Photo by Rick Hatch on Unsplash

Ten Reasons to Gaze into the Night Sky

quotes taken from Spirituality and Practice

It evokes wonder and mystery.
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"To nurture mystery at this level means keeping a lively and open curiosity about reality and developing a new awareness of the limits of our knowledge. It means always beginning anew in the face of the untold richness of experience, and always being ready to draw on any source of wisdom and from different cultural traditions. It also means continuing humbly to venerate and remain enthusiastic before the astonishingly various aspects of reality which, though utterly beguiling, must always elude our most subtly devised attempts to represent it. This mystical approach is available to all of us without exception, as long as we are human and remain aware."
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— Leonardo Boff in Ecology and Liberation

It reveals the multiplicity of life.
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Multiplicity is our last spiritual sign in this section on horizons. The night sky opens our view to a sheer unimaginable assortment of heavenly bodies, stars and planets, comets and asteroids, galaxies and other strange objects. If we think of the world as the earth and of unenumerable worlds beyond, or even as a cosmos and of inexhaustibly many universes beyond—what are we in this sheer expanse? Think of God in relation to such an expanse, such an interstellar vastness, such an unending proliferation of universe.

- Roland Faber, Spirit.

It encourages us to take our true measure.

"Humility might be defined as ‘taking one's true measure’ and then not hiding from the truth of that realization. Humility, Sufis aver, is a state that is achieved, not through practice, but through awareness."

— James Fadiman and Robert Frager in Essential Sufism

It invites a sense of unity.
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"For the Hasidic masters, humility was the key quality that enables us to strike a balance between the yesh and ayin aspects of our being. With humility we gain a sense of perspective, so that we neither overestimate nor underestimate our own importance. … Each of us is a precious and a unique manifestation of the Divine One, essential to the unfolding of creation. On the other hand, we cannot be whole unless we also understand how to surrender ourselves so that we may experience our unity with all things."

— Estelle Frankel in Sacred Therapy

It is silent and sweet.

"There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility."

— Thomas Merton in A Seven Day Journey with Thomas Merton by Esther de Waal

​It decenters the self.

​"Emphasized by many writers on the topic of beauty and justice is the way in which beauty ‘de-centers’ the self. Elaine Scarry writes, ‘At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering.’ We cease to be the center of attention for ourselves, as perhaps we usually are; we become aware that our own vision is expanded through the beautiful thing we encounter."

— Susan A. Ross in For the Beauty of the Earth

It reminds us of our common humanity.

"Humility is the key to wonder. As humility grows, wonder deepens. You will see yourself as a temporary expression of God's infinite and timeless unfolding. Aware of your impermanence, you become brother and sister to all life. You realize the common fate of all beings and find in that realization a compassion that embraces all beings."

​— Rami Shapiro in The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness

It relativizes our ambition.

"The word humility is perhaps not in tune with our times, but what it means is: don't claim any great work to be your own. It's very sound advice. For any great work done to help humanity, personal ambition has to be put out. These are the conditions: no hunger for personal profit, personal prestige, or personal power. These stand in the way of the highest results coming through us."

— Eknath Easwaran in How to End Suffering by Dolores Wood

It is playful.

In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others like links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge.

- NASA's Hyperwall

It is a window to God.

We might think that God is above the night sky, but really God is in the night sky.  God comes to us in its silence, its darkness, its thousand points of light, its capacity to de-center us and relativize our ambitions, its playfulness, its capacity to comfort us, and its capacity to elicit wonder.  It's not just that the night sky is a sign of God, as if God were external to the night sky.  The night sky is itself God godding. God gods in other ways, too.  In things that are small and beautiful, in the face of the stranger, in the arms of a loved one, in the courage to suffer, in love. But God gods in the night sky, too, and without it we are nothing.

- Jay McDaniel

​Galaxies, Galaxies Everywhere
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​Galaxies, galaxies everywhere - as far as NASA's Hubble Space Telescope can see. This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, this galaxy-studded view represents a "deep" core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years.

The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old.

In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others like links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge.

- NASA

On the Night of the Last New Moon
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"On the night of the last new moon, my husband and I borrowed our dear friends’ cabin perched at the very edge of Lost Cove, one of the darkest places in Tennessee. We were later leaving town than we’d hoped, and it was full dark, darker than any darkness at home, by the time we reached the top of the Cumberland Plateau and rattled down the gravel drive through the bare trees of a cold forest. After we unloaded the car and walked the dog, I opened a book in the cozy cabin. My husband headed out to the bluff.
Within seconds, he was back inside, jubilant, to report that the sky was full of stars. “Come look at the Pleiades!” he said. “I haven’t seen the Pleiades in years!”
That night, fog filled up the cove. Come morning, a cloud would engulf the cabin, and rain would fall on the metal roof. But for a few hours, the night sky was full of light. So much light, even in the darkest cove of a dark winter forest. And soon there will be more light."

Margaret Renkl, There's Light at the End of this Dark, NY Times

When I start to despair, more often in the last few years than in any previously in my 72, I go to my saved image of the Hubble Deep Field View. Seeing the countless galaxies each containing millions of stars across the inconceivable vastness of space somehow brings me peace. While our earthly, mostly manmade troubles can seem overwhelming, we are but a speck in time and space. And though we may destroy our own planet, thank God we are incapable of spreading our destruction too far. That is my point of light.

- Michael, NY Times Letters, in response to Renkl's article