When we stepped out of the church, I saw the moon floating behind the leaves of a tree, a sight I found too magical to pass up, and so I whipped out my phone camera, positioned myself to get the right composition and took a shot.
The moon seemed full to me. When we got home, however, our gardener corrected my impression, saying that, judging from a small, almost imperceptible imperfection in the arc, it would be one or two more days before the moon would be completely round. I deferred to his opinion. As between us, he would know better, having been a fisherman, who respected the sky in matters of catch and safety, to whom a full moon would mean, well, empty arms. But I found it strange that none of us checked the wall calendar, which would have given us the meteorological information we wanted, together with the tides.
Perhaps I found my photograph sufficiently illuminating to let the matter rest without further verification, and too lovely not to post on Facebook. I did not have problems finding a suitable text to go with the photograph, because, when I first saw the moon at the church grounds, these lines from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” instinctively came to mind; they in fact moved me to capture the scene with my phone camera—“Leaving as the moon releases / Twig by twig the night-entangled trees.”
In “Ars Poetica,” MacLeish describes a poem in terms of images — globed fruit, old medallions, mossy stone, flight of birds, moon, doorway, leaf, grasses. He compares the poem to the moon that seems motionless as it climbs, and yet leaves us, and this we note from the way the moon behind a tree progresses — moving from twig to twig.
When I reflect on the full moon, especially on the word “full,” I think of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, in which he tells them of his prayer that they “may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Being filled with the fullness of God implies being charged with the mystery of God, being charged with His power, as the leaves are charged with the life that their chlorophyll draws from the sun. There is only one word, just one, that describes the mystery of God — love. Love means nothing if not active. And if God is love, He must contain in Himself the dynamics of love — the Lover, the Beloved, and the Affection between them, which three do indeed correspond to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Conscious of this, John Donne exclaimed, “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” comparing himself to an illegally taken town, and his heart to its gates, and, being unwilling and weak to free himself, pleading with the Blessed Trinity to use a battering ram to force the gates of his heart open and then to take him unto Himself.
The perfectly round moon may be a symbol of the fullness of God. But from where I stood, the moon seemed two-dimensional. It is, of course, three-dimensional, just like the earth. I recall someone trying to explain why we find the Blessed Trinity incomprehensible, saying that one who is two-dimensional would not understand anything with three dimensions, such as a cube or a sphere, and would find our world a mystery.
There were many things that the disciples as yet did not understand, and of these John writes of Jesus telling them, “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Nonetheless, if the disciples could not at the time comprehend these things, Jesus gave them this assurance, “when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…”
Instead of wasting his time arguing with himself or with others how there could be a Mystery of the Blessed Trinity, Donne addressed the “three-personed God” and asked Him to fill him with His fullness. Fill the moon of my being with your light, he seemed to say. Make me round like the moon, or a woman who has been loved — “for I, / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.”