tiny desk astronomy

on nights like this
I gaze into the night-sky
to see a sky filled with
desk lamps in the dark
casting light for one
tired poet after another
milky ways of metaphors
supernovas of near misses
swirling star-clouds
of what matters most

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: in the dark

I came across this post by Tim Suttle tonight over at The Huffington Post and, as I read down, found one of my favorite Annie Dillard quotes:

God asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things. You do not have to do these things unless you want to know God. They work on you not on him ... you do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

The quote stuck out to me because I had been thinking of it only a few minutes before as I stared at a blank page trying to figure out what to write. My thought process began with the news stories I saw today about the full moon being the biggest one we’ve seen in twenty years. That reminded me of Italo Calvino’s wonderfully odd collection of short stories called Cosmicomics. One story, “The Distance of the Moon,” recalled a time when the earth and moon came close enough every night for people to jump between them.

Orbit? Oh, elliptical, of course: for a while it would huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while. The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high that nobody could hold them back. There were nights when the moon was very, very low and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair;’s breadth; well, let’s say, a few yards anyway. Climb up to the Moon? Of course, we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder up to it and scramble up.

The story goes on in even more fantastical fashion. Ever since I first read it, I’ve wanted to write a song called, “Ladder to the Moon.” Calvino and Dillard both understand the value and importance of going out into the dark to see the light. I imagine Dillard’s words have shown up in any number of Lenten meditations since she first wrote them. On this Big Moon Weekend, I’m happy to hear them again.

The reason, however, that her words came to mind in the first place was because I was thinking differently about the dark. There is the dark we allow to envelop us like fading house lights in a grand theater so we can better see the stars and ourselves. There is also the dark that descends like weighted rain, that painfully surprises us, that isolates and discourages. These first few days of Lent this year have held more of the latter than the former. I have friends who are hurting and grieving, who are out in the dark and the stars appear to have abandoned them. All I know to do is keep calling their names so they know, at least, they are not alone.

A designated season of preparation in the darkness is one of our underappreciated luxuries. Those who walked and lived with Jesus didn’t know it was Lent. There was no Ash Wednesday. But there was darkness. Incomprehensible, alienating, devastating darkness. The closer Jesus got to the cross, the darker things became. They didn’t look at stars. They slept and wept at Gethsemane. They ran away. They betrayed. They denied. They grieved.

The disciples didn’t know the tomb would be empty as they watched Jesus die and then buried him. They shared the same sense of failure and loneliness I hear and see in my friends. None of them is without faith, but they are without relationships they had counted on to last. They are sitting in the dark, but not star-gazing. Though I’ve had my seasons where the darkness was crushing, this year the darkness is a backdrop to the stars. I’m well aware that I cannot change their circumstances, nor can fix much of anything. I can sit in the dark with them, as others did with me. If I don’t go out into the darkness, I won’t see the stars.

Neither will I find my friends who need to be found.

Peace,
Milton

index of favorite lines

Here’s what happened Sunday.

Ginger had the congregation read John 1 in unison:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The last line is one of my favorite in all of the gospels. I remember it the way I learned it years ago: the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out.

As we read, I was struck by the notion that John and his readers knew more about darkness than you or I do. Light, in John’s time, constituted of oil lamps and, well, starlight – the ones we can’t see much of anymore because of our manufactured illumination. In a world where lamps burned out nightly, John talked about what was inextinguishable: the same inexhaustible, ancient light the Magi followed was born into a baby boy who would become the Light of the World: light as old as creation, filled with the love of our inescapable God, found focus in the insignificance of an infant.

OK, I need to back up a bit. On the way to church on Sunday, as I was preparing to follow the Magi to the manger, this story was delivered without irony on NPR:

America's space program is scheduled to undergo a fundamental shift in 2011. Unless something changes by the end of the year, NASA will no longer have a rocket to send astronauts into space. The space shuttle program is being retired, and for the moment there is no American replacement rocket capable of sending people into orbit.

As we watched the wise men follow the star to the manger, the news came that we have quit chasing stars. (I know that’s not really what NASA was saying, but you have to give me a little poetic license.) In a year when we “discovered” more stars than we had previously imagined, we appear to have grown more provincial. The technological boom is in smart phones, not space craft. I have forty-seven ways to announce my every move to the world, yet, to borrow from my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald line, our count of enchanted objects continues to be diminished. Are we are losing our capacity for wonder, and to wonder?

Now – back to church and the rest of the gospel reading from Sunday:

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

One last bit of time travel: on Friday, Talk of the Nation: Science Friday was going down their list of the top science stories of 2010 and one of the guests mentioned the discovery of extrasolar planets. Though we are not taking to flight very much, the Kepler spacecraft keeps looking for “dips in starlight”

that indicate the passage of planets, had found a whopping 706 candidate bodies by June, bringing the total of presumed extrasolar worlds to well over 1,000. One of Kepler’s discoveries, though much too close to its parent star to support life, has a diameter only about twice that of Earth. The finding demonstrates Kepler’s potential for finding Earth-sized planets.

What intrigued me most was the discussion about how the planets were discovered. The “dips in starlight” were the shadows cast by the small celestial bodies crossing in front of their larger and brighter partners. The planets were recognized by their insignificance – and the light to which they pointed, much like John and the star that led the wise men.

I got to sing in church on Sunday. I sang a duet of Steve Earle’s Christmas song, “Nothing But a Child.” The last verse says,

now all around the world, in every little town
everyday is heard a precious little sound
and every mother kind and every father proud
looks down in awe to find another chance allowed

The last line -- another favorite -- gets me, whether I’m listening to or singing the song. Earle wrote and recorded it as he was falling victim to his addictions and before he went to prison for his heroin habit. The light shines in the darkness . . . .

There is, as we say in the UCC, more light still to break forth. Let’s go out into the dark and wait for it.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: get yourself awed

300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

No, that’s not my salary offer to pitch next year, nor is it the number of Cheetos I have consumed in my life time. 300 sextillion is the latest estimate of the number of stars in the universe, which is three times what astronomers had previously thought. As we learned from Hubble’s “Deep Field” pictures, every time we look out into the darkness, we find more light.

Or, perhaps, it’s the other way round.

The story is not new, but I thought about it again today because of another NPR story on Voyager 1, a spacecraft launched in 1977 to look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which is getting close to the outer edge of our solar system and will move on into interstellar space in about four years. Melissa Block talked to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium and asked him what had been the most amazing thing he had learned from Voyager and he talked about seeing the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The images were clear enough to see mountains and ice. They aren’t just big balls of gas, he said, they are worlds.

As I meandered the web before I started to write, my friend Sonya pointed me to this article by Mark Morford that talked about the sextillion stars and finished with one other thing:

Oh and BTW? 300 sextillion, says our sly scientist, also happens to be the rough sum total of all cells inhabiting all human bodies on planet earth at this particular moment. One sextillion stars, one sextillion cells. Isn't that fascinating? Isn't that an odd coincidence?


Well, no, say the wise ones. Not really. Now pipe down and get yourself awed.

I put it all together and I come up singing hymns:

O Lord my God when I in awesome wonder
consider all the worlds thy hands hath made
I see the stars I hear the rolling thunder
thy power throughout the universe displayed
then sings my soul . . .

On the continuum of wonder, we sit somewhere between the two sextillions, cellular and celestial, stealthily bombarded with opportunities for amazement from both directions, even as we, the inhabitants of this world, are consumed by our fears and distractions, along with our ever-expanding sense of ourselves. Yet, the sum of all our arrogance doesn’t come close to 300 sextillion ramekins of rage (or whatever the measurement might be); our fear stands dwarfed by the brilliance bound for us at the speed of, well, light.

Maybe that’s why every time an angel shows up in the gospels he leads with, “Do not be afraid.”

Yes, it’s dark out there and, as David Wilcox says, “there’ll always be some crazy with an army or a knife.” But all the IEDs and RPGs, all the cancers and car crashes, the Alzheimers, all the terrorists and tsunamis, all the smart bombs and stupid politicians, all the wars and rumors of wars don’t come close to outnumbering the 300 sextillion stars – the light gaining on us – and all the cells that are our built-in reminder of what has been true since Creation: nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Bill Mallonee has a song called “Look at All the Stars.” The last two verses say:

there are some who’re blind by choice
and there others who are not
and I’ve kept so many faces
but my own I’ve long forgot
father often took me here
he was like a little child
long before the lights went out
I can still see him smile
he said look at all the stars
oh my look at all the stars

yeah I brought you here to see
all the things I never see
brought you to this highest peak
so you’ll me what I’m missing
when the clouds are blown apart
I hear the moon shines like a cup
in that silver velvet blue
the heart of God it opens up
look at all the stars
you say look at all the stars
oh my look at all the stars

Pipe down and get yourself awed: say, “Oh, my, look at all the stars.”

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: living in black-and-white

Last night our little town of Durham lay in the path of a winter storm working it’s way up the East Coast and we got enough snow to make it feel real. Once the ground was covered, I walked out into the street to take a picture of our house with lights aglow. Because the first attempt let me know the shutter speed was too slow for me to hold the camera steady, I flipped open the flash and took another one, lucking into this wonderful shot of the illuminated house framed by the shining snowflakes caught in the flash of the moment.


I managed to get up and out of the house this morning to run some errands and end up at Guglhuph, one of our great local places, for lunch with Ginger and a Massachusetts friend who is moving to the area. I got there early so I would have some time to read, sat down with my coffee, only to find Raymo talking about photography and referring to Janet Malcolm, who says the serious photographer resists “the blandishments of color.”

“It is black-and-white photography,” she says, “that demands of the photographer close attention to the world of color, while color photography permits him to forget it” . . . The black-and-white medium is hard, says Malcolm, color easy. The former requires art, the latter doesn’t. (131)

Here’s the house, then, in black-and-white.


Many years ago, when David Gentiles was youth minister at Hunter’s Glen Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, he invited Billy Crockett and I to come for a weekend. Billy’s concert was the real draw; Dave knew we were working on songs for a new record and he invited me to come along and then he paid for a couple of extra nights in the hotel so we could do some writing. The song that came out of one all-night session was called “Song and Dance,” an unabashedly joyful look at life taking off of the scripture verses that talk about the trees clapping their hands in praise to God, and we wrote:

put away your woes
let ‘em go let ‘em go
they’re gonna be here tomorrow
tune your hearts
to the birds that fly
out on the edge of the deep blue sky
can you hear the music
through the circumstance
listen to the laughter
in the song and dance

I still love that song. It is a full-speed-ahead-arms-wide-open-Snoopy-dancing-in-the-leaves-run-and-jump-and-love-will-catch-you expression of hope and faith that still rings true for me. It’s also akin to my photograph in the snow last night, or driving through the variegated splendor of a New England autumn and taking a picture of the leaves. It’s going to be a great picture because you’re taking a picture of something great. But how do you find the spirit in the song when the color drains from the scene?

Grief is in black-and-white: the winter of the heart, a season of skeleton trees, long dark days, and bone-chilling cold. One note I read in the exchange between friends talking about David quoted C. S. Lewis: “No one ever told me that grief feels like fear.” And fear is the antithesis of love and faith and art. We know that well as a nation because we have allowed fear to be our driving force far too often since September 11, 2001, and that fear has robbed us of too much of our imagination, compassion, and hope. Though it may feel like fear, grief is not the same thing. Grief is loss and pain, and coming to terms with our limits and mortality. As the Sundays sing, “Here’s where the story ends.”

Yes and no. It is also where art and faith and love show their strength and offer some of their best music through the circumstance.

“The art of observing the night sky,” Raymo says, “is 50 percent vision and 50 percent imagination” (133). He goes on:

Stargazing, like black-and-white photography, demands close attention to color. There are no ravishing sunsets in the midnight sky, no deciduous riots of red and gold in the forest of the night. The snapshooter turns from the telescope in despair, but the artful observer will take the hint and let his imagination enrich the palette. William Henry Smyth fixed his telescope on the stars and saw “crocus,” “damson,” “sardonyx,” and “smalt.” This is the kind of imagination that labels paint chips . . . Of hints and traits we make our way. (135)

Faith and art and love are best expressed as a response, which also means in the context of relationships. The insidious thing about the fear that grips us as a nation is it is generalized: we are scared of big things, broad strokes, which makes us frightened of pretty much everything. Seeing a bogeyman under every bed is not imaginative, it is incapacitating. We respond, therefore, with force and violence, neither of which is artful, faithful, or loving.

The pilgrim who would find his way to the edge of the galaxies and to the beginning of time must forgo daylight’s easy color and launch himself upon the black-and-white sea of the night and in those huge spaces find stars the colors of damson, crocus, grape, and straw. (138)

Jesus, it seems to me, was born in black-and-white, bringing a trace of color into a world full of fear and grief. And the angels sang to the shepherds. As I grieve David’s death, I wait in the dark for a birth, for Christ to be born again this year. I can see the traces of color and the hints of hope in the those of us who knew and loved David – and also know and love each other – have worked to not let grief turn to fear, but are finding ways to share our love, to tighten the bonds, and to imagine we can hear the music, even through this circumstance; we look out into the darkness and we see the colors of “friendship,” “compassion,” and “trust.”

The very first song I wrote with Billy for a youth camp said

here’s another picture of life
all of us together with Christ
its an open heart
it’s a work of art
it’s the basic stuff
that makes another picture of love

It's still true -- even in black and white.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: night vision

If someone were driving by our church tonight, they might have mistaken us for Baptists: the parking lot was full on a Wednesday night. The choir was rehearsing, with orchestra, for their Vivaldi offering on Sunday, the bilingual English class was having their Christmas party in the Fellowship Hall, and a group of us were gathered in the Dowdy Room (not a descriptive adjective, but the name of someone) for our annual Blue Christmas service, designed to allow those who are grieving or struggling to have permission to feel something other than full of holiday cheer. It’s one of my favorite services of the year and, in every church where we have had the service, it’s always a small crowd.

I know there are more than ten people in our church who are struggling through the season. I also realize there are any number of reasons they might not have been there; I’m not making a judgment here. I just wish for more because of what the service means to those who do participate. There is wonder-working power in shared grief and pain. We hold each other up and we learn from each other. I see my pain differently when I am sharing the load with those around me.

Chet Raymo sends my looking skyward, once more:

If we want to understand the Milky Way, it is usually best to look to other galaxies. The Milky Way is the one galaxy we cannot see in its entirety because we are inside it. (114)

We certainly feel our pain up close, yet when it comes to making meaning out of our existence we must look out, look toward one another in order to gain some perspective. I learned about my depression by reading what others lived through and by talking to almost anyone willing to share their experience. Had I been left solely to stare out into my own darkness, I couldn’t have found my way through deepest midnight of those days. Still, it seems we have to train ourselves to need one another, even when we know we don’t want to be alone. Living intentionally means choosing to live in community until it becomes second nature.

One of my favorite parts of the service tonight was the closing reading, which accompanied the lighting of four candles. I offer it as a view into our little constellation of compassion.

One: The first candle we light to remember those whom we have loved and lost. We pause to remember their names, their faces, their voices, the memory that binds them to us in this season. (Light first candle.)
All: May God’s eternal love surround us as we hold them near.

One: This second candle we light is to redeem the path of loss: the loss of relationships, the loss of jobs, the loss of health, the loss of dreams. (Light second candle.) We pause to gather up the pain of the past and offer it to God, asking that from God’s hands we receive the gift of peace.
All: Refresh, restore, renew us, O God, and lead us into your future.

One: This third candle we light is to remember ourselves this Christmas time. We pause and remember the disbelief, the anger, the down times, the poignancy of reminiscing, the hugs and handshakes of family and friends, and all those who stood with us. (Light third candle.)
All: Let us remember that dawn defeats darkness.

One: This fourth candle is to remember our faith and the gift of hope which the Christmas story offers to us. (Light fourth candle.) We remember that God who shares our live promises us a place and a time of no more pain and suffering.
All: Let us remember the One who shows the way, who brings the truth, and bears the light.

And then we sang:

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by;
Yet in the dark streets shineth the everlasting Light!
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

As we sat silently, the Spanish folks snacked down the hall and, in the sanctuary, the singers and strings practiced for their concert; then we all went out into the night, as the galaxies gazed and glistened.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: walking after midnight

When I got home from work Sunday night, Ginger and I took our two Schnauzers, Lola and Ella, for a walk around the neighborhood. We have to go late because Lola is not much of a people person and does better on dark and quiet streets. More nights than not, I sing a little Patsy Cline as we head out: “I’m going walkin’ after midnight” The four of us have a rather settled path, walking down to the end of our street (past Harper Lee’s house – yes, there really is a kid on our street named Harper Lee), turning in front of the North Carolina School for Science and Math, then back down Ninth Street, past the house where I think Boo Radley lives and then the fire station, then left on Englewood, and left again on Iredell and back home. As we passed Boo’s house, Ginger said, “Look,” and there was Orion, hunting over the rooftops.

I won’t even claim to be an amateur astronomer, but I can recognize a couple of constellations. I can find Cassiopeia (thanks to two John Cusak movies, The Sure Thing, first, and then Serendipity), and I know Orion, the Hunter. Almost two decades in New England meant winter was coming when he began to appear in the night sky, his belt shining through even the city lights. This morning, in my pre-kitchen reading, Chet Raymo, a real astronomer, gave me more to ponder:

Giant Orion: boaster, beast-slayer, storm-bringer. Muscle-bulging constellation of the lights. No other part of the night sky visible to northern observers contains more brilliant stars. Here is diamond Rigel, the giant’s forward foot, and ruby Betelgeuse, in the shoulder of the raised arm. Here are glittering Saiph and Bellatrix, the other foot and other shoulder, and Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, the white pearls of the hunter’s belt. Bellatrix is the closest of these stars, but at 470 light-years away it is a hundred times more distant than our nearest stellar neighbors. Saiph is 2000 light-years away. These are the giants of the Galaxy, stars ten thousand times brighter than our sun, the largest and most intrinsically luminous stars of the night. (14)

I was taught to look at the stars that we call Orion as a group gathered together in wonder and imagination. I have learned that what I see is far from cohesive. The light I saw coming from Saiph Sunday night was more than fifteen hundred light years older than that coming from Bellatrix, even though I took it all in at once. Betelgeuse is five hundred light years away; Raymo says an “average-sized star” like our sun would not even be visible to the eye from that distance. (Just think of the light we are not seeing as we gaze into the night sky.) He goes into more detail about the information astronomers are learning from new telescope images that

have only recently arrived on our doorstep to tell us that Betelgeuse is a distended giant star, a sphere of hydrogen and helium 400 million miles in deameter, swelling with a violence that consumes planets and lights up dusky corners of the Galaxy. Its surface roils like a sea in a storm, and a froth of fire is flung ten million miles into space. In Earth’s sky this monstrous object is reduced to a point of light in Orion’s shoulder. The stars are good at hiding their true natures. They have a trick up their sleeve, and that trick is distance. (16-17)

I read that last sentence and I couldn’t help but begin to hear Julie Gold’s words (sung in my head by Nanci Griffith):

from a distance the earth looks blue and green
and the snow-capped mountains white

It’s the next verse that gets me, however.

from a distance we are instruments
marching in a common band
playing songs of home, playing songs of peace
they're the songs of every man

And then she sings,

God is watching us, God is watching us
God is watching us from a distance

The truth at the heart of this season speaks otherwise. The Love as old and bright as the most ancient of stars is racing across galaxies to find us. “The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light,” Isaiah said, and John followed, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out.” Distance is not the trick in the Incarnation, nor is the Coming Child something Other than the true nature of God. The trick is beyond the distance, in the drawing near. The Light and Love of God are landing among us, not with meteoric force, but quietly and subversively, in a manger, in the darkness on the edge of town.

“You shall call him ‘Emmanuel,’” said the Angel, “which means, ‘God With Us.’”

Scout’s fear disappeared when Boo Radley got close enough to save her life and she saw him, as we say, in new light. The starshine from Saiph, Orion’s back foot, that found us on the sidewalk Sunday night was old light as old as Christmas itself, having traveled over two millennia to find us. And in that light, Patsy Cline sounds like she’s singing an Advent hymn of her own:

I go out walkin'
after midnight
out in the starlight
just hoping you may be
somewhere walkin'
after midnight
searching for me

Even Lola knows you have to go out in the dark if you want to see the stars.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: how silently, how silently

I woke up this morning knowing it was going to be a busy day. (It appears waking up is oging to be a theme this season.) Mondays are rebuilding days at the Duke restaurant, meaning we pretty much have to make all things new, as far as our menu is concerned. From the time I get there at eleven until the dinner service begins at five, I keep a steady beat, working my way down a very long prep list. Though I knew my day would not have any significant breaks, I still put a couple of books in my bag, with it being Advent and all, because I always look for a couple of travelers for the journey this year. They rode to work with me and back home again before I was able to give them any attention; I was glad to have them with me nevertheless.

I did have something on my mind other than cooking, however. In L’Engle’s discussion of quanta last night there was something I didn’t quote, or quoted partially that kept coming back to me.

And, like the stars, they appear to be able to communicate with each other without sound or speech;

there is neither speech nor language; but their voices are heard among them,

sings the psalmist.

She is quoting Psalm 19, paraphrased this way by Eugene Peterson:

God's glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon.
Madame Day holds classes every morning,
Professor Night lectures each evening.

Their words aren't heard,
their voices aren't recorded,
But their silence fills the earth:
unspoken truth is spoken everywhere.

Wait – the choir extolling the sacredness of silence is not yet fully gathered.

I got home tonight and opened one of the books that had spent the day with me, Chet Raymo’s The Soul of the Night, to find him speaking of the silence of the stars. Raymo wrote a column for the Boston Globe for years that often spoke to me, even though it was in the Science section, because he looked at the universe with such a sense of wonder. Here’s what I read tonight:

As a student, I can across a book by Max Picard called The World of Silence. The book offered an insight that seems more valuable to me now than it did then. Silence, says Picard, is the source from which language springs, and to slience language must constantly return to be recreated. Only in relation to silence does sound have significance. It is for this silence, so treasured by Picard, that I turn to the marsh near Queset Brook in November. It is for this silence that I turn to the stars, to the ponderous inaudible turning of the galaxies, to the clanging of God’s great bell in the vacuum. The silence of the stars is the silence of creation and re-creation. It is the silence of that which cannot be named. (8)

I wonder. Another Bostonian, Phillips Brooks, came pretty close to naming it in one of my favorite carols:

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven
No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin
Where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in

When Elijah ran and hid because he was scared of Jezebel, God found him and told him to go up on the mountain and wait. The wind came, then the earthquake, and then fire – all noisy signs, but, the scripture says, God was in none of them. Then came, as the footnote in the RSV says, “a thin silence.” And God was there, how silently once more.

Getting ready for dinner is a noisy, frantic affair; getting ready for Jesus, however, is not. Or so it appears. And this is where I come clean about not being so comfortable with silence. I’m not very good at being still and knowing God is God. Yet the cloud of witnesses gathering round me today are calling me to take stock of the spaces between the stars, the minute movements of the quanta, and listen to the sound of silence, a deep abiding call to re-creation and renewal.

We watched Elf again the other night – second time this year already. During the scene where Buddy bounces up into Santa’s sleigh as it is trying to take off, a jack in the box pops up and startles him. As many times as we have seen the movie, none of us had ever noticed that detail before. It seems to me the call to silence is a chance for me to find something new in the story, an opportunity to be caught by surprise in all to familiar territory. Ginger and I often speak of the difference between ritual and habit. The latter is something one does over and over without thinking, or because it is how it is always done. The former is meaningful and intentional repetition, embracing the paradox that mystery resides in words and deeds we know by heart.

And that mystery seeps to the surface when we are silent like the stars.

Peace,
Milton

there are no stars tonight

There are no stars tonight.
We see only clouds and
hear the storm gathering
on the edge of town like
bandits in a Western.

There are no stars tonight,
so we say, waiting for rain,
listening to the thunder,
cosmic talking drummers
telling an old, old story.

There are no stars tonight,
but there will be stars –
stars outshine storms;
light beats clouds every time:
paper, rock, scissors.

Peace,
Milton

underneath another satellite sky

I was in ninth grade when they came to town.

The town was Nairobi, Kenya and they were Up With People. Members of the American community provided host homes for the group and so a couple of them stayed at our house, and in the homes of my friends from Nairobi International School. It was the fall of 1969; most of us were ninth graders, had guitars, and were completely consumed with playing music together. We were completely taken with this traveling band trying so hard to tell the world we were all connected:

if more people were for people
like people everywhere
there’d be a lot less people to worry about
and a lot more people who care

I still remember the songs. One of them came back this week as we celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing. (Of course, in a wonderful bit of technological irony, I couldn’t get web access in my hotel room last night to write.) Up With People had a song called “John Jacob Sebastian Smith” that was about a little baby born the day Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon.

John Jacob Sebastian Smith took his first breath today
in a little river town in the middle of I-o-way
the day the train came down the track
the corn stood shoulder high
and it was just as the whistle blew
that papa first heard him cry . . .

The story line was the dad telling his new son he would see a world his father had hardly dreamed of, as he sang in the chorus:

John David it’s all yours
it’s a new world you’ve found
you can make it what you will
nothing can hold you down

The astronauts appear in the last verse, both as a way of dreaming of the stars and coming to terms with our humanity at the same time:

John David as you took your first breath today
others took the breath of life to a planet far away
someday maybe you’ll do even more
remember son it’s all about people
people like the folks next door

Nothing happens in a vacuum, even in space. While Armstrong was planting a flag that couldn’t fly on the moon, the big blue ball below him was in turmoil: the Vietnam war waged on; Woodstock was not so far away; LBJ’s Great Society had given way to Nixon, and the Civil Rights movement continued in the aftermath of the deaths of both King and Malcolm X, among others. Even the dream of reaching the moon was fueled by the competition of the Cold War: we wanted to beat the Russians to show them who was Number One. I read in the Birmingham News yesterday that the amount NASA spent getting to the moon was equivalent to more money than we spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan last year. Long before Christopher Cross sang about it, we were caught between the moon and New York City.

I know it’s crazy, but it’s true.

Another teenager a little older than I who stared into the sky an ocean away from Nairobi, was Mark Heard. A little over twenty years after the moon landing and, unfortunately, in the same summer that he died, Mark released a song, “Satellite Sky,” that still speaks to both the possibility and ambiguity of what it means to be alive in these days.

why do I lie awake at night and think back just as far as I can
to the sound of my father's laugh outdoors
to the thought of Sputnik in free flight

before I could fashion my poverty
before I distrusted the night
I must've known something
I must've known something
those were the times I live for tonight

why, why, why, I say why, mama, why?
why can't I sleep in peace tonight underneath the satellite sky

it can't be easy for my children
I'm hollow before my time
it looks like a desert here to me
where is the promise of youth for my child

where are the faraway kingdoms of dreams
we've been to the moon and there's trouble at home
they vanished in the mist with Saint Nicholas
they lie scattered to the ghettos and the war zones

why, why, why, I say why, mama, why?
why can't I sleep in peace tonight underneath the satellite sky

I want to stand out in the middle of the street and listen to the stars
I want to hear their sweet voices
I want to feel a big bang rattle my bones
I want to laugh for my children
I want the spark to ignite
before they find out what it means to be born into these times

why, why, why, I say why, mama, why?
why can't I sleep in peace tonight underneath the satellite sky

In these days when we can “Google” our way to most anywhere in the world (except, of course, in my hotel room last night) and see YouTube videos from all across the planet, we are also the ones who see fewer stars from our porches and windows than any generation to have inhabited the planet. Since Armstrong’s steps, we have run rovers across Mars and we have yet to provide clean drinking water for over a quarter of the people on our planet. I’m not making an either/or case here by any means. My question is the same as those who have come before me: how do we look up at the stars and look out for one another at the same time?

The early astronomers studied the night skies, finding gods and bears and hunters, in order to find their way across lands and seas. The stars told them where they were and where they might be going. The psalmist pulled theological questions from the twinkling darkness:

I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?
(The Message)

Forty years after Apollo 11, we have pictures of galaxies far, far, away; we know our own smells like raspberries; we have driven on Mars and have plans to go farther; my MacBook is a stronger computer than anything the Apollo astronauts understood; the Red Sox have won the World Series twice; there are twice as many people on the planet today than in the summer of ’69 (and Bryan Adams is still touring); we are in another unexplainable war; we have an African-American president; and our planet is plagued with poverty and need that cripples us all.

Chet Raymo wondered on paper years ago how there could be darkness at all when there were so many stars in the sky. He answered his own question by saying it was because not all of the light has gotten here yet. It’s coming. But not yet. The stars give credence to our UCC credo that God has light “that has yet to break forth.” I believe, with all my heart, we can still sleep in peace underneath a satellite sky, not so much because we walked on the moon, but because that’s what the stars say.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- Here are my first Heard-inspired musings about satellite skies. And here's Mark Heard.

smelling stars

I found them walking from Winchester High School one afternoon to meet Ginger at her church. A small handbill on the door of the Griffin Museum of Photography announced the showing of color pictures of the universe by David Malin. What I learned that afternoon, and in my subsequent trips with my English classes, was that Malin, who began as a micro-photographer (check out this book), had developed a way of photographing different levels of light, if you will, using different colored plates (I’m out of my league trying to describe this, you understand), such that he was able to give color and scape to what we can only see as small white lights or even darkness, if we can see them at all. This photograph, for instance, is the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion, the Hunter; I do well to find the stars that make up his belt on any given winter evening.

I thought about Malin on my way home from church because of a conversation I had during coffee hour. Brian, who would be able to understand what Malin was doing, told me – with great joy – about a recent discovery. It seems scientists have been able to isolate the largest molecule in the galaxy (so far) outside of our solar system. The cool thing is it is the same molecule that gives raspberries their flavor.

“So you see,” Brian said with a smile, “our galaxy has a raspberry filling. I love it. God has a sense of humor.”

They also found alcohol molecules. The Milky Way appears to be a giant raspberry daquiri. Now that will preach.

Though A Wrinkle in Time is the book that gets the most attention, my favorite volume in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet is A Wind in the Door. Before Malin started taking photographs, or scientists when berry picking, L’Engle was spinning a story of size and significance. Two siblings, Charles Wallace and Meg, face the same expanse of magnitude and minutiae as Charles Wallace has an infection in the smallest particles of his blood and Meg is fighting cosmic evil that is ripping stars out of the sky. (Did I mention it’s a science fiction story?) At one point in the book, Meg is taken to a planet where the mitochondria, the stars, and Meg are all the same size and she is told to remember everything matters and everything is connected.

In one of her nonfiction books, A Rock That is Higher Than I: Story as Truth, L’Engle wrote:

The secrets of the atom are not unlike Pandora's box, and what we must look for is not the destructive power but the vision of interrelatedness that is desperately needed on this fragmented planet. We are indeed part of a universe. We belong to each other; the fall of every sparrow is noted, every tear we shed is collected in the Creator's bottle.

That we are inextricably connected to one another is not a new idea. In fact, I think it borders on cliché, as often as we give lip service to it. (I’m not sure we are quite as accustomed to incarnating the connections.) Here is what has caught me with its freshness today: the imagination of God is so extravagant that God makes connections we can’t even begin to see, or smell. In the middle of the galaxy, in a place we cannot even recognize with our own eyes, are beams of light and gatherings of gas older than anything we can comprehend, and they smell like raspberries. The layers of the universe, from the indistinguishable micro particles we have yet to discover to the starscape whose oldest light has yet to even find us, are full of the love and limitlessness of our Creator.

The connections are as old as creation, and as fresh as our willingness to sharpen our senses and stretch our minds and hearts to find them. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes –
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

O, taste and see that the Lord is good. Smell, too.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: cosmology

can it be on these nights
when we are tucked in our home
curled up on the couch with
doughnuts of dogs at our feet,
the kitchen still holding the aroma
of the garlic I roasted this afternoon
the way we are holding life close,
with only a couple of lights burning

even the clouds have closed us in
still – beyond them the stars shine
small lights, from my view,
lights like ours, crossing the sky
constellations of community
each one a household shining
in the darkness; such is the stuff
of which universes are made

when we go to bed each night
we never turn off all the lights
two lamps stay burning in the kitchen,
both made from old fixtures;
can it be some sailor on a sea
we have yet to name finds his way
because our light is shining,
our kitchen light, our star?

Peace,
Milton

underneath the satellite sky

Ever since I wrote the post on memory the other day, I’ve had the Hubble Telescope on my mind (which may explain the headaches). I don’t know much at all about the giant flying machine except it is discovering all kinds of things about our universe and sending back pictures that are absolutely amazing. When I went to the website today, I found this image of an Einstein Ring


and this explanation:

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. This very rare phenomenon can offer insight into dark matter, dark energy, the nature of distant galaxies, and even the curvature of the universe. The phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, occurs when a massive galaxy in the foreground bends the light rays from a distant galaxy behind it, in much the same way as a magnifying glass would. When both galaxies are exactly lined up, the light forms a circle, called an "Einstein ring," around the foreground galaxy. If another background galaxy lies precisely on the same sightline, a second, larger ring will appear. The massive foreground galaxy is almost perfectly aligned in the sky with two background galaxies at different distances. The foreground galaxy is 3 billion light-years away. The inner ring and outer ring are comprised of multiple images of two galaxies at a distance of 6 billion and approximately 11 billion light-years. The odds of seeing such a special alignment are estimated to be 1 in 10,000.

What I understand about those words is what looks like a single image to me is the alignment of light particles just now getting to where we can see them that range from 3 to 11 billion light years away and the chance of them lining up as they did is better than the chance of me winning the state lottery.

Here are two other images I saw (took) today:













Ginger and I participated in Durham’s Annual Martin Luther King Celebration March and Rally with several hundred folks who walked side by side through downtown and ended up worshipping together (more than rallying) at First Presbyterian Church. This is my first experience living in a town so directly affected by King and all of the Civil Rights Movement. The history I had been taught second hand, the experiences I had growing up in Africa, the way Martin’s words and writings have influenced me over the years, and the spirit of those with whom I walked today aligned to give me my own little Einstein Ring, I guess I could say, bending the light and dark of all these experiences into a picture I had not anticipated.

You see, the reason Hubble had been on my mind is I’ve been thinking about all the things it had gone past. The pictures get cooler and more amazing and the gallery gets larger and larger and stuff gets left behind. (My metaphor breaks down a bit here. Hubble is actually orbiting the earth taking pictures deeper and deeper into space; I didn’t know that when I was thinking about this stuff so bear with me.) Hubble was launched in 1990, the same year Ginger and I married. In the same years that it’s lens has been pointing deeper and deeper into the universe, my focus has not been quite as singular. I’ve been a youth minister, a Blockbuster video guy, a substitute teacher, an English teacher, a concert security guy, and a chef – and that’s just the jobs. I’ve made candles and handmade cards, painted with watercolors, learned to write icons, written songs, wrote the draft of a novel, am trying to put together a book of poetry and recipes, and written this blog. I’ve lived in four towns, five houses, and had six schnauzers. I’ve worked on Habitat projects, written letters for Amnesty, cooked who knows how many church dinners and breakfasts, had three foster kids, and probably lost track of more stuff than I’ve hung on to. Whether I’m in orbit or hurtling through space, stuff – even important stuff – has gotten left behind.

Yet, when I read about the Einstein Ring, which I found by accident on the Hubble site as I went to find the link for this post, it gave me a different way to think about it. When we say a star is three billion light years away, it means the light we are seeing is three billion years old: that’s how long it took to get where we can see it. Sometimes the light from things long ago takes a while to get here and, when it does, it shines in such a way to make connections we had not seen before. Sure, some stuff stays behind us (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing) and there are things we will not understand until the light of both the past and the present hits just right.

Ginger came home from another MLK service this evening and, in the course of our conversation, said, “You know, the world is really different than it was forty years ago.”

Yes, it is. We can see that now.

Peace,
Milton

capturing light

As I was wrapping scallops in little bacon blankets this afternoon, I heard a great story on All Things Considered about plans for a new telescope to replace the Hubble Telescope, which has given us some amazing images of things we had never been able to see before. The new one, to be called the James Webb Space Telescope will be sent into orbit over a million miles away from Earth and will be able to capture light from over thirteen billion light years away, which means that light will be thirteen billion years old when we see it for the first time.

One of the most intriguing things they said in the story was when they first came up with the design for the Webb Telescope twenty years ago it required ten technologies that had not yet been invented. I love that their dream was not tethered to their sense of limitation. The story didn’t say whether the ones building the scope also invented the ten technologies they needed or if other folks did those parts. Either way, the brilliance of their dream is the first bit of light captured by the Webb Telescope, even before it is built.

One of the phrases that caught my ear was “capture the light.” The Webb will not take pictures per se, but will capture the light using infrared technology to generate images of things we would not normally be able to see. Capturing light is not an easy thing to do. The image is something I’ll take to work with me tomorrow since the orbit of the Inn might as well be taking place in a black hole. Even now, there is light to be captured somewhere in the Inn. So I keep cooking and trying to capture new light, or at least new to me.

For now, I’m going to go close my eyes and enjoy the dark.


Peace,
Milton

farther and faster

The phone rang about 5:45 this morning: Ginger called to let me know she was getting on a flight and would be in Providence by 7:30. I got there about 8:00 and we left around 10:00. One of her bags has still not made it home. I drove her straight to the church for a meeting and I ran errands until it was time for to pick her up and take her on a Valentine’s date (Mexican food) and then home for a well deserved and anticipated nap. As usual, while I was driving around, I was listening to NPR. On Point was focused on the legacy of Carl Sagan ten years after his death. One of the questions Tom Ashbrook asked was what advances had been made in astronomy and physics since Sagan died. The answer intrigued me.

What we know now that we did not know a decade ago is the universe is both expanding and accelerating. (Sagan only knew it was expanding.) Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the scientists being interviewed, said the implication of that combination meant that astrophysicists of the future would not see the same sky we see. A time will come when it will look as though we are alone because the universe will have expanded so far and so quickly that we will only be able to see the planets closest to us. He went on to say it’s important for us to keep and preserve good records of what we see so people in the future will not think it has always been the way it looks then.

We live in a time when we are able to see deeper and farther into space than anyone who has lived before us, thanks to Hubble and the like, and we are people who can see less of the stars than anyone who has come before because we have been too busy making lights of our own. When the Psalmist, captured by the wonder of the night, wrote,

I often think of the heavens your hands have made,
and of the moon and stars you put in place.
Then I ask, "Why do you care about us humans?
Why are you concerned for us weaklings?” (Ps. 8:3-4)

he saw a sky crammed full of stars with his naked eye. For centuries, ships determined where they were on earth by what they could see in the heavens. The sky that was familiar to them and the stars they knew by name are not things most of us know anymore. From our back deck here in Marshfield I can see more of the night than I could in the city. My incredibly amateur eye can recognize the Pleiades, Ursa Major (since when does a bear have a tail?), Casio Pea, Orion – my favorite, and Sirius (the dog star, not the satellite radio). I know the names because they have been passed down, person to person, over the centuries, but the list of names I know is far shorter than those known by those who named them to begin with. As my universe has expanded to include iPods and oil fields, hard drives and Hubble telescopes, I’ve lost sight of what was once the common field of vision.

About a decade ago, I remember reading that the body of knowledge in the world doubled every five years, which means there is now four times as much to know as there was when I first learned that bit of information. When the term “Renaissance Man” was coined to describe someone who pretty much knew everything, knowing everything was an accomplishable task. Now there is too much to know before we even get to the stars. Tyson is right: as the universe accelerates, we are left to assume the universe is only as big as what we can see.

When it comes to the stars, we measure distance in time: light years. If the scientists tell us a star is three million light years away, then the light we are seeing is three million years old. What we see on any given night is light that is old and tired and yet new to us; we have no idea what is really happening where that light began. What looks like a sky full of lighted dots to us is a panoply of history, a polyglot of light we can barely begin to translate. It makes me wonder if the first draft of Psalm 8 went something like, “Who are we to think we matter at all?”

When we lived in Boston, one of our favorite places to take people who came to visit was the Mother Church of Christian Science. The main sanctuary has a beautiful dome. About the second or third time we visited, I noticed the room was considerably lighter. I asked the docent leading our tour what had happened. She told me they had been renovating the dome when they discovered skylights that had been painted over during World War Two. Once the war was over, people forgot to uncover them and they had stayed dark for over fifty years. I was struck by the fact that the church had met in that room every Sunday since the windows had been darkened and yet still managed to forget what they had done as life accelerated and moved away from the fear that caused them to paint the skylights to begin with.

We, as human beings, have already forgotten more than we have discovered. A trip to the Mayan ruins or the Pyramids will bring that home in hurry. One of the fallacies we have bought into in our age is that an accelerating universe means we have to keep looking ahead if we want to keep up. What I continue to find to be paradoxically true is most of the meaning I’ve been able to make of my life and our world comes from looking back and taking in the light that finally reached me. We get some sense of ourselves in our universe from the records we keep and the stories we tell. However fast and far we are flung by the centrifuge of existence, what makes us human is our capacity to remember that the oldest, most tenacious, and most permeating light is love. We are not alone.

Peace,
Milton