Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices - Blogs

March 17, 2011

Getting Perspective

This isn’t the blog post I had in mind. Last night, still wrestling with words and a deadline, I took a break to join the Sisters in singing the ancient prayers of Compline. Yet when I left chapel I was overwhelmed by something more ancient: the entire cosmos!

Fretting about a once-a-week blog post seems so insignificant when you are staring at the moon in the sky and realizing we are specs on a living planet called Earth that is part of and emergent from the whole universe. The mystery of our sheer existence, not only as humans, but as part of “the vast expanse of interstellar space” (as Eucharistic Prayer C says it) humbles me to the point of silence.

[Silence.... Breathe.... Soak it in....]

We span the slightest fraction of time in a long story. Whether you count 7 biblical days metaphorically or 13.7 billions years scientifically, the fact that we did nothing to create the universe and only enter the story in one specific place and time is astonishing. If Lent is a time for humility and reordering our lives in relation to the One who created us, then maybe my Lenten discipline should be looking at the heavens every night. (This isn’t the first time my ego has been checked at the chapel door by moon, earth, and sky.)

Last Wednesday I wrote about dirt and our connection to it: we are dust and to dust we shall return. I mentioned stardust then, but didn’t think much about it all week. Yet apparently stardust wants its share in the spotlight of my own little blogosphere. Dirt got a movie last week, so here’s one for stardust.

Hope you enjoy this little music video mashup called "We Are All Connected," featuring scientists Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye. You can check out more (or read the lyrics) at Symphony of Science.

Finally, if there is such a thing as a blog dedication, this one goes to the late William W. Morgan, a wise, gentle, and deeply spiritual elder to me when I was in high school. Bill was then a retired astronomer at Yerkes Observatory, around the corner from my house in Williams Bay, WI. He always encouraged a sense of wonder, joy, humility and gratitude. I realized only after his death that Bill discovered the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.