Ave Maris Stella
The period from roughly the quarter moon through the three-quarter moon gives me of lot of pleasure if the nights are clear or partly clear. That’s when my nightly walk with the dogs, which usually happens somewhere between nine and eleven (maybe later on weekends), gives me a chance to see the moon in the west or southwest shining over Mobile Bay. I had several such nights last week, and I very much wish I had the skill to paint a picture of it, or at least to photograph the scene. I could try to paint it in words, of course, but at least for me such word-pictures rarely work. In general the more detailed they are the less they succeed, but that’s probably because I lack the visual imagination. So I’ll leave it at just a few suggestions: moonlight on the sand, a fallen tree to sit on, glittering dark wavelets breaking, and a wide path of light leading from the shoreline to the horizon.
For the past two or three nights the moon has been approaching the full and doesn’t get over the water (from my west-facing point of view) until sometime after midnight, so it’s rare that I see the full moon on the other side of the water from me. But last night I had something else almost as good: bright moonlight shining from the east on tall banks of white clouds to the west, over the bay. The clouds were moving swiftly, at the far outskirts of the winds of Hurricane Ike.
Clouds covered perhaps two-thirds of the sky, so the moonlight came and went, as did my view of the fairly few stars visible within the ambient light of town. Off to the south, toward the open sea, there was one very bright star or planet. It made me think of my favorite of the many titles given to Our Lady: “stella maris,” “star of the sea.” As stars and seas are two of the most beautiful things in the world, combining them this way in praise of the one unstained yet ordinary human being is sublime.
So I thought this seemed a good time to pray to her. But when I looked toward that star again it was behind the clouds. Well, no matter, I know it’s still there so I’ll go ahead: “Blessed mother, I beg you to pray for….” And at that instant, in a very brief pause between the request and its object, the star emerged from the clouds and stayed there until I finished my brief prayer, adding “Hail, star of the sea.”
Just coincidence? Perhaps. Or one small sign, a sort of smile from the other world, a barely audible whisper of yes, we are here? There’s no way to know, but I think there is a realm of knowledge, perhaps never accessible to us because we are too limited, where the distinction has no meaning.
A lot of people prayed last week that the fury of Hurricane Ike would be averted or ameliorated. The storm surge—the giant wave that a hurricane pushes before it—was predicted to be over twenty feet (six meters) high, but in the event was much less. From what I have seen on TV and read, the difference spared the lives of many on Galveston Island. Coincidence? Blind luck? Answered prayer? We won’t know in this life. God almost never makes it impossible for us not to believe. Or even very difficult.
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Light On Dark Water 
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