Maghrib Sky

8th of Safar, 1433 — January 2, 2012

With the Name of the Gracious and Compassionate
Creator of the Heavens and the Earth

The World Beyond the Sky

The sun had set, perhaps fifteen minutes earlier, and I was about to do Salaat-ul-Maghrib (the sunset salaah), when I decided to look out my front door at the evening sky.

The stars were not visible yet, but I saw a planet – Venus – shining bright, high in the western sky. I knew the moon was out, so I searched for it. When I found it – the first-quarter moon – it was not alone. Just to the south of it was another planet. I’m fairly certain it was Jupiter.

I normally look at the sky in the wee hours before dawn, not so often in the evening. From my little front porch – more of a little stoop, really – I have a magnificent view of the eastern horizon and the southern sky. My view to the west is blocked by trees, and to the north by the house I live in.

Nowadays, Mars – a yellowish hue to my eyes – is almost directly overhead at that hour. Saturn and Mercury are supposed to be visible in the morning, but I don’t know if I’ve seen them. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Mercury in my life. If I’ve seen it – which I guess is likely – I probably didn’t recognize it and thought it was Venus.

I lived in New York from May 1980 to March 2003, and regretted that the sky was always polluted and blocked out by excessive lighting and tall buildings. Where I live now – despite my neighbors installing more and more lights on their properties – I have a magnificent view of the stars, and even see the Milky Way from time to time.

The sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, the Milky Way – these are in the world beyond the sky. We say they are in “the sky” – as though there is only one sky – and actually seem to see them in the sky where birds and airplanes fly and clouds float. But it is not so.

Airplanes and clouds may be five or ten miles above us. Our communications satellites may be over 20,000 miles up. But the moon is 240,000 miles away. Our eyes tell us that the moon is in the sky, but the moon is 240,000 miles beyond the sky.

Our eyes tell us that the sun is in the sky – that the sun is in our sky – but, in fact, we here on Earth are in the sun’s sky. Not only is the sun beyond Earth’s sky, but the sun is so huge – its diameter is 100 times the diameter of Earth – that its atmosphere, its weather, reaches out to affect us. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – huge storms in the sun’s atmosphere – surge outward from the sun’s surface and cause blackouts and freak weather events here on Earth. We are in the sun’s sky, not the other way around.

The planets we can see – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – are tens to hundreds of millions of miles beyond the sky. The stars we see as points of light are hundreds of trillions or thousands of trillions of miles beyond the sky. And the dimly glowing mass of stars which form the Milky Way are 300,000 trillion to 600,000 trillion miles beyond the sky. Also visible to the naked eye is a galaxy – the huge companion to our own Milky Way galaxy – a dim spot in the night sky, which is over 12,000,000 trillion miles beyond the sky.

There is a sign in this. There is always a world beyond the sky. No matter how far we look – even with the most powerful telescopes – there is always a world beyond the sky.

And this spacious planet – our earthly home – is barely a point in the vastness of the sky.

This – all this – is the lower reality. The vast magnificence of the higher reality — the reality of the meaning and purpose of existence, where the Creator has established his residence — cannot be seen with physical eyes, or with any physical instruments we can devise.

Lester A. Knibbs
8 Safar 1433 / 4 Jumaada-al-Aakhirah 1442
January 2, 2012 (last eight words added January 17, 2021)