I attended a beautiful memorial today for a young man whose life on earth was cut short by mental illness. In listening to the lay people as well as those ordained in the religion, I was moved by their passion for understanding things that are beyond their understanding.
I often ponder whether or not God exists. I have seen the beauty of a baby born and the horror of war first hand and it puzzl
es me that one heavenly entity could have a hand in both. I, with jaded eye on the bad in the world, am skeptical. However, in listening to the heartfelt emotions of a family and friends that collectively gathered to remember a young life, I let my mind help me understand what I was hearing.
Often when I ponder my mortality, I think about my place in our universe. That gives me great comfort for some reason I can't explain nor would expect you to. So, I travel in my mind to what I know for an explanation.
When I look at our closest astronomical partner, the moon, for example, I marvel that gravity and time have conspired to force it spin one time on its axis while it completes one revolution around earth. That oddity makes us always see the same face and the man, or woman in the moon. Our neighbor in space also happens to transect the same arc distance in the darkness as does the disc of the sun. That happy circumstance allows us the opportunity to experience the pleasure of majestic eclipses of the sun. They wouldn't be nearly as spectacular if the moon were a few hundred thousand miles farther away. If you've ever viewed a total or partial solar eclipse, the experience is sublime.
My favorite example of why I think things are far more complicated spiritually than some give credit is the Big Bang. All that we know, all that we love, hate, dream about and experience, all that we see in the sky at night and around us in the day, all of our universe, vast as it is, emanated from a single point infinitesimally small. When queried about the explosion 13 billion years ago that set us on a course of being, physicists, most of them anyway, say they can't explain it. But even if they did know, they would not know about what preceded the Big Bang. If the Big Bang started all we know, what started it?
Now that it is nearing winter, I urge you to go outside at night and look for the constellation Orion. You can't miss him. The hunter lords over the winter night sky and his three starred belt with his sword hanging down shines brightly in the cold and dark. Look at Orion's right shoulder to the left and a bit higher than the belt. You'll notice a great orange star there. In fact, you can't miss it. The name of that star is Betelgeuse. It's pretty far away. If you were miraculously able to travel at the speed of light or a blistering 186,000 miles per second, you wouldn't get to Betelgeuse for 625 years. But, despite its great distance from us, Betelgeuse is the only star, except the sun, that appears as a disc in telescopes rather than a sparkling pinprick of light. That's because Betelgeuse is huge. Not to exaggerate, but Betelgeuse is REALLY big. If, instead of a burning ball of hydrogen, it was a mason jar and we could pour earth-sized marbles into that jar at one per second, we wouldn't fill Betelgeuse (the mason jar) for 30,000 years. Think about that. Wow, we're small and insignificant aren't we?
So, on the day set aside in memory of a young man who died many years too early, I hope you take stock of what I say here and sleep soundly under a clear late fall sky with many stars, like Betelgeuse, twinkling high above. Take comfort in knowing that in some way, those that have gone before us, like the young man we honored today, still shine down upon us as well.
Often when I ponder my mortality, I think about my place in our universe. That gives me great comfort for some reason I can't explain nor would expect you to. So, I travel in my mind to what I know for an explanation.
When I look at our closest astronomical partner, the moon, for example, I marvel that gravity and time have conspired to force it spin one time on its axis while it completes one revolution around earth. That oddity makes us always see the same face and the man, or woman in the moon. Our neighbor in space also happens to transect the same arc distance in the darkness as does the disc of the sun. That happy circumstance allows us the opportunity to experience the pleasure of majestic eclipses of the sun. They wouldn't be nearly as spectacular if the moon were a few hundred thousand miles farther away. If you've ever viewed a total or partial solar eclipse, the experience is sublime.
My favorite example of why I think things are far more complicated spiritually than some give credit is the Big Bang. All that we know, all that we love, hate, dream about and experience, all that we see in the sky at night and around us in the day, all of our universe, vast as it is, emanated from a single point infinitesimally small. When queried about the explosion 13 billion years ago that set us on a course of being, physicists, most of them anyway, say they can't explain it. But even if they did know, they would not know about what preceded the Big Bang. If the Big Bang started all we know, what started it?
Now that it is nearing winter, I urge you to go outside at night and look for the constellation Orion. You can't miss him. The hunter lords over the winter night sky and his three starred belt with his sword hanging down shines brightly in the cold and dark. Look at Orion's right shoulder to the left and a bit higher than the belt. You'll notice a great orange star there. In fact, you can't miss it. The name of that star is Betelgeuse. It's pretty far away. If you were miraculously able to travel at the speed of light or a blistering 186,000 miles per second, you wouldn't get to Betelgeuse for 625 years. But, despite its great distance from us, Betelgeuse is the only star, except the sun, that appears as a disc in telescopes rather than a sparkling pinprick of light. That's because Betelgeuse is huge. Not to exaggerate, but Betelgeuse is REALLY big. If, instead of a burning ball of hydrogen, it was a mason jar and we could pour earth-sized marbles into that jar at one per second, we wouldn't fill Betelgeuse (the mason jar) for 30,000 years. Think about that. Wow, we're small and insignificant aren't we?
So, on the day set aside in memory of a young man who died many years too early, I hope you take stock of what I say here and sleep soundly under a clear late fall sky with many stars, like Betelgeuse, twinkling high above. Take comfort in knowing that in some way, those that have gone before us, like the young man we honored today, still shine down upon us as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment