The Universe in You
A sermon given at the First Parish in Milton
March 25, 2012
By the Rev. Molly Housh Gordon
This has been a spectacular month for night-sky gazing. Venus and Jupiter have been dancing with the moon, and in fact, tonight, if the clouds move away, you should be able to step out right around dusk, and encounter a duet between our moon and the king of the planets, Jupiter. The pair will be separated by only 1.5 degrees- about the width of your little finger held at arm’s length.
Then, tomorrow evening, the moon will enter into a tango with the goddess of love, Venus. While Venus is actually 250 times farther away than our moon, the two will appear to the naked eye to be only as far apart as the width of your three middle fingers held at arm’s length.
And perhaps you have seen images of the violent storms wracking the surface of the sun earlier this month, sending out solar flares as big balls of magnetic energy into our galaxy.
Cosmically, It’s been quite the month.
I’ve enjoyed reflecting upon the convergence of these galactic events with the forty days of Lent, when we ponder our limited earthliness, beginning with the reminder on Ash Wednesday that ‘dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.’
Perhaps this Lent, we are meant to remember that we are stardust, as well. Dust to dust reminds us of our mortality. Stardust to stardust reminds us of our part in the larger universal story. It reminds us of our connectedness to all of creation from the very beginning. Stardust to stardust reminds us of our birth into mystery.
I remember as a child, lying on my back in the yard staring up at the night sky. It was so beautiful and amazing, so vast and unknowable.
Mystery and spiritual humility join hands the moment we realize all we cannot know. And every now and then, as I admired the cosmic beauty and wondered at the mystery of it all, I would begin to feel as though I was shrinking, smaller and smaller, until suddenly I was smaller than a flea, smaller than you could see.
We all undergo this Galilean shift at some point in childhood, where we suddenly recognize that our place in the big picture is not at the center, but somewhere small at the edge of that great web of stars. It is disconcerting, to say the least.
I remember a clear moment of this from my own childhood, spurred on by a scene in the movie Apollo 13.
It’s early in the movie, and we’ve just watched the astronauts practicing a maneuver in a test simulator, when suddenly we cut to a shot of them in the real spacecraft. Something has just gone terribly wrong. We see a bolt pop off of some necessary piece of equipment, and the gauges in the cockpit begin to go crazy.
All three astronauts are working frantically to get things under control when suddenly the hatch blows open and there it is… Outer Space, right outside the open door. Some vacuum-like force is at work, sucking machinery out of the door and into space.
The astronauts are tethered to the ship by several cables, but then we see a cable break, and another, and then suddenly one of the men is sucked out the hatch, as he tries desperately to grab on to something, anything. We see him float away into space, helpless.
And then the character wakes up. Cut to a sunny day on the good green earth, and we realize that it’s all been a dream.
But it’s too late for me, because the image is burned in my brain. A man in space, with nothing to hold onto, floating away into the nothingness beyond.
For a while after that, an evening of stargazing was no longer full of wonder for me, but rather of fear. I would dizzily clutch the grass, unable to trust in gravity, as though I was afraid that I would somehow fall off the earth as it turned upon its axis.
It was the floating away that scared me, into the infinite emptiness. It was these two layers- first of being un-tethered, and then of nothingness.
This fear was a step in my spiritual development, though thankfully not the endpoint. It awakened in me a set of metaphysical and theological questions. Who are we, in this wide universe, and how do we stay connected? What does it mean to think about ourselves as these tiny dots of ‘something’ floating in a great sea of nothing?
These questions about meaning and belonging in the universe set me on a path toward spiritual growth, and I brought them with me to church.
As I grew further into our liberal religious faith, which believes life to be precious, suffused with meaning, and interconnected, I found resources to meet my desire for meaning and connection; assurance that my tether to the world is strong, because it is woven into the web of all life that upholds and connects us.
And, recently, in this Lenten season, I have been thinking about stardust and doing some reading that links this part of my spiritual growth back up to its celestial beginnings.
For it turns out that in the world of astrophysics, there is no such thing as nothing and disconnection is impossible.
Because of a shadowy force called dark energy, what looks like emptiness in Outer Space is actually full of movement, connection, and possibility. National Public Radio’s science correspondent Robert Krulwich explains it like this:
“If you showed [a] patch of empty space to a physicist, he or she would tell you, "It isn't empty." No matter how remote, every inch of our universe carries a mysterious "dark" energy that is pressing out in all directions. We're not sure how it works, but across this same patch you will also find threads of gravitational force stretching to every part of the universe, while deep down, in impossibly small subatomic nooks and crannies, there's a riot of coming and going, a quantum flux, with little clouds of matter popping in, then out of existence, like summer storms.
A patch of "empty" space may look empty, but in fact, its nothingness contains all kinds of invisible somethings.”[1]
Nothing always contains something. Even in the farthest reaches of our universe, “Nothingness” is enmeshed in a web of gravitational force. The same gravitational force that holds us to the earth, whether we are clutching the grass or not.
And amid that web is an atomic and subatomic riot of coming and going, an unfathomable realm of possibility… An unfathomable realm of possibility in which we, too, have our being… In which we are participants in the continuing unfolding of the universe.
There is no such thing as nothing.
And we are connected to it all, which brings me to a recent interview with TIME magazine, in which astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked the following question.
What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the universe?
This is his answer.
The Most Astounding Fact from Max Schlickenmeyer on Vimeo.
Just by being alive.
The universe is big and we are small, but the universe is in us. Every single one of us. And for me, this is the crux of the matter.
The point of spiritual maturity comes at that meeting point of humility and commitment, when we realize that we are stardust, tied up in the vast and mysterious universal story -- when we can synthesize the truth of our smallness and unknowing with the equal truth of our agency and connectivity.
I am no scientist but it seems to me that astrophysics and liberal religious faith converge upon the claims that all are connected and every life matters, that the universe is always unfolding and so are we.
This is our good news. Now we must live into it.
We are not living into it.
This week I re-watched that clip from Apollo 13, and as I clicked off DVD mode, my television was on a news channel, which was covering the response to the murder of black teen Trayvon Martin, as his killer walks free. The unjust law and institutional racism undergirding the situation deserve their own sermon, but I must say that in that moment as the television clicked over from Hollywood to Sanford, Florida it was so clear that my childish fear from a space movie had been misplaced. For one thing, why give energy to fearing outer space, when there’s plenty of heartbreak and horror right here?
What’s more, what we have to fear is not dis-connection itself, but rather all the forces in our society that train us to ignore and deny our inborn connection. What we have to fear are the institutionalized fears, themselves, which condition us to see a human being as suspicious other, rather than precious sibling, covered in stardust.
It’s so easy to live in denial of the web that ties us all together in our shared fate. Often that web is just as unseen and mysterious as the vast universal beginnings that gave it birth. And the media age has made it easy for us to live at a distance, a step removed from the real human connections that are the building blocks of our very existence.
For me this is where a church community comes in. This is why our membership here together is essential. This is a place for us to proclaim our shared fate and to live it.
Because here we experience connectivity on a level that we can understand. In the face of deep cosmic mystery, we practice belonging to the universe by belonging to one another. We live into the truth of our interwoven-ness. We remind one another of each’s inborn potential, each’s essential role in the unfolding of the universe.
Here, we teach our children - all of our children - that they are in the universe and the universe is in them, every single one of them. We teach them to treat one another accordingly.
I end with an excerpt from the story The Everything Seed, by Carole Martignacco, which our 3rd through 6th graders are reflecting on in their Sunday School classes today. It is contemporary creation myth, a piece of poetry about our mysterious, connected, entangled story.
After telling about the origins of the universe and its blossoming forth in a blaze of light from that one tiny seed which gave all of creation brith, she ends like this.
“Now, if this were an ordinary story, it would end right here.
But this story of the Universe keeps unfolding.
What once began in a blazing blossom of light continues every day.
New stars sprout open in the deep soil of space.
New plants and animals appear on the Earth.
Seeds of many kinds... are scattered everywhere... to help us remember.
And new people are born every day
with the spark of that first light still alive and burning deep inside...
Waiting... like the Everything Seed, to shine in ways that are yet to be known.”[2]
The story of the Universe and the story of our lives are still unfolding, but that Eternal Light has been alive and burning in our hearts from the very start. Let us proclaim that good news, and live it... until all people shine bright with the glow of stardust.
