And when we experience it on Bardsey, where the sky is so dark and there’s nothing else visually to distract us, well: it’s an unforgettable experience. How wonderful that Bardsey’s Dark Sky has been recognised and given the special status it deserves.

Partly of course our “wow” is evoked by the sheer beauty of those pinpricks of white light against such a black background, tiny, yet brilliant. Partly it’s the sense of height and depth in which these stars seem suspended, silently and apparently unmoving. And then there’s the knowledge that we now have of just how vast the universe is which we are glimpsing: so vast that the distances involved – even just between one star and another, let alone one constellation and another, let alone one galaxy and another…are unimaginable.

And then there’s the time factor too: the light which we see from some of the stars may have taken hundreds, thousands, even millions of years to reach us, despite travelling (of course!) at the speed of light… And so, what we see is not how any particular star is now, but how it was when the light set off from it: by the time its light reaches us, the star could well have exploded or imploded, and so no longer even exist…

It is a truly a remarkable experience: here we are, perhaps six feet tall but not much more; and here for just a few decades… standing still and looking up, with such an infinity of time and space just (!) there above us… It is extraordinarily humbling, and even more so when we remember that each of us is only here because of an evolutionary process which has gone on, on just this one small planet (and perhaps uniquely and nowhere else in the universe) for some 4.5 billion years. From that process not only have we humans emerged, but we have emerged with the ability to observe, experience and reflect on all these amazing things.

All of this, of course, begs all the questions: how and why and wherefore – and, for that matter, how and why and wherefore me? Astrophysics can provide some answers to those questions, and so can aesthetics, and so can psychology. But only partly. Ultimately it all remains a fascinating mystery, an awesome experience, and one that leads us to the heart of what spirituality is all about…

As far back as perhaps three thousand years ago a Hebrew poet mused “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have ordained, what is man that you should be mindful of him?” (Psalm 8: 4-5). And a mere three hundred and fifty years or so ago, the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan spoke of such a “deep but dazzling darkness” as being perhaps of the essence of God, and a means by which we are drawn into the heart of that mystery. So no wonder the particular Dark Sky designation that Enlli has been given is the one called “Sanctuary”: that’s “spot on”!