Despair

Last night I awoke abruptly and found myself on my back with my shoulders scrunched in, my arms folded close together over my chest, with the covers pulled up close to my face. I had the edges of my sheets gripped tightly with my fists, which were nestled into the narrow declivity formed by the underside of my chin and neck. As I lay there, enfolded in the bleak and static embrace of the hopeless small hours, black thoughts and feelings gripped me and held me firm, forcing me to lie still and listen to the quiet desolation as it gathered its voice and blew through my soul.

As I lay there motionless, I could feel despair pouring into my body, filling me up beyond what I could bear. I thought that if I remained still for much longer, that if I didn't make some attempt to move... to roll over on my side, flip over onto my stomach, glance over at my clock, anything to start time again... that the despair would overflow and I would start to choke on it. I tried to summon an urgent need to break the dense pall which held me fast, but a feeling of apathy had settled into me which erased my motivation to escape. The feeling grew until I was ensconced within an impenetrable cocoon of fear, the last shreds of hope abandoning me as my futile attempts to justify my life echoed dully around me. My only cogent thought was the realization that I had spent all the years of my adult life traversing a path composed of rotten ice, and that the inevitability of total existence failure had finally caught up with me in the dark. I felt a great fool for ever thinking that I could avoid reality by ignoring it.

I lay there for a long while, overflowing with this feeling of ultimate doom that seemed to last for so long. However, as all earthly things are transient and insubstantial, so were these feelings which had finally abated to a point where I was no longer struck stupid by panic. I began to take a mental inventory of existence... I was in my room, in bed, and my clock read 3:43 am. There, reality still endured. I was far from feeling dandy however, as the last few minutes had left my stomach a ball of tangled anxiety. As I was settling down in an attempt to find sleep again, my breath caught in my throat as a memory was thrust forward abruptly into my awareness. It was a passage from my prayer book, which goes like this:

"Suddenly the Judge shall come, and the deeds of each shall be revealed; but with fear we cry out in the middle of the night: Holy, holy, holy art thou, O God. Through the Theotokos have mercy on us."

I repeated the Jesus prayer like a mantra until I finally fell asleep again.

The Star of Bethlehem: An Astronomical Phenomenon

Recently I've discovered that it is highly probable that the Star of Bethlehem was not only a recorded historical event, but an actual, verifiable astronomical phenomenon.  And I love scientific explanations for things like this... the vision that Constantine saw may have been an uncommonly spectacular sun halo, for instance.  But I digress.

There is a movie that has been circulating around the internet for a few years called Zeitgeist, which seeks to cast aspersions on Christianity (among other things) by espousing false correlations and comparisons between Christianity and other religions and inventing new and improved historical data to support their arguments... basically it's a dissertation of shameless and blatant lies, and it's also a topic that I'll save for another time. However, I do find it somewhat ironic that this movie, the purpose of which is to tear down faith, served instead to reinforce it. Allow me to explain.

So, in reaction to this steaming pile called Zeitgeist, I was checking some of this 'factual data' online. In the process I discovered that the Bible doesn't give a specific date for the birth of Jesus, and that it's possible that it could have occurred sometime during the late summer. It's even been postulated that December 25th was chosen as the date of Christ's birth so that pagans could convert to Christianity more easily, being that some popular pagan holidays occur on December 25th (it's not my purpose here to speculate or support any of these suggestions, and they're beside the point anyway). From this information I was led to some very specific data which I found almost unbelievable. It has been suggested before that the Star of Bethlehem could have been an astronomical event, such as a comet or supernova, so this was a concept which which I was familiar. What I discovered, however, amazed me.

Firstly, it is useful to know that a conjunction, in astronomical terms, is when two or more celestial bodies appear near one another in the sky. What I discovered was that on a specific date over 2000 years ago - that of June 17th, 2 BC, to be exact - Jupiter and Venus, the two brightest 'stars' in the night sky, visibly merged to form one dazzling object. There has not been a brighter, closer conjunction of these two planets in the 2000 years before that date or since. For such an extremely unlikely event to occur so near the time of Christ's birth, to me, is far more than just coincidence... it's providence. Therefore, I believe that this extremely rare celestial event is, in fact, what was historically witnessed as the Star of Bethlehem.

Excited by this possibility, I decided to see it for myself. There is a program available for free download called Stellarium... http://stellarium.org/ ...which can show what the sky looked like or will look like at any given date, past present or future, from any location on Earth. So, I loaded Stellarium and typed in the global coordinates for Bethlehem (32°44′11.85″N 35°11′28.72″E), set the date to June 17th, 2 BC in the early evening, and was promptly disappointed. There was no conjunction of Venus and Jupiter. Frustrated, I clicked forward to the year one and noticed something odd... the program actually used a year 'zero', so instead of going from 1 BC directly to 1 AD, it first went to the year ZERO and then it went to 1 AD. That was the problem. Since there was no actual year zero, then the year zero in Stellarium was actually 1 BC. Since I had it set to 2 BC, I was actually seeing the night sky of Bethlehem on June 17th in the year 3 BC. Armed with this new found wisdom, I set the year to 1 BC (actually 2 BC) and was presented with exactly that which was predicted - Jupiter and Venus were undergoing a conjunction so close that the two planets were indistinguishable as two separate objects... even to this computer program, this virtual planetarium, they appeared as a single 'star'.

Wow, I thought. Just wow. There it was - verified, indisputable scientific proof that at a time very close to the birth of Christ an extremely bright 'star' appeared in the sky; a signal which Wise Men of the time could have predicted with astrology, measured with instruments, and charted with maps, thus using it to guide them over oceans of not water, but desert. A celestial event coinciding with the biblical prophecies which predicted the birth of a Messiah; a new, bright star shining in the sky, brighter than any star ever before. To me, this is the evidence for the Star of Bethlehem.

Here is the link where I discovered this information, a very interesting read...

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/OCM/packages/bethstar.html

And here is a link to some screenshots with captions that I made with Stellarium demonstrating the conjunction of June 17th, 2 BC between Jupiter and Venus (numbered 1 - 5, in order). Be sure to click on the actual picture in your browser window so that it magnifies to full size.

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i141/kaxtorplose/StarofBethlehem.jpg

Oh and by the way, Stellarium doesn't render this conjunction as particularly bright... but in real life, you can be sure that it would have been spectacular.