Orion is framed by two meteors during the Perseid shower on Aug. 12, 2018, in Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah. NASA/Bill Dunford

​The Consolation of Stars

their beauty and independence


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Some people, in times of pain and grief, find consolation in the stars. The faithful beauty of stars and their independence from human life remind them that their burdens, terrible as they are, are not the center of things. This very recognition offers a small taste of healing, a recognition that “there is more in life than this.” The recent work of Andrew Davis and other process theologians in stellar theology points to this kind of spirituality. Even as people might not be sure about the transcendence of God, they are sure about the transcendence of stars. And, who knows, maybe divine transcendence meets them through, not apart from, the faithful beauty and independence of the heavens.

​- Jay McDaniel

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​"There's more in life than this."

Lillah McCarthy and
George Bernard Shaw
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The actress Lillah McCarthy describes how once she went in great misery to see George Bernard Shaw, just after she had been deserted by her husband:

I was shivering. Shaw sat very still. The fire brought me warmth…How long we sat there I do not know, but presently I found myself walking with dragging steps with Shaw beside me…up and down Adelphi Terrace. The weight upon me grew a little lighter and released the tears which would never come before…He let me cry. Presently I heard a voice in which all the gentleness and tenderness of the world was speaking. It said: “Look up, dear, look up to the heavens. There is more in life than this. There is much more.”
Whatever his own faith in God or lack of it, Shaw points here to something that is fundamental to the spiritual Way. He did not offer smooth words of consolation to Lillah McCarthy, or pretend that her pain would be easy to bear. What he did was more perceptive. He told her to look out for a moment from herself, from her personal tragedy, and to see the world in its objectivity, to sense its wonder and variety, its “thusness”.

And his advice applies to all of us. However oppressed by my own or others' anguish, I am not to forget that there is more in the world than this, there is much more. St John of Kronstadt says, “Prayer is a state of continual gratitude.”
 
Kallistos, Bishop of Diokleia . The Orthodox Way . St Vladimir's Seminary Press. Kindle Edition.

​​The Consolation of Stars

Jay McDaniel
​

Stars console us in their independence from us, their faithful beauty, the vastness of their galactic homes, their journeying across the night sky, and the possibility, says Andrew Davis, that they express a vitality, an aliveness, that is akin to our own experience. They also share with us a mortality, albeit in time frames far beyond our own, Stars live and die. And in their mortality they may well "live and move and have their being" in a larger Life, a Consciousness, that is divine. 

As the story above attests, the consolation of stars isn't centered around the idea that they exist solely 'for us' or that we hold a central position in their galactic homes. On the contrary, the consolation arises from their autonomy, their existence independent of us, and their freedom from bearing the burden of our troubles. When we gaze at the night sky, we come to realize that we aren't the focal point of the universe, and our suffering, while significant, isn't the center of everything. This realization carries a healing quality, a unique grace – the grace of their intrinsic 'thusness.' The stars liberate us from an excessive sense of self-importance; they de-center us.

However, this isn't the sole source of consolation they provide. We may also find solace in what poet Sara Teasdale describes as their 'faithful beauty.'

​Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,
The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,
All things are changed, save in the east
The faithful beauty of the stars.

​They are indeed steadfast in their presence and beautiful in their shining. We can healed by their beauty and their independence at the same time. The two go together. 

Amid this sense of beauty and independence, a third intuition can emerge. For lack of a better word, I will call it the intuition of vastness: vastness in time and in space, and a vastness that includes collisions. Galaxies hold the key. The exact number of galaxies in the universe is not known with certainty, but astronomers estimate that there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. To "think galactically" is consider the vast scale of the universe and the multitude of galaxies beyond our own. 

Spread out across the voids of space like spun sugar, but harbouring in their centres super-massive black holes. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, is shaped like a fried egg and we travel inside it at approximately 220 kilometres per second. The nearest one to us is much smaller and is nicknamed the Sagittarius Dwarf. But the one down the road, called Andromeda, is just as large as ours and, in 10 billion years, we'll probably crash into it. Galaxies - the vast islands in space of staggering beauty and even more staggering dimension. (BBC, In Our Time)

As we sense our place in that island in space we call the Milky Way, and recognize our neighbors the Satittarius Dwarf and Andromda, we may sense that we ourselves are located in a larger sea of galactic islands which, together, form an expanding network of islands in a sea of dark matter. We are part of a vast system.
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Feeling the beauty of stars and sensing our place in a multitude of galaxies is a kind of recentering. This recentering is about finding significance beyond ourselves. We are both decentered and recentered by the stars and galaxies.

Philosopher Andrew M. Davis presents yet another perspective on how we can experience this recentering. We can come to realize that our own experiences, including the sensation of being decentered, are not exceptions but rather expressions of something inherent, pervasive throughout the universe, even within the energetic events within atoms. Davis refers to this something as experience – the inherent capacity of things to receive influences from their surroundings and respond to those influences, resulting in the creation of something beautiful in the process. His proposition suggests that if there is life on other planets and moons, this life also embodies this concept of experience, just as the energetic events deep within stars do. I will call this "panexperiential awareness."

With panexperiential awareness, we can sense that the shining of the stars, and the death and birth of stars as well, brings with it the self-expression of something vital and self-creative. Their very independence is not just self-containment; it is a shining forth of a certain kind of inwardness, of subjectivity. The whole universe is alive with experience, and this recognition offers a sense of recentering, connecting us to the profound subjectivity of the cosmos itself. We may even sense that the cosmos is gathered into the unity of an ongoing and living whole, a cosmic self, God. And we might hope and even trust that this Whole carries within it the seeds of something like love or even, as Whitehead often put it, tenderness and peace. But for many in the world necessarily begins with a recognition, like it or not, that the stars unfold independently of us, and with aims and purposes of their own, not that are more than us. In their independence and indeed their indifference, they are our friends. 

- Jay McDaniel

​I Try to Remember That
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​​ACHIEVING PERSPECTIVE
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by Pattiann Rogers
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Straight up away from this road,
Away from the fitted particles of frost
Coating the hull of each chick pea,
And the stiff archer bug making its way
In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair,
Up the stem of the trillium,
Straight up through the sky above this road right now,
The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster
Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm
Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes.
I try to remember that.

And even in the gold and purple pretense
Of evening, I make myself remember
That it would take 40,000 years full of gathering
Into leaf and dropping, full of pulp splitting
And the hard wrinkling of seed, of the rising up
Of wood fibers and the disintegration of forests,
Of this lake disappearing completely in the bodies
Of toad slush and duckweed rock,
40,000 years and the fastest thing we own,
To reach the one star nearest to us.

And when you speak to me like this,
I try to remember that the wood and cement walls
Of this room are being swept away now,
Molecule by molecule, in a slow and steady wind,
And nothing at all separates our bodies
From the vast emptiness expanding, and I know
We are sitting in our chairs
Discoursing in the middle of the blackness of space.
And when you look at me
I try to recall that at this moment
Somewhere millions of miles beyond the dimness
Of the sun, the comet Biela, speeding
In its rocks and ices, is just beginning to enter
The widest arc of its elliptical turn.

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I…a universe of atoms…
an atom in the universe
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​
​[UNTITLED ODE TO 
THE WONDER OF LIFE]

by Richard Feynman
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I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.

Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.
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Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.

Astronomers Discuss Galaxies

​Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the galaxies. Spread out across the voids of space like spun sugar, but harbouring in their centres super-massive black holes. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, is shaped like a fried egg and we travel inside it at approximately 220 kilometres per second. The nearest one to us is much smaller and is nicknamed the Sagittarius Dwarf. But the one down the road, called Andromeda, is just as large as ours and, in 10 billion years, we'll probably crash into it. Galaxies - the vast islands in space of staggering beauty and even more staggering dimension. But galaxies are not simply there to adorn the universe; they house much of its visible matter and maintain the stars in a constant cycle of creation and destruction. But why do galaxies exist, how have they evolved and what lies at the centre of a galaxy to make the stars dance round it at such colossal speeds? With John Gribbin, Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex; Carolin Crawford, Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge; Robert Kennicutt, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.