If I Have Kissed My Hand…

Wednesday I pruned bushes in our yard.

In the evening, Ginny and I watched the total eclipse of the moon; the tv weatherman says there will not be another lunar eclipse till the year 2010.

Here’s a photo I snapped from our backyard garden:

Seeing such beauty reminded me of two things: a private joke and a thought from Scripture.

Lone ago when we were courting, at times I’d take Ginny’s dainty hand in mine, lift it to my lips, then kiss the back of my own hand.

And I’d say, “What in the world to those French guys get out of this”?

She would giggle like a girl.

She still does when I do that.

I suppose you’d have to be us to understand.

This lunar eclipse also reminded me of the words of the Patriarch Job when he told God that he had never kissed his hand to the moon. (Job 31:26-27)

“If I beheld… the moon walking in brightness, and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand: This also were an iniquity to be punished by the Judge,” Job said.

He’s saying that the beauty and majesty of nature, of God’s creation, can entice us to worship the created thing more than the Creator. The kissing of the hand to the moon appears to be an ancient act of homage or worship.

I’m not sure if the ancient pagan worshipers kissed the back of their hands or if they sort of blew the moon a kiss, but they acknowledged the created thing, while neglecting the Creator of all things.

Job mentions kissing the hand to the moon in the middle of a laundry list of evil things:

“If my step hath turned out of the way… If I have withheld the poor from their desire… If I have seen any perish for want of clothing… If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless…If I have made gold my hope… (If I kissed my hand to the moon)… If I covered my transgressions…”

Those were evil iniquities Job said were worthy of being punished by the Judge.

I don’t know of anyone in modern times who kisses his hand to the moon (there may be some but I’ve never run across any) but the other sins on Job’s list beset us even today.

If we don’t hold God in highest esteem, then we hold something less than God in highest esteem.

My grandmother believed that sleeping in moonlight caused mental illness. She made sure the curtains were drawn tight on moonlit nights; she said that crazy people were called lunatics because of what the moon did to them.

Made sense to her.

Sometimes I wonder if we all haven’t been sleeping in the moonlight.

Saint Paul said, “When they knew god, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations… (They) changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image… (They) changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen”.

Paul sees this corruption as a deliberate act; I’m not so sure about that.

I wonder if we see beauty in nature then slip into regarding the visible more than the Invisible. It’s an easy transferring to make. As when Job speaks of making gold our hope, we can so enjoy the blessing that we loose sight of the One who gives that blessing.

And we loose sight of ourselves.

The Psalmist David said, “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! Who had set thy glory above the heavens… When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars , which thou hast ordained: What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?… O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!”

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A Historic Note For The Kid In The Attic:

In the Pacific Ocean during Wednesday night’s lunar eclipse, the USS Lake Erie, an Aegis-class cruiser, fired a three-stage SM-3 missile shooting down a rogue US satellite in space.

The satellite, known as USA-193, was built by Lockheed Martin Corp. and failed shortly after launch in December 2006. In addition to its high-tech payload, it contains about 1,000 pounds of frozen hydrazine, a hazardous propellant stored in a metal tank.

Some experts have compared the task of hitting the satellite to hitting a bullet with a bullet about 150 miles above Earth.

The satellite, the size of a small bus, was speeding through space at 18,000 mph, about twice as fast as the test missiles previously targeted. "It's moving at roughly 300 miles a minute, and so you need to know where it's going to hit. And if you're off by just a minute on that, that's 300 miles off," said Ivan Oelrich, vice president for strategic security programs at the Federation of American Scientists.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, dismissed suggestions that the operation had been designed to test the nation’s missile defense systems or antisatellite capabilities or that the effort had been to destroy secret intelligence equipment.

“This is about reducing the risk to human life on Earth, nothing more,” Mr. Whitman said.

Yeah. Sure.

A standard military tactic since year one is “Always take the high ground”. That way your enemy has to attack uphill while you drop rocks on his head.

AP Photo: US Navy Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), used to shoot down the falling satellite, is launched as part of a test, 6 Nov 2007