Star Stuff

I was given a book for Christmas, The Soul of the Night, by Chet Raymo. In January, it only seemed right to set out with Raymo on an astronomical pilgrimage through the night sky as he echoed the Christuman challenge “to reach” in his Preface: “If we are truly interested in knowing who we are”—the wonder and mystery of this stuff of stars of which we are made—"then we must be brave enough to accept what our senses and our reason tell us. We must enter into the universe of the galaxies and the light-years,”—try to reach all of the way—"even at the risk of spiritual vertigo, and know what after all must be known.”

It wasn’t long after launching this pilgrimage with Raymo, that I experienced my first episode of “spiritual vertigo” for one of the things that Raymo makes clear is the wild ride through the cosmos we are on at this and every instant.  I learned that every two seconds, the spinning earth carries us half a mile to the east.  In that same short time, we are carried back again forty miles westward around the sun and beyond that, caught in the tow of our center star, the entire solar system moves twenty miles toward the star Vega.  If that’s not enough to give you motion sickness, the whole pinwheel of our Milky Way Galaxy is carried about 300 miles every 2 seconds in a great circle about the galactic center.  And we’re not even touching the movement of our Milky Way Galaxy which is traveling about 2 million kph relative to our earth’s center. Most simply put, if you are standing on the equator, you are being hurtled through space at a speed of about 1000 mph. Just pause a moment to imagine the complex cosmic ride we are all sharing right at this very instant. Whoosh!

It is almost impossible to avoid spiritual vertigo as we realize we are dance partners to a star – a star barreling like a blind Orion through the skies with us and eight other planets in tow. Indeed it is almost impossible not to experience spiritual vertigo for as Raymo says, “Here are stars in uncountable numbers, each perhaps warming Earths unseen— other Earths teeming with other life. Here are galaxies where stars by the hundreds of billions are born in gassy nebulas and die in violence. Here are galaxies arrayed in knots and streamers across light-years, across billions of light years, like motes of dust dancing in window light, worlds and worlds without end, reaching at last back to that singular moment when all that now exists came to be in a blinding flash of pure creation.”

This astronomical pilgrimage was an enervating, ever accelerating ride, but I must confess that by the end of January, Raymo’s “spiritual vertigo” had begun to catch up with me—with this star stuff of me—such as God makes me. For while we are the stuff of stars, we have to admit that we are a seemingly insignificant amount of such star stuff as we are made, relative to our cosmic neighbors. And it is pretty dizzying to consider that this star stuff of ours is what holds us in relationship to this ground of star stuoff we call Earth, that is held in tow to the sun-star around which we dance and it is the stuff of our own star that holds it in relationship to other stars around which it dances and the stuff of our Milky Way galaxy which holds it in relationship to other galaxies and on and on and on worlds without end…whoosh.

So I opened my Rilke reader on the morning of February 1, 2021, a little dizzy and slightly exhausted from the wild, enervating ride of January – overwhelmed by contemplating the distances as we understand them—vast, and expanding. Overwhelmed by the mystery of the silence of the cosmos, just as deep as the distances are vast. On the morning of February 1, I wondered how I could reach the end of the month of Enlightenment and feel so utterly bewildered…free falling as it were in the cosmos.

And I read from the Rilke’s Book of Hours,

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night”…and I sighed a very human sigh. After a month of wandering about in the deep ineffability of the cosmos, I looked out my window to “see” the moon, as if for the first time, at a very imaginable and comforting distance, shining in the constellation of Virgo and I was comforted to have a companion walking with me out of the night… 

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night…
These are the words we dimly hear”:…

And I pause to listen as I have been straining to listen all month—yes, I realize that I’ve been straining all month listening— as do those giant satellite dishes aimed into space—straining to hear a series of beeps, clicks, claps, hear a word—any word at all— arising from the vast silence of the night sky. 

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us” the poet says, and “as he makes me”, it is my nature to reach…to reach to see patterns in the stars, to find meaning in our stories, to lean in to hear reoccurring songs, ancient and timeless. And to reach again and again, to journey farther and farther, deeper and deeper, straining for the word that arises from the vast backdrop of silence that says, “I am here.” 
Of course, any word spoken anywhere in the cosmos ultimately means, “I am here.” And begs the question, “Are you there? Do you hear me?”

When I stand under the night sky and ponder the arrival of the light from a star a million light years away, I wonder if any consciousness is pondering back across these vast distances of space and time.  I recall the delight of a child’s first game–peekaboo–the delight of realizing that not only am I seeing, but being seen. Not only hearing, but being heard.  

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night…
These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond recall”….Yes, “beyond recall” this stuff of stars, bounded by the speed of light, and having traveled too far to return home, too far even for memory this journey we are on, unless we pass the story on, pass on the quest, the question. Here I apparently am, but why and where? And, when and how am I to answer the call, the quest, when all that I am, all that is knowable speeds towards ineffability?

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night…
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond recall”…and I give thanks to God for poets who can reach into the silence and pull out the word. For when the poet speaks, the star stuff of me, knows it is about to hear a word akin to the first, arising out the vast silence of the night, riding in on the moonlight through the window.

“You sent out beyond recall,
Go to the limits of your longing”….Ahhhh, yes, that’s right. I remember that indeed to know is only half, the other half is to love. I feel the reach of the poet across time and space and experience the grace of a word spoken as if from beyond the boundaries of recall.  I begin to hear the music of February, the music of the Prayer to the Mystery of Grace and Love.

“From the universe that holds us, down to the galaxies that dazzle us, down to the sun that warms us, down to the earth that sustains us, down to the human buried inside us, grace and love abound. From the instant of our conception, up to the time of our birth, up to the day of our first words, up to those times when we break through to something new, grave and love abound. By the fact that we are here, they are here, ever present, omnipresent. Grace and love abound.” Ahhh, a graceful release from spiritual vertigo.

And, the poet delivers one more word…

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night…
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond recall
Go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.”

“Embody me.” Again, I breathe a very human sigh. 

The quest then this new day: to express, to arrange, to exemplify perceptibly this stuff of stars of which I am made— to breathe life into this stuff of stars.

Embody me. Imbue this stuff of stars such as I am made, with the gratitude for the life I have been granted on this planet’s wild ride through the cosmos. Imbue even the knowledge of our unknowing with the grace of each numbered breath we’ve been grant. 

In the call of February’s in celebration to the Mystery of Grace and Love, we hear:

“Grace takes the imperceptible light and defracts it through an infinite number of lives—lives that break out of the linear into a flowering of the unexpected. It takes the unhearable voice and translates it into an infinite number of voices—voices from the saints and sages of all ages, the still small voice of our each.” 

By the grace of this breath, we reach with the tentacles of all the human longings we possess: “To want is to reach, To joy is to reach. To grieve is to reach. To search is to reach. To live is to reach.”

It is as the Zen Master says: “Attain enlightenment before enlightenment and thus you will have found the true treasure of life. And then you will have begun.”

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.”

I reach out with my gratitude to Rilke this morning and to all the voices of Orpheus who reach into the vast silence to draw out the song from beyond recall…the eternally new song of all that is eternal and of all that is universal. 

January? The song of light and dark. February? Of grace and love. Lean forward with me now and begin to listen for the strains of all that is eternal and all that is universal…. “Grace is the evidence of love. Here-the flower of a thousand graces. In turn, it yields the seed of a thousand more graces.”

As we try to reach, reach all the way, may we never forget that right Here, and in every cosmic Here, the flower of a thousand graces. May we never forget that as we make our way through this vast expanse of cosmos, we are always moving in a sea of grace.

May it be so.