It's not just young Etienne, though, is it? There's something about the infinite expanse of the cosmos that takes even our adult breath away. Mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote, "The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me." I grew up in NASA-land during the Apollo Program. In the elementary grades, my path to school took me by old rocket remains, and I played with the children of astronauts. My father studied moon dust and helped create spaceships. And yet in high school, I still had that quote from Pascal pinned up on my bulletin board, right next to my science fair ribbons.
Don and I went to the Grand Canyon in May. On our way, in Flagstaff, we got a chance to take a private tour of the Lowell Observatory late one night. The astronomer who showed us around aimed the telescope at one galaxy after another, each millions of light-years away, and invited us to take a look. Fixing my eye to the view-piece and squinting, I could barely make out tiny cotton-like puffs of light. I got dizzy with the magnitude of what I saw. Then, the very next day, I walked the rim of the Grand Canyon and read the panels pointing to rock formations that were millions of years old. With each step, the panels and stones brought me further and further back into time. And once again, I could barely breathe. Between the infinite silence of space and the rock-solid weight of time, I felt so tiny, so off-kilter. Like my son, I wondered where God could be in all that. Was God in it all, or beyond it all, or somehow both at once?
When we're lost in space and time, there is comfort in our reading from Proverbs. Here we have a poem in the lyrical voice of "Woman Wisdom," a personification of God, important in Judaism, about three or four hundred years before Jesus was born. The Jews of this time-period had several images that they used in order to try to express the inexpressible, to talk about their relationship with the Holy One. They wrote, for example, in personified terms about God's Glory, God's Spirit, God's Word, and God's Wisdom.
God's Wisdom belonged not outside of the universe, but inside it, embedded in it. God's Wisdom didn't need to fit in somewhere on the other side of infinity, to use my son's language. She didn't reside in a separate and far-off place called heaven. Wisdom was born before creation, yet, alongside God, participated in the formation of the cosmos. Like a scientist herself, Wisdom both "knows and delights in the basic structures and patterns of the whole universe."[1] Yet like a child, she plays alongside the creatures; she rejoices in the mountains and the springs of water; she twinkles and dances among the stars. From her special vantage point from within the Creator and from within Creation, she is present to share her wisdom with us; she offers to guide us, to show us how to live.
British author G. K. Chesterton once wrote, "'Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of."'[2] What is the cosmos that we live inside of today? With God banished from our cosmos, many of us live inside of a frightening and impersonal bubble, one empty of Love, one empty of meaning. No one can feel truly beloved inside of an empty, accidental universe. On the other hand, if my religion is only about getting my own individual soul "saved" from hellfire by my "personal relationship with Jesus," then I still float through my earthly life disconnected from others and from the rest of Creation, bent only on leaving this world behind.[3]
If, however, our religion connects us with the world around us, with God, and with ourselves, drawing us together in love, then we aren't alone. Love gives us purpose and courage. The poetry of Proverbs that we read today invites us modern Christians into such a world of connection and wholeness. You see, Christians centuries ago adopted the Jewish image of God's Wisdom. As Jewish Christians set about to explain to themselves and to others how Jesus of Nazareth could be God, and who the Holy Spirit really is, they turned to the personifications of God from their old tradition. And the concept of the Trinity was born! And Wisdom, the first-born of all Creation, echoed in the Prologue of John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Wisdom is Christ.
For us Christians, it's this universal and cosmic Christ, then, who was first revealed in Creation. It's the cosmic Christ who left hand-prints in the rock of earth and who dances with the stars. It's the cosmic Christ through whom all things came into being, through whom all things were marked with the Love of the Triune God. Later, this cosmic Christ took on flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus—or "Joshua," in Hebrew—is the name given to the baby in the manger, born during the reign of Augustus Caesar. When Jesus' followers recognized God in him, they realized that he, too, is "the Christ"--in Greek, the "Anointed One." "Christ" is not Jesus' last name! Richard Rohr explains, "Jesus Christ is the amalgam of matter and spirit put together in one place, so we ourselves can put it together in all places, and enjoy all things in their fullness."[4] Our cosmos is full of the divine Love of our Creator, the divine Love manifested twice: in Creation and in the Word made flesh, Jesus the Christ. We are not "lost in space." There is room for God in our universe.
Perhaps that's why most Apollo astronauts came back from space in awe of God's holy presence. Astronaut Frank Borman, however, a "fact guy" and engineer through and through, says that he undertook his Apollo mission merely to "beat the Russians" in the space race. He would have rolled his eyes at the poetry of Proverbs and at all of my theologizing. Yet he told an interviewer not long ago that there was a moment in his journey around the moon that moved him deeply: It was when he saw the lighted blue marble of earth rise over the moon. It was a beautiful sight, glowing in the darkness. Seeing it for the first time in history, Borman was overcome, suddenly picturing everyone down there whom he loved, hundreds of thousands of miles away. He took a photo, and this picture became the most famous of all the Apollo photos, the "Earthrise."[5]
In 1987, author Frank White gave a name to this common spiritual experience of seeing Earth from space. He called it the "overview effect." It's marked by a perception of the connectedness of all things and an appreciation of the fragility of life.[6]
God is right here, my dear, scientist son. Here with us in this world that God made. Here in the love that we share. Here in the beautiful fragility of created matter. Living in this truth is the gift of Wisdom, indeed.
[1] Amy Plantinga Pauw, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015), 51.
[2] Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ (New York: Convergent Books, 2019), 6.
[3] Ibid., 16.
[4] Ibid., 14.
[5] David Kestenbaum, "The Not So Great Unknown," an interview with Frank Borman, This American Life. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/655/transcript.
[6] Daniel Oberhaus, "Spaceflight and Spirituality: A Complicated Relationship," Wired, July 16, 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/apollo-11-spaceflight-spirituality-complicated-relationship/
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