Faith Works 2-28-2025

Faith Works 2-28-2025
Jeff Gill

A different sort of cosmic experience
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There's an old riddle about the closest star to Earth.

It's not Sirius, or Alpha Centauri (or Proxima Centauri, either). Our Sun is the closest star, of course. So near it doesn't quite seem like the right answer.

Our star next door lights our days, and indirectly lights our nights by reflection off the Moon (hold that thought). We grow accustomed to the days growing longer in the spring, lengthening which from Old English comes "lencta" the basis for the church year term of Lent.

Next week, Lent begins with Ash Wednesday on March 5, and carries us on into Holy Week after April 13 and Palm Sunday, up to Easter on April 20.

Easter in the western tradition comes on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This year, the astronomical date for day and night to be equal comes on March 20; Easter shifts later since the full moon comes March 14, so the canonical date has to wait for the next one, April 13, pushing Easter morning to the next Sunday, the 20th.

My old friend the Venerable Bede (he's like Beyonce, just Bede, really) in the early Eighth Century wrote a book with the marvelous title "The Reckoning of Time." He was, among many other things, a master of a discipline called "computus," which autocorrect really dislikes, since autocorrect isn't into archaic Latin. Computus is the field of study around how we came up with such an odd way of designating Easter, versus Christmas which just sits fat and happy atop December 25th.

Bede in northern England was aware of how complicated mapping the lunar cycle was onto the essentially solar calendar of the year. In 725 A.D. he tracked the moon's peculiar movements as it rose back and forth along the eastern horizon, in a faster cycle from north to south than the Sun's annual track, but with a longer sequence from maximum to minimum northern rise points requiring him to compute a more complex cycle across many years . . . 18.6 of them, to be precise.

I find this British cleric's writing of interest here in today's Licking County because, of course, we have the Newark Earthworks, and the majestic scale and scope of the Octagon which was already tracking these movements centuries before even the Venerable Bede was born. The Native American builders of these earthen enclosures and alignments did not leave us a written account of what they were intending, but the precision and extent of the walls which mark the lunar cycle so closely strongly suggest to us there was some form of record keeping we do not yet have, perhaps on a perishable form (but we continue to hope for discoveries yet to come).

There was a form of computus at work here, tracking the puzzling yet knowable rhythms of the Sun and Moon and seasons, for purposes we do not yet fully understand. To that end, I've been spending more time in the last few years watching daytime moonrises.

Daytime moonrises? Yep. Like the Sun being our closest star, we can miss the obvious, that the Moon rises all around the clock over a month. Late evening full moon moonrises are impressive, but some of the key earthwork moonrises come just around noon, the Sun already high in the sky. A silvery Moon swims out of the blue sky slowly, a revelation no less than the bright orange spark of moonrise at nighttime.

On Friday, March 7, at 11:00 am, I'm part of a tour at the Octagon Earthworks at the end of 33rd St. off West Main in Newark. We will walk into the vast enclosures, and around 12:15 pm or so see the Moon by day, while thinking about the meanings of celestial movements, spiritual events, Native American accomplishments. I'll be thinking about good old Bede, and how he might help us understand the reckoning of time right here.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes the schedule for noontime moonrises more than midnights. Tell him how the skies make you wonder at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.