The Red Moon and a Sinking Ship: On Beauty in a Burning World

For all these things: we rejoice.

The sunsets have been glorious lately.
The world’s on fire, and the sunsets have been glorious.
The world’s at war, and the sunsets have been glorious.
The world’s in shambles, and the sunsets have been glorious.
And the sunsets have always been glorious.
And the world has always been on fire.
And for all these things: we rejoice.

Not a picture of last night’s sunset, but of one I captured last summer while visiting Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

This morning my phone is ablaze with photos of last night’s particularly striking moon. People up and down the Northeast are sharing glimpses of an unusually bounteous full moon, hanging low and forlorn and flaming in a cavernous sky. I’m grateful for these images—for the merciful way they interrupt the other headlines: Israel’s air strikes on Iran, a local dentist among the dead in the Air India crash, something else about there being no kings in America…? I’m grateful for the moon’s haunting splendour, the way it holds court over it all.

But on his personal feed, an acquaince is quick to lament. Everyone celebrating the so-called strawberry moon, he says, is mistaking catastrophe for beauty. A “strawberry moon” isn’t supposed to be red—the term comes from an Indigenous name for the full moon in June, when strawberries ripen. That strange, luminous glow is borne of crisis: smoke from forest fires and Saharan dust, the earth quite literally on fire. This moon, he writes, isn’t a gift of the cosmos but a sign of “our tragic and complete failure” as human beings—a failure of relationship, of restraint, of care for the earth.

I consider his words as I walk my dog before work. It’s a perplexing paradox that forest fires make for splendid sunsets. Does marveling at the latter (an extroardinary moon) mean we condone the former (forest fires)? I am torn between both lament and awe—must we force one another to take sides even in this?

And another question: is it wrong to rejoice in beauty on a sinking ship?

I mean this literally as much as figuratively. Many survivor accounts from the Titanic recall how uncommonly beautiful it was at sea that night—no moon lit the sky, but the water was calm, the air clear, and emerald bursts of phosphorescent algae shimmered in the same waters where hundreds of souls were extinguished. The beauty of that night comforted, bore witness, humbled, remained.

And Anne Frank, writing against the backdrop of a very different kind of fire than the ones ravaging the Interior of Canada, once wrote:

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

Walking my dog, a crisp sun shines on a blessedly temperate June day. A bird coos from somewhere close—the shady sycamore tree on the corner, perhaps, or a nearby park bench. My dog has claimed a discarded softball, much too big for his mouth, and as he parades it through the neighbourhood, a man I don’t know smiles at him from his porch.

If I didn’t know any better, I would say the world is a good place. I would say I am deeply grateful for this day, this moment, this place. I would say that despite—or between or alongside—all the gruesome headlines, I will receive the solace of beauty in whatever form it is offered to me.

I would say, too, that maybe this is more than an avoidance, or a vain, therapeutic hope. If we police beauty too much—if we force each other to choose a side: beauty or lament; if we wait for the world and all its people to be perfect before we allow ourselves to give voice to any goodness at all—there may not be much of a world left worth saving. Worth grieving for. Worth marveling in. Worth sacrificing ourselves for.

For a lone ray of sunlight dancing on the mountainside, even as the storm rages on: we rejoice. For a world that wasn’t swallowed up long ago in unrelenting darkness or red-hot flames: we rejoice. For the grace of beauty despite our worst sins: we rejoice. For eyes to behold and hearts to be humbled and words to bear witness to all these things before our own brief candle goes out—for all these things, and more, we rejoice, we rejoice, we rejoice.

We say beauty will save the world. What we mean is this: alone, neither shame nor guilt, nor regret nor self-excoriation—no matter how well founded—will ever save us. When all else fails, it is beauty that will move us to save the world, or at least what we can of it—what God has given us to save. And to love.

☙

I’m still thinking about the moon. Later, after wrestling the softball from my dog’s overextended jaw, feeding him, and settling in at my desk, I open my computer.

It turns out smoke and sand weren’t the only factors behind yesterday’s unusually large, unusually rose-coloured moon. The timing coincided with what’s known as a lunar standstill—a rare alignment that occurs every 18.6 years, when the moon reaches its lowest angle in the sky. That angle makes it appear larger and more orange than usual.

Another paradox, I suppose: both nature and our environmental failures conspiring to produce beauty worth beholding.

May we rejoice.

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