by Meg Riley
Service at UUCSS on February 21, 1999
Opening Words are from the biologist Lewis Thomas:
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small,
you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all
in a contented dazzlement of surprise.
from Jane Wagner's script of Lili Tomlin's play, THE SEARCH FOR INTELLIGENT
LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
I worry that humanity has been 'advanced' to its present level of incompetence because evolution works on the Peter Principle. . . |
by Meg Riley
| Today I want to speak about stars. I speak not as an astronomer, or a
physicist, or even as someone who makes it a hobby to stare out of telescopes
or memorize constellations. No, I speak only as someone who loves to look
up and see the night sky.
When I was in seminary, my Christian ethics professor swore that this really
happened. He was on an airplane, seated next to a somewhat obnoxious man.
Midway through the flight, after the man had been rude to the flight attendants
and snarled at several other passengers for various reasons, the man turned
to him and demanded, So, What do YOU do for a living? My professor, who admitted
that he often lied in response to this question, but in this case hoped an
honest answer would cause his seat-mate to reconsider some of his behavior,
replied, "I am a professor of Christian ethics." "Hunh!" snorted his seatmate.
"Big deal. I could teach that. Love your neighbor as yourself!" "What do
YOU do for a living?" my professor asked. "I am an astronomer," replied the
man. "Hunh!" responded my professor. "Big deal. I could teach that. Twinkle,
twinkle little star!"
In a sense, this morning's sermon will be as if my Ethics professor was teaching
astronomy. In preparing for it, I forged my way through some of the books
by modern physicists which perhaps you, too, have tried to read, but as Trudy
said, no matter how hard they tried to simplify it all, it was hard for any
of them to bring quantum physics down to a level I could more clearly
misunderstand. So I'll be talking broadly, generally, about stars this morning,
as I share with you the FIVE ways that I find stars minister to me.
Why five? Why not three, or nine? Because this morning's sermon was conceived
and written in the shape of a star-that is, a child's rudimentary (SHAPE).
One of the first complex shapes almost every child learns to make and, in
my case, made still with some deep sense of pride and delight.
Let's start there, for our first line of the stars' ministry: they offer
us the gift of their steady presence. The smallest child looks for them,
greets them as friend (although the moon is in many cases a closer friend,
but that's a whole nother sermon!). Children-and the child within all of
us--love to draw them, sing about them, wonder what they are, make wishes
on the first one they see at night. And so it is that, from our tiniest time
on the earth, until we draw our last breath they are there for us, cradling
us underneath them. They are there for every one, from the poorest to the
richest. No one has yet figured out how to own them, or profit from them,
except only to use their image or name in big budget movies or in weapons-
technology which is named for such movies.
The intuitive kinship that we feel with them comes in no small part from
the fact that they're always so accessible to any of us who can get outside.
They're like family members-we don't have to seek them out, we live with
them!!! Looking up from a city street or more powerfully from a field or
a boat where their light is not dimmed by man-made streetlights and car lights
and house lights-that sense of being family, of relatedness, of kinship is
borne out by the eventual discovery that we are, our very own selves, made
of stardust!!!! As the responsive reading said,
Out of the stars in their flight, here have we come. This brings us to the
second gift from stars, the second line of our star-awe at the spectacular
beauty of the very stuff of our being, at the majesty of our ancestors, the
stars. This line of our star is perhaps best embodied by Joni Mitchell's
words in the song, "Woodstock": "We are stardust, we are golden. . ." used
to describe the perfect realization of 60's idealism-"By the time we got
to Woodstock, we were half a million strong, and everywhere there was song
and celebration. . ."
This species-pride is somewhat akin to young black children in a white racist
society being instilled with race-pride: they are descendents of African
kings and queens, of the beginning of all life, the fertile crescent. Like
blacks in a white-racist society, we humans need reassurance about the nature
of our being. Such reassurance is offered in asserting that, despite the
wars we visit on each other with sickening regularity, despite the unending
evolution of ways we create to make one anothers' lives miserable, we are,
in fact, a spark in the dark-we do embody all that is bright and alive and
dancing.
The wonderful pride in and awe for our ancestors--We are stardust, we are
golden! our second gift from the stars, leads all too quickly, however, to
the third gift: humility.
From Robert Fulghum: Moving is a blow to my self-image. I do like to think
that I am reasonably clean and tidy. But comes that moment after all the
furniture and possessions have been removed from my rooms and I come back
to see if I've left anything, and I look at the floor and there's all this
STUFF around. Behind where the desk was and behind where the bookcase was.
. . stuff. Gray, fuzzy, grotty, stuff. This STUFF. It's always there when
I move. WHAT IS IT?
I read in a medical journal that a laboratory analyzed this Stuff. They found
the majority of stuff comes from just two sources: people-exfoliated skin
and hair; and meteorites-disintegrated as they hit the earth's atmosphere.
No kidding. It's true-tons of it fall every day. So, in other words, what's
behind my bed and bookcase and dresser is mostly me and stardust. Scientists
have pretty well established that we are the Stuff of Stars. And there behind
my desk, I seem to be returning to my source, in a quiet way. . .
Humility. While we are stardust, we are golden, so is that STUFF. Humility
is another instinctive response that we have to the stars-for when we look
up at them, so far away, even the tallest of us cannot help but feel very
very short! If they are our ancestors, our family, we have certainly fallen
a long way. As Lili Tomlin said, Evolution seems to have plateaued out-left
mankind with a middle management problem.
But, consider for a moment, how far we HAVE come. From Lewis Thomas' introduction
to the spectacular collection of his essays, A Long Line of Cells: What sticks
in the top of my mind is another, unavoidable aspect of my genealogy, far
beyond my memory, but remembered still, I suspect, by all my cells. It is
a difficult and delicate fact to mention. To face it squarely, I come from
a line that can be traced straight back, with some accuracy, into a near-infinity
of years before my first humanoid ancestors turned up. I go back, and so
do you, to a single Ur-ancestor whose remains are on display in rocks dated
approximately 3.5 thousand million years ago, born a billion or so years
after the earth itself took shape and began cooling down. That first of the
line, our n-granduncle, was unmistakably a bacterial cell. I cannot get this
out of my head. Never mind our embarrassed indignation when we were first
told, last century, that we came from a family of apes and had chimps as
near-cousins. That was relatively easy to accommodate, having at least the
distant look of a set of relatives. But this new connection, already fixed
by recent science beyond any hope of disowning parentage, is something else
again. At first encounter the news must come as a kind of humiliation. Humble
origins indeed. But then, it is some comfort to acknowledge that we've had an etymological hunch about such an origin since the start of our language: Our word 'human' comes from the Proto-Indo-European root dhghem, meaning simply, 'earth'."
The humility we learn from stars is in part the humility of perspective.
I used to have a postcard above my desk with a photo of the Milky Way galaxy,
in all of its mystery and splendor. To one side, an arrow pointed into the
midst of the galaxy with the text, "You are here." When we see our troubles
in the context of such scale, they seem microscopic indeed.
From Carl Sagan, "Our universe is composed of some hundred billion galaxies,
one of which is the Milky Way. Our galaxy, we like to call it, although we
certainly do not have possession of it! It is composed of gas and dust and
about 400 billion suns. One of them, in an obscure spiral arm, is The Sun,
the local star-as far as we can tll, drab, humdrum, ordinary. Accompanying
the Sun in its 250 million year journey around the center of the Milky Way
is a retinue of small worlds. Some are planets, some are moons, some asteroids,
some comets. We humans are one of the 50 billion species that have grown
up and evolved on a small planet, third from the Sun, that we call the Earth.One
of them, in an obscure spiral arm, is The Sun, the local star-as far as we
can tll, drab, humdrum, ordinary. Accompanying the Sun in its 250 million
year journey around the center of the Milky Way is a retinue of small worlds.
Some are planets, some are moons, some asteroids, some comets. We humans
are one of the 50 billion species that have grown up and evolved on a small
planet, third from the Sun, that we call the Earth.
Friday I was in Boston for a series of meetings. Rushing out of the last
one earlier than I would have desired, I rushed to the airport only to find
that my flight was delayed for two hours. Suddenly finding time on my hands,
I took the opportunity to call my parents on the phone. When I explained
to my father what had happened, concluding, "So I rushed out of the meeting
for no reason!" he asked, with the calmness of a retiree, "Was it really
crucial for you to be there?" "Of course not!" I responded. "It's almost
NEVER crucial!"
That is the gift of perspective. As the book title says, Don't sweat the
small stuff, and it's all small stuff. Who among us hasn't had illness, or
death of a loved one, or crisis or catastrophe suddenly shift WHAT IS IMPORTANT
before our eyes? I remember several Christmases ago: my partner and I had
the kind of holiday season planned which is kind of normal in this culture.
It involved a series of parties, followed by houseguests from Minnesota,
followed by a trip to be with my family in Ohio. Except that we both got
sick the day before it was all to start. Each day, we would reluctantly cancel
that night's plans: Sorry, we'll have to miss your party. Then, sorry, you'd
better not come to visit, we're both sick. Then, sorry, we'll send your presents
UPS, we won't be coming to Ohio. After about two weeks of doing this, we
stopped grieving each cancellation. Rather, sleep, a little TV and reading,
quiet days at home, became the very shape of our holiday season. We lit candles
every sunset and sat quietly in the living room with our Christmas tree and
beautiful music. And I should say that the very DAY we both finally got well,
the blizzard of 96 came by to keep us still for another week! The funny thing
is, we both look back on that holiday as one of our best ever. It was restful
and easy and full of appreciation for beauty. We were given the gift of humility
which comes with perspective, the same gift that the stars offer us night
after night after night.
The stars' beauty is also greatly enhanced by the large amount of darkness
that surrounds them. The fourth gift which the stars offer us is the gift
of open space, both inner and outer space. Consider the difference between
the light emitted from the starriest night you ever saw in your life and
the lights of, say, Las Vegas. This is why I'm so glad that corporations
haven't yet discovered how to own the sky-they'd certainly want to improve
it by filling it up more!!! The sky tells us that emptiness is not the same
as loneliness, that what is 'enough' may be far less than we think, that
one star can fill a large section of sky.
Did you know that there are people who make a living by figuring out what
spaces are empty and filling them up with advertisements for profit? A friend
of mine told me this. A friend of hers does it for a living. He is 'one of
the best,' he's the one who invented ads on the back of sales receipts at
the grocery store. Since she told me that, I've looked around and realized
that the claustrophobia crowding life in this culture is not a fluke or the
result of a growing population: it's corporately designed! I have a great
deal more I'd like to say about this--But that's another sermon!
In the face of this crowding, this insertion by name brands and admonitions
to buy, buy, buy! the stars offer a refreshing ministry of open space. By
their very definition, they enhance the darkness. It's like that little string
of pearls on the black dress. We can feel our very cells open, make room,
when we look up at the night's sky. We can feel not only the humility of
our tininess, but also the expansion of our minds and hearts and selves to
take in the vistas of the entire nights skies. The stars, by giving shape
to the sky's immensity, compel us to take deep breaths.
This fourth gift, of open space, is closely linked to the fifth and final
gift of stars: they open time for us. They help us to know that every moment
is eternity.
Thich Nhat Hahn, monk, teacher, and writer, speaks of the Buddhists' 'ten
penetrations.' The tenth penetration is, "All times penetrate one time. One
time penetrates all times-past present and future. In one second, you can
find the past, present and future." In the past, you can see the present
and the future. In the present, you can find the past and the future. In
the future, you can find the past and the present. They 'inter-contain' each
other. Space contains time, time contains space. When we realize our nature
of inter-being, we will stop blaming and killing, because we know that we
inter-are."
I am the daughter of a physicist. When I was young, simple curious questions
could lead to long, incomprehensible lectures about rainbows, or sky color,
or stars. By the age of ten, I knew, Don't ask! One of the earliest such
incomprehensible lectures I recall was about the fact that the light I was
seeing from stars had actually been emitted quite some time ago, and in fact
the stars I was seeing might not actually exist anymore!
Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, describes in the epilogue of his final book,
Billions and Billions, that Sagan assembled a committee to make a phonograph
record to affix to each of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. Here, she writes,
was an opportunity to send a message to possible beings of other worlds and
times. . . the engineers projected a one-billion-year shelf lie for the golden
phonograph records. . . those of us privileged to work on the makings of
the Voyage message did so with a sense of sacred purpose. It was conceivable
that, Noah-like, we were assembling the ark of human culture, the only artifact
that would survive into the imaginable far distant future. The record would
include greetings in 60 human languages and one whale language, an evolutionary
audio essay, 116 pictures of life on Earth and ninety minutes of music from
a glorious diversity of the world's cultures. . .
I asked Carl if those putative extraterrestrials of a billion years from
now could conceivably interpret the brain waves of a meditator. "Who knows?
A billion years is a long, long time," was his reply."
Just two days after she and Carl have discovered and spoken their love for
each other after many years of friendship, Ann meditates into a computer
that turns her brain data into sound-she writes, "I began by thinking about
the history of the earth and the life it sustains. To the best of my abilities,
I tried to think something of the history of ideas and social organization.
I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and
about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of
its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of
what it was like to fall in love."
I don't know about you, but if anything is to represent our planet for a
billion years, I am glad that falling in love is part of it. Love is the
closest thing I know to what Thich Nhat Hahn calls "interbeing"-what Lili
Tomlin means when she says "we all time share the same atoms"-what the scientists
mean when they say, in the words of Lewis Thomas, "the whole dear notion
of one's own Self is a myth-we do not yet have a science strong enough to
displace the myth." Perhaps we don't yet have strong enough science, but the stars nudge us strongly in that direction.
For offering us the gifts of their eternal witness to our
interconnectedness, |
This is the wonder of time, this is the marvel of space,
out of the stars swung the earth,
life upon earth rose to love.
This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know,
Out of your heart, cry wonder, sing that we live.