The Stars of Human Destiny
Our Cosmic Journey and Being
The world is a wonder. And that is all we know. Much of the time it is confusing. Perplexing. There are the age old questions about why we are here and what is this all about. Then there are those moments when we see wonder and we know.
Where we are is something to be found. Many people are on the road as migrants reminding us that we are not as rooted as we think. We walk for pleasure out in nature. A safe distance from the cocoons of our cars, we venture out in Gortex and designer jeans.
For billions, walking is a way of life. Morning trips by women and girls to draw water 2 miles away, returning with plastic jugs on their heads. For the fortunate there are long hikes to hop into pickup trucks that cross deserts a bump or a breakdown away from misfortune.
In the fresh air creature comforts of glamping, we wonder why we are lonely or why we have lost the way. For billions, the way is known, but where it heads is still unknown. We come with answers that are but hopes of spirits and beings around us or a life beyond death. A time and place where the innocent do not suffer and people are not forced on the roads to escape and wander in hope.
How are we to the stars? How are they to us? We are made of the stardust that piles on our surfaces and is brushed away. All the atoms vibrating and bonding themselves and us together come from star nurseries that engender us. So, are we just a sweep of dust and gas coming into existence and brushed off the cosmic surface in a quantum flux? Are we here just to hear the tree makes a crashing soundwave in the forest? Are we here because without us there would be no night sky?
The odds that there are others like us ranges from none to 100 to 1,000 in our galaxy of 100 billion stars. Why have others not come to visit? Either is disturbing. We are alone or they have not told us.
From the stars thou art and to the stars thou shall return.
The stars are not a static creation nor a backdrop for human drama. Of themselves, powered by the fire of Divine Love, they sweep us into the Hymn of the Universe.
“Once upon a time men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their flocks. But the offering you really want, the offering you mysteriously need every day to appease your hunger, to slake your thirst is nothing less than the growth of the world borne ever onwards in the stream of universal becoming. Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day.”
“Because, my God, though I lack the soul-zeal and the sublime integrity of your saints, I yet have received from you an overwhelming sympathy for all that stirs within the dark mass of matter; because I know myself to be irremediably less a child of heaven than a son of earth; therefore I will this morning climb up in spirit to the high places, bearing with me the hopes and the miseries of my mother; and there — empowered by that priesthood which you alone (as I firmly believe) have bestowed on me — upon all that in the world of human flesh is now about to be born or to die beneath the rising sun I will call down the Fire.”
- Teilhard de Chardin - Mass on the World
Only in the moment for a few days, the stars of our days show the wonder of the forces of galaxies caught on a gentle stream, a slip of air - a silent flutter. Weak and ephemeral as a human’s years, the indigo of beauty and strength reveal a light from the first “Let there be.”
And so we are the stars and they are us. We cannot be apart. From them we came and wheel around not only our Sun, but the center, on an arm skimming space-time.
“I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” - Ephesians 3:17-19
And so the question is not what we are, nor where a we headed. We dance in a prayer. We live in song and drum. In myriad suns and multiverses, we are at home. Our light dispels all that is misfortune and wrong. We live. We suffer, We rejoice alight in the stars.
