A Splinter of Moon

I have always been friends with the moon; she seems to me by turns tender, jovial, giddy, beaming. I love the heavy, round harvest moon low in the sky. I love the moon swelling just past the first quarter, like a hopeful bud. I love even the curved sliver of moon in the first few days of its newness, slipping across the sky as if it might catch on a cloud and wobble. 

There is only one time I can remember being afraid of the moon. I was with my grandparents, driving to their home to spend a night, and a large red moon slowly crested the horizon and floated there, ominously. Somewhere between church and family devotions, I’d heard the verses about the last days, when the moon would turn red and the stars fall from the sky. I saw the moon hovering, undulating, staring at me through the trees as we drove, and I was terrified. Would the stars fall? Would the earth burn? The red moon flamed on the edge of the world, and I began to wonder if I was about to die. 

I can smile about it now, and I pity my young self, sitting frozen in fear with my face glued to the window as the car sped along. If I hadn’t been so afraid, the sight of that gentle moonrise would have been a gift. But I was rather haunted by the idea of death in those years, and the moon was so crimson, so near, it seemed impossible that it could mean nothing. 

I do not know if I thought of death more often than other children, but when I did think of dying, it terrified me. I heard of deaths in the Bible, and as I grew older my parents encouraged me to read the biographies of missionaries. William Carey, Mother Teresa, Jim Elliot; I knew their sacrifices and their sufferings. I fixated on the martyrs with fearful fascination, and I often guiltily thanked God I’d been born in America, where it seemed I could both believe in Jesus and keep my head attached to my shoulders without too much trouble. Was I so afraid of death that I would deny Jesus to live? I didn’t know the answer.

I have never been afraid of the moon since that one night. She is a friend once more; faithful, illuminative, turning the night across the sky with silver beauty. And the question of physical death no longer weighs on me the way it once did. I have seen more of death; perhaps I’ve had time to grieve its inevitability. Maybe it’s that sanctification has revealed itself as a type of killing off: everything in us that is dead or ought to be dead is cut away and thrown into the fire. The question of death has changed altogether—because there is much more to dying than simply dying. Once I thought it meant losing my life. Now so often it means laying my life down for another.

Only Christ-in-us will pass through unscathed. Dying has come to mean something new. 

I do not imagine that my early teenage years were easy for my parents. Even as an adult, my emotions run close to the surface. I cry easily. Perhaps more accurately, I feel hurt and heartache deeply, both mine and that of my friends. Along with this predilection toward grief, I have always suspected that joy is more virtuous. Isn’t it better to rejoice than to weep? With time, my view of grief seems as naive as the innocent fear of the full, red moon that night so many years ago, but as a child and young adult obsessed with my own sanctification, I found myself wondering. There must be something wrong with such bitter sadness, especially when that sadness comes in seasons of spiritual pruning, of dying to myself. 

But what about the Hebrews 12 moment of discipline? [1] When, as James says, our faith is tested and we should rejoice, because testing produces perseverance? [2] What then? What if rejoicing is the last thing on my mind? Am I allowed to grieve in the middle of loneliness, money troubles, nights and days of breath-stealing anxiety? Have I heard Sunday school songs about how the Lord loves a cheerful giver for so long that I’ve begun to believe the Lord loves a cheerful person? 

Are we still allowed to grieve, even if we are the ones who are dying? 

 Last winter as part of our homeschool lessons, I taught my children about the phases of the moon. I had always loved the rhythm of the words “waxing” and “waning,” but now I had a reason, an excuse to weave them into everyday conversation. 

“Look at the moon,” I would say, pointing out the window before I closed the curtains at bedtime. “It’s larger tonight. Do you remember what this is called? It’s waxing gibbous.” Or perhaps “The moon has been shrinking. Tonight, it’s a waning crescent—see what a tiny sliver of moon it is?”

The term “new moon” always bothered me. It didn’t seem as if it could be new yet—why didn’t we call it a new moon on its first night of re-visibility? That was new. What everyone called new seemed to me just blank, empty, the space where the moon had once been. Slice by slice, the moon is carved away every month until it seems to vanish. But I may have been looking at dying all wrong. Maybe death is the way we become new. Perhaps we wane in slice-by-slice sanctification, until everything is dark, invisible, gone. A new moon. A new man. 

Death becomes the way to life. In the midst of grief, rejoicing. 

I have watched the moon rise many times since that one horrifying night. There is a summer camp where I live for three months of the year for my husband’s job. I’ve lingered outside many clear summer nights, and I know the place where the moon will rise. From the deck of the staff lodge I see it drifting up into the sky; it emerges as if from a fold in the mountains. 

One night, several of the camp staff were gathered on that long wooden deck together. 

“What’s that?” someone pointed at a diffused glow emanating from behind the mountains across the valley from us. 

“It’s the moon; it’s about to rise,” I answered.

“No, those are just the city lights below us,” someone replied dismissively. I shrugged it off; time would tell. I’d watched the moon rise above those hills in every stage; a nearly-round waning moon, a tidy half-moon floating above the valley. The moon as a silver splinter, shaved away to nearly nothing. 

Five minutes later, my dismissive friend turned to me and gestured frankly at the moon. “You were right,” he said. A full moon rose above the pine-covered hillside, beaming with gentle benediction. A full moon that had laid itself down night by night until it vanished into the dark, now grown back to brightness. 

The waxing moon fills the hollows of its first quarter, grows bright again with newness of life. The full moon, bright with promise, shines with the full reflection of the sun. Even as the waning moon slides away into the dark, the unknown, the new moon isn’t gone at all. When I thought the moon was losing itself, she was turning her face to heaven.

[1] Hebrews 12:7-11, New Living Translation

[2] James 1:2-3, NLT 

The featured image, “Jordan’s Golden Moon,” is courtesy of Cultivator Jordan Durbin and is used with permission for Cultivating.

Gianna Soderstrom

Gianna Soderstrom is a contributing writer to Cultivating Oaks Press and the Anselm Society, and she serves as Assistant Director of the Anselm Society Arts Guild. Adventure-hearted, but also a connoisseur of cozy, book-ish evenings, she is delighted by coffee and cocoa but shockingly, not tea. She is equally fascinated and challenged by the myriad ways that small and steady faithfulness transform a strange place into a home. She is a writer, dreamer, wife to Grant, mama to E1 and E2, and more than the sum of her parts, just like you. Gianna writes here and everywhere else to mine hope out of our ordinary moments.