This week, alongside probably millions of other earthlings, I found myself literally starstruck by the newly revealed photographs taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. These photos expose just a glimpse of the great expanse, the “cosmic cliffs,” “layers of light,” and depths and depths and billions upon billions of stars and galaxies – worlds unknown. We’re left breathless, overwhelmed by unrivaled beauty and profound mystery—multitudes of matter exposed in a single snapshot.
Rare and Beautiful
I sat staring at these astounding images of Carina Nebula and Stephan’s Quintet and Southern Ring Nebula and I thought, “I know so little but I’m captivated by the mystery of it all.”
Not only are we a speck on a tiny planet, but we are a speck in time, mere stardust existing for mere seconds in comparison to this utter vastness.
I’ve been listening to David Bowie (Starman seemed appropriate) and also Sleeping at Last who has an entire album dedicated to the solar system. One line from the song Saturn says: “How rare and beautiful it is to even exist”—something I hadn’t really contemplated until looking through the photographs yesterday. To exist is a rarity, especially when compared to the grandiosity of a limitless multiverse.
Mystery is a marvel, which makes me wonder why so many western evangelicals and people like Ken Ham not only dedicate time and energy but also millions of dollars to literalizing Genesis, attempting to use the story as a prooftext or scientific theory for a 6,000-year-old earth.
But last weekend, in the middle of the Colorado woods, at an elevation of 9,000 feet, I stared up at the stars so clear and bright peering over an even higher mountain peak and felt the oldness resonate through the earth and spill over me like moonlight. Whales sing for reasons unknown to marine biologists, trees grow wide enough for cars to drive through them, and cosmic cliffs reveal unexplored galaxies, yet some deny mystery and hold tightly to definitions and engage in debates and build faux cathedrals of mediocrity.
I’d rather swim in wonder.
A Sparrow’s Fall
Genesis 1, the creation account, does not provide a literal rubric for how matter first appeared, or a literal timeline from wild and waste to light and created things, but unfolds a story of divine love for humanity. With all of the enormous incomprehensible matter, matter far bigger and grander than ourselves, we somehow matter.
Somehow, even the tiny particles of our short-lived tiny, microscopic bodies matter…
Months ago, I wrote an essay about The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, a fictional tale about a Jesuit-sponsored trip to a newly discovered planet. It’s a stunning book about exploration, the cosmos, faith and doubt, grief and restoration, a story that first highlights the excitement of new discoveries coinciding with the overwhelming grief of a universe too vast to comprehend. As the protagonist Emilio grapples with his deep trauma, having seen more of the universe than anyone else on Earth, he grows increasingly despondent. He’d devoted his life to God as a Jesuit priest, given up the safety of Earth to venture out into the unknown and as a result endured horrific violence. He returns broken in every way, convinced he’s been abandoned by God. But as he heals and remembers and eventually recounts, as he considers the goodness he had seen and is cared for by kind priests, he is met in love. The priests recall what Jesus said about the sparrow–even a sparrow’s fall isn’t missed by God. “But the sparrow still falls…” Russell’s novel is not only about space exploration and what-ifs or brilliant story-telling…it’s a book about matter mattering,* human suffering mattering even amidst the overwhelming, ever-expanding cosmos.
This is the significance of the Genesis poem too. Within this poem of wildness and wasteness and nothingness and somethingness…in the chaos waters, light swallowing darkness, firmament descending, molecular life brimming, plant life springing, animals awakening, gasses burning and galaxies expanding, humanity is formed. We are God-breathed, bearing marks of the divine. We have a creation story that affirms our own worth, value, and sacredness in spite of the bigness of everything else.
I know what it’s like to feel inconsequential. I fall asleep with half-formed prayers. Can the God who created Stephan’s Quintet truly hear my barely thought through jumbled prayers?
Russell writes, “Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God…”
Perhaps we fail to recognize God because we’ve forgotten how to marvel, how to lower our heads and revere the holy ground on which we stand. Many Christians want young earth proof but don’t know how to accept their own belovedness, a concept far older than a few thousand years. They want literalism because mystery is terrifying. Even those who believe in God are in danger of missing the sacred, skirting the ethereal because they don’t want to consider that maybe science matters too, and maybe the universe is actually old and maybe we can investigate theories and equations and big bangs without having to cast aside faith. Maybe the universe is massively more infinite and complex than The Creation Museum suggests. Maybe there’s room for mystery and faith and science and humility to co-exist.
Layers of Light
I was stunned by the Webb photos. I was equally stunned by this beautiful phrase: “layers of light.” The Southern Ring Nebula photos in particular reveal multiple layers upon layers of competing light, almost like invisible hands have torn a hole through a galactic veil to reveal a shimmering world on the other side.
We’re multi-layered too, containing a multitude of conflicting and opposing thoughts and opinions and beliefs and questions. I have no desire to practice an unimaginative faith, to view God as cosmic judge whose creativity is limited to literalism and the mundane. Nor can I cast aside God completely. I considered it. In the deep throes of a “dark night of the soul” I questioned the worthwhileness of faith. I am not a scientifically-minded person. I failed biology in college and comprehend very little about the complex workings of the universe. I find myself in and out of faith depending on the day and my own very loud thoughts. And I can understand how someone can look at these photos and see proof of God while another can see proof that the universe is too unfathomable for a deity to exist, let alone love its tiny human creations.
We can’t rationalize faith. We can’t rationalize the beauty of cosmic cliffs either—cliffs so incredibly massive they’re measured by lightyears. In For the Time Being, writer Annie Dillard wrestles with the paradoxes of life and death and unanswerable questions.
“Ours is a planet sown in beings,” she writes. “Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.”
We share our tiny lives with billions who have gone before and exist now and will exist at some point in the future... And here in 2022, we’ve caught a glimpse of the depths of a universe we somehow have been sown into.
The about page for The Creation Museum explains this multi-million dollar experience shows “why God's infallible Word, rather than man’s faulty assumptions, is the place to begin if we want to make sense of our world.” But the thing about mystery is some things will never make sense. Love can’t be proven, only experienced. My faulty words here cannot prove to you your belovedness. Believing in a young Earth won’t make you closer to God. We have to begin to accept the mystery of Love, a Love that can find us if we’re open to it.
If Love is the force that bonds humanity and holds the universe together, if Love initially formed the particles that formed gasses and stars and cosmic collisions, if Love deigned to make man in its image, and visited a forlorn Hagar in the wilderness; if Love is embodied in the personhood of Christ and he himself spoke and preached of Love, taught us to Love, died for Love…it’s all compelling enough to continue seeking, holding, believing that the matter that makes up our cells and marrow and blood and skin and organs matter. And not only matters, but is divinely, ineffably loved.
*”Matter matters” is a quote from the book “The Rock That is Higher” by Madeleine L’Engle
Loving & Savoring
Article + Photos - ‘NASA Reveals Webb Telescope’s First Images of Unseen Universe’ – If you haven’t yet, I can’t recommend enough taking some time to browse through and sit with these magnificent, other-worldly photographs.
Article - ‘The Women Left Behind by the Pro-Life Movement’ by Beth Allison Barr – The Roe v. Wade conversation is a nuanced one. Regardless how many are celebrating the decision, there are very real human lives negatively and terrifyingly affected by the reversal of this law. “Shouldn’t it be telling that Black Christians, who are just as religiously devout as white evangelicals, are less likely to identify as pro-life? According to a recent PRRI survey, 75 percent of Black Protestants support abortion being legal in most or all cases in contrast to only 25 percent of white evangelical Protestants. The Washington Post recently interviewed Black pastors Rev. Cheryl Sanders of Washington D.C.’s Third Street Church of God and Rev. John Fils-Aime of Central Baptist Church in New York City. Sanders agreed the Bible is’“absolutely pro-life’ but does not want to align with the political pro-life movement, remarking that it is ‘fraught with problematic racial views and exceptions and blind spots.’ Fils-Aime similarly called reversing abortion laws a ‘hollow victory’ without sufficient support to help Black mothers who face greater physical and financial challenges than white women.”
Substack Essay - ‘Hold On’ by Leslie Trovato – Along similar lines, my friend Leslie wrote a stunning and poignant essay on “being rooted together” in tenderness and love. “We couldn’t look more different from one another. And I’m not saying God has nothing to say to those individuals about all their choices, because I know he has things to say about mine. I can’t and won’t guess how the Gardener tends to each of his creations; I can only explain how he cultivates and prunes me, and that chapter is entitled Tenderly.”
Recipe - Campfire Paella — I made this recipe over coals last weekend while camping in the Buena Vista wilderness. It’s now one of my most favorite things to eat and the only dish I’ve successfully cooked over a fire without it burning. It was so much fun for me to make–the perfect summertime camping dish!
Spotify Playlist - ‘Layers of Light’ — A compilation of Sleeping at Last and other songs that make me dream and think of stardust and the cosmos and worlds far beyond my own…
Sarah this piece is BRILLIANT. It brought tears to my eyes at several points. Love you friend.
Oh how I enjoyed this! ❤️