On Reaching the June Moon

Recently, there was an astronomical event called a “Strawberry Supermoon.” This sounds like a late Beatles song or a drink at a Sonic drive-in, but it’s actually stranger than both of those things: it’s a gift from the eternal God to some small creatures whom He loves intensely.

That said, it’s frightening to see a huge crimson-colored moon if you weren’t expecting it and had never witnessed one before. Like many of God’s gifts, it’s terrible in the literal sense (“to make you tremble”). That night, I was on Revere Beach near Boston, flanked by two friends, eating ice cream and hunting for shells on the dark shore. We noticed the moon hadn’t come out yet and we wondered aloud where it could be, since it should have been full. Then one of us noticed the faint red glow on the water.

It looked for all the world like a mushroom cloud. The moon peeking over the ocean was so large and, at first, so oblong that it seemed to be pressed down by a thumb. That night it was intensely red. None of us were sure what to make of it, except I thought maybe New York had been hit by a hydrogen bomb, but my friends didn’t think this would be visible from Boston. I checked the news on my phone just in case. It didn’t seem to be the end of the world as far as anyone knew.

Of course, slowly and with much embarrassment, we admitted it must be the moon, and laughed in relief and wonder. I gravitated from my BBC check-in to a search about moon news, where I learned the term for what was happening. Then I put my phone away and stared at the strawberry supermoon for a long time.

Here’s what it was like on Revere Beach.

It was as if dawn were appearing but the sun no longer hurt your eyes, and you could look at it to your heart’s content. The fat scarlet moon grew slowly and sat on the Atlantic. The waves threw their foamy heads at our feet, tossed aside by their beautiful new monarch, and the stars came out, attracted by it.

The moon grew higher and took on a little yellow in its hue. It rested awhile between two thin clouds that looked like mittened hands holding it tentatively. A path of light lay across the water towards us, a beam in which the twitching ocean seemed like a set of stairs—long and golden stairs with a deep ascent and innumerable, shifting steps. If you ever reached the top of them, I thought, you could stand on the horizon, directly beneath the hands which held the molten moon. Then, if you stood still enough, the hands might let go, and the moon might slip down and melt into you and cover you and color you. And this would be a terrible and desirable thing.

I have a point to describing all this, and it’s to say that if you wish you had been at Revere Beach, you should go to Mass today, where within an hour you’ll be standing at the top of the ocean stairs, waiting beneath the hands for that beautiful touch which is the end of your old dark world—an apocalypse and a new beginning.

"June Solstice Full Moon" by robert.breckenridge is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.