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There I could sit with my back securely pressed against the outer wooden frame of the house, gazing at a particularly bright star. I assume now that I was actually looking at Venus, for it was distinctive bright and lower in the night sky. What struck me then is that it seemed to hang directly over the Catholic grade school and church I attended. Shining out of the darkness, it gave me great comfort.
Sitting on that roof, I was outside the house with its complicated relationships - a parent suffering with the disease of alcoholism, another parent who seemed hard to please, a sibling who found me a nuisance, another who was kinder but wished I were a boy. All of that was inside the house. On the roof, I was physically outside, in the fresh air, hidden in the gentleness of night.
The star spoke to me of another life, a life that I heard about in school. There I was told there was a way of life that, if I followed the rules and colored within the lines, would be mine and would be better. Yet that is not right. The star was over the church and school - and somehow I linked that in my mind to being outside the house. What the star promised was freer, fresher, more mysterious. The house was a place of unpredictability, the church and school were, for me, a place of predictability - but the star had nothing to do with either predictability or unpredictability. It spoke to me of wonder. It beckoned to me, asking only for openness and a willingness to trust my intuition that there was goodness above - and all around me.
I am sure now - it wasn’t really a star at all - it was Venus, another name that points toward Love.