Article December 21, 1974 Issue

Morning Star—Not Superstar

JOHN E. CHEAL

Very early one morning I was on a plane flying eastward from the Hawaiian Islands to the mainland. The sky was almost black, with just a faint rim of light on the horizon to indicate the coming dawn. As I drew back the window curtain, I saw over the wing of the plane the brilliant glory of the morning star.

Many times during my holiday in the beautiful islands I had pondered a paragraph in Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, with the marginal heading, "Some lessons from nature." The sentence "The floral apostles are hieroglyphs of Deity" Science and Health, p. 240; inspired me to translate the visual beauty of flowering shrubs and waving palm trees into a symbol of eternal spiritual qualities of life and harmony. Now the brilliance of the morning star turned my thoughts to the next sentence in that paragraph: "Suns and planets teach grand lessons."

What grand lesson could I learn from this radiance? A Bible verse concerning Christ Jesus, in the last chapter of Revelation, came to mind: "I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star." Rev. 22:16; Why had this metaphor of the morning star come to John's inspired thought to represent the nature and mission of the Christ? What is the morning star? The realization came, Why, it's not a star at all; it's a planet. But what is the difference between a star and a planet? A star is a sun, generating and radiating its own light. A planet has no light of its own, it shines by the reflected light of the sun.

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