Cosmos Conscious

“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained – What is man that You are mindful of him?”

David wrote that question roughly three thousand years ago. I don’t know if you live in a place where the city lights screech for attention at night, or whether you’ve ever been miles from home on a moonless night when the stars are at their most brilliant, but in David’s day it would have been a short trip away from the fire to find a dark shadow, a spot where all the visible stars in the cosmos seem to sparkle down like an orchestra of light. That sight prodded an obvious question in him, namely, given the size of the universe, and our inconspicuous placement within it, why does humanity merit God’s attention?

For David, the answer was that man’s exaltation was a favor granted by God because of His own excellence. Today we call that grace, or the undeserved attention and blessings of our Maker. After Copernicus helped us to see the sun and earth in proper relation secular scientists used that information to make a dangerous leap of blind faith. They said that in the same way our planet is not the center of the solar system, humanity is not the point of creation.. Hopefully we can see that making broad, sweeping philosophical generalities on the basis of observations by physicists is a fool’s game. Physics can tell us what, but not why. Sometimes how, but never who.

In David’s time the stars were abundant and brilliant. But once men started to make telescopes the universe seemed to explode into an infinitely more complex and daring place. The wildest imaginings of humanity were dwarfed and made obsolete by nothing more poetic than simple reality. Scientists do have plenty to wonder about in this age of amazing discoveries. One galaxy recently discovered has two sets of spiral arms spinning in opposite directions “like a double pinwheel.” Old stars and young planets, dust clouds and violent explosions and violence which produces beauty... space is like a fireworks display which has been spread out over eons, across thought-defying stretches of emptiness. After all these millennia, human beings are finally starting to enjoy the spectacle. Now that we’ve used our creativity and our curiosity to look beyond our shallow sphere, we can see that the moon and stars, the heavens – the work of God’s fingers – inspire even more awe than they did when the shepherd boy from Bethlehem gazed up at the night sky. If what he felt can be described as awe, then what words are left to us today?

Our language has many words, but none of them are adequate. The human race (and believers especially) are standing within a great threshold of the imagination where words like infinite and unimaginable and vast are taking on something like their real power. We are looking into an abyss of beauty so enormous that it must thrill and terrify us. The galaxies we now see swirl and spin in spite of us, and for us; a Davidic dance of worship in the night skies. The universe grows in the act of discovery, and we find as much in the minute as in the galactic to marvel at. Consciousness cannot drink it in, and intellect cannot fathom it. Pure, random joy sparks and explodes at the molecular level in a free association of unpredictability.

Our order and beauty and sense ride like raft on the surface of chaotic mystery so that the very stuff of life is a new enigma that we can describe but not explain. It is left not to our cognitive senses but to our imagination to revel in this new reality, and if you haven’t experienced a spontaneous gush of worshipful reverence, then you haven’t been paying attention. Let the brilliance of the universe lift your sights from what is, to what can be. If our sanctified fancy can ride this wave of incoming luminosity, then we will soar to heights our ancestors never envisioned; and our words and ideas will travel further beyond, farther above, carried forever on a beam of light from a newly discovered star. Gloria.