God In The Sky

“Christ is and has always been in the atmosphere of the Earth!” —Rudolf Steiner

Many old texts, even the Bible itself, indicate that we can see God by literally looking at the sky. Reductionists have used this concept to mock and discredit those who follow a spiritual path because, of course, when we look up at the sky, we do not literally see God, right?

Is it possible to understand God and angels, even dark entities in the clouds, as something beyond what we see with our eyes? Through this lens, old paintings, mythologies, and stories about the sky and heaven could become a veiled reference not to the literal sky we see above our heads, but to the realm that exists there, which is what we once called heaven.

The beauty of a sunrise draws us toward this realm, where perhaps the angels indeed seem to sing as the light rises and pours out upon us another dawn. The stirring in the soul caused by a new dawn is not some sort of evolutionary response to another day of hunting down our prey and making up stories about the gods helping us around campfires in our stony caves. It is a call to return to the spiritual reality that exists above the earthly reality of a new day.

The poets say the dawn can speak. That we can understand. But what if, from within the beauty of dawn, there is an actual spiritual being that speaks to the human soul? On some level, we can all hear this, even those who say it is nothing but a random collection of dust particles and light. Still, the dawn speaks of hope: another chance for forgiveness, restoration, and the return of all good things, even things we have lost here that seemingly cannot be restored.

What if every day the heavens truly calls to us to return to our understanding of the reality of the spiritual world? We can comprehend the feeling of this, but see only the water vapor, chemical compounds, and refraction of light in this phenomenon, and so dismiss it as such.

What if the atmosphere of Earth is truly more than material compounds, but instead consists of a spiritual plane that is only a step away from our understanding—a step that involves looking beyond what we see, into the being itself that lies behind the sunrise? Then the old texts take on an entirely different meaning and can perhaps be understood in a new way that changes our understanding of the sky itself.

Suddenly, reading older texts becomes a new way to see something very old when it says, “Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man… and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.”