Where do you notice a window opening in your life right now? This episode reflects on Moonlight, Strandgade 30 by Vilhelm Hammershøi, exploring how stillness, emptiness, and moonlight can become places of prayer. Guided by Psalm 139, we listen for God’s presence in the quiet and discover that even the night is not empty.

Psalm 139:7-12

Poem by Rumi

In Moonlight, Strandgade 30, Vilhelm Hammershøi invites us into a quiet interior shaped by shadow, stillness, and a single source of light. There are no people in the room, yet the space feels inhabited—empty and full at the same time. Hammershøi once described these rooms as symbols of the inner human experience, places that reveal their beauty most clearly when no one is present. In this episode, we allow that quiet interior to become a place of prayer.

The reflection opens with a poem by Rumi, not as a directive for how we should feel, but as one example of how symbols—moonlight, windows, breath—can speak differently to each of us. Contemplative prayer does not ask us to adopt someone else’s experience of God. Instead, it invites us to notice what meaning arises within us as we attend to what we see. In this way, art becomes a language through which God may speak uniquely to each person.

As we sit with the painting, we are encouraged to explore its symbolic elements: the door, the window, the empty room, and the moonlight stretching across the floor. Rather than analyzing the painting, we practice presence—allowing one element to draw our attention and listening for what it may reveal about our own lives and our relationship with God.

Psalm 139 accompanies this prayer, grounding the quiet interior in the assurance that no place—light or dark, near or far—is beyond God’s presence. Even the night, which can feel lonely or uncertain, is not empty. Darkness and light are held together in God, just as the stillness of the room is held within a larger, sustaining presence.

This episode invites you to release expectations, remain open, and trust that God is already present in the silence. As you pray, you are welcomed to notice which symbol draws you in and to listen for what God may be stirring within you there—remembering that the night, too, can be a place of encounter.