When the Moon Hits Your Eye

O Lord, our Sovereign,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.
     Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
    to silence the enemy and the avenger.

 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars that you have established;
 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
    mortals that you care for them?

Psalm 8:1-4 NRSV

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie
That's amore

The July full moon will be Tuesday of this week and it is called the Buck or Thunder Moon...or so the moon people say. I've written before about the many verses in scripture which include the moon, usually as a portent of change and even of God's judgement. Jesus was in Jerusalem for Passover, a moon related festival,  in the days which led to his crucifixion and may have been in Gethsemane under a full moon.

There is a new exhibition, Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which the New York Times describes as "a testament to the human drive to know and explore, and it quietly affirms the growing influence of visual representations of the moon from the invention of the telescope through the first manned moon landing 50 years ago." 



It sounds fascinating but the exhibition on at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, The Moon: A Voyage through Time, is excellent as well. It explores the religious significance of the moon in Islam and I really enjoyed it. 

It's interesting that a relatively recent human achievement, the lunar landing, has inspired so much reflection on the importance of the moon to science and religion through the ages. We will be in Newfoundland in September for the Harvest Moon and we'll experience daily tides which are the influence of the moon's twice-daily gravitational pull. We won't take for granted the glory of the heavens. 



Georges Méliès’s “Square in the Eye"
 a preparatory drawing for the film “Le Voyage Dans la lune” 
(“A Trip to the Moon”) from 1902, re-created in 1930.
CreditGeorges Méliès/Cinémathèque Française, Paris