worship together. We were just inventing writing, pressing reed pens into damp clay. We'd begun to take the first unsteady steps toward civilization as we know it.

I like to think of them, though, those people so long ago. They stood on hillsides, just like we are now, gazing up at that light with their children by their sides, pointing upwards, saying, Look! They struggled to survive, to make a living, to care for their families; they tried to endure hardship with fortitude and face death bravely. Take away our fancy screens and our gadgets, and we're not much different, really.

But we were talking about glory, and that's why I wanted you to walk out and look up at that bright stream of light in the night sky.

I said that comets were humble things, but that's not really true. What really matters is what they do when they finally meet their destiny.

It's breathtaking, when you think about it. For centuries that little rock tumbled through the dark immensity of space, beckoned toward a great mystery far, far away. Then, finally, a light off in the distance appeared, growing brighter and brighter, drawing it toward this one great ordeal, one that might, in the end, destroy it. It plunged ahead, moving faster and faster through the rising heat, buffeted by the growing force of a mighty, invisible wind.

And then - in the face of the unbearable, that humble rock burst into glory. Ice turned to vapor and gases exploded, sending it hurtling forward faster than ever, trailing a giant tail of flame. The closer it came to the sun, the more it blazed, burned itself away, lighting up the sky in triumph. In that ordeal, it burst out of its chrysalis of sooty rock into something new and bright and beautiful.

Maybe that's why we're all looking up and marveling tonight. Perhaps we all feel the lesson here.

All our lives we've moved along our simple paths, nudged here and there by fate. We didn't know this was waiting for us up ahead, this destiny, out there in the distance, pulling us forward, until we would finally see it, growing and growing, waiting to engulf us.

And now we're caught in it, drawn into the immense, heart-wrenching challenge of these days.

I've never known a time like this, with so heavy a burden and so much at stake. All of our quiet paths have brought us here, facing a greater challenge than we've ever known before.

But I take a lesson from that light. If it were to speak, it would say: this is our time. This is our moment.

Let's face into the wind, submit to the storm and meet it with all our courage. Let's light up this weary, struggling world with our passion, give it all of our strength, all of our love, and let ourselves be transformed into something new and brave and wonderful. All our lives have brought us to this moment. Let's meet it in a blaze of glory.

We may not survive the challenge, but we won't let that stop us. And if, when we leave the light behind and return to the darkness, we've given all we can, well done.

This is our time. This is our moment of glory.