This reflection was written for the 2018 half-day retreat at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Christiansburg, Va. The Ann-Frances Chapter of the Daughters of the King holds this quiet day every Advent and Lent. The first meditation for the retreat, “Voice, Music, Prayer,” can be found here.
Creator of the stars of night,
your people’s everlasting light
O Christ, Redeemer of us all,
we pray you hear us when we call.
When this old world drew on toward night,
you came, but not in splendor bright,
not as a monarch, but the child
of Mary, blameless mother mild.
(“Creator of the stars of night,” The Hymnal 1982, number 60; Conditor alme siderum; text from the 9th century)
A few years ago, I was listening to public radio, probably on some leg of my several-times-a-week commute among Roanoke, Ferrum, Radford and Blacksburg by way of Route 40 and Route 8 over the mountains, and I heard a story, or a fragment of a story. I didn’t catch it all, but what I did catch was this concept: the universe is singing.
I spent some time Googling when I got to a computer, and could not manage to find that particular radio story, for whatever reason, but since then I’ve found more on the topic from other sources (including Wired and EarthSky. As someone who marks the colder seasons by watching for the constellation Orion in the sky, this was an intriguing, wonderful revelation.
The science is a little complicated, as science tends to be, but the gist of it is:
The stars – from where we stand, just pinpricks of silver in the sky – sing. They sing in two ways, according to scientists. One is with help from us – astronomers study the stars, specifically the light they give out, and convert their light into sound waves in a process called astroseismology.
You can even listen to the results (click here) – what they call the sonification of light curves. Depending on the star, the sonification sounds like a deep rumbling. I played some of these sonifications for my cat. The higher-pitched oscillations startled her, but she curled up and went back to sleep for the lower-pitched ones. They may have sounded to her like a giant, cosmic cat, purring contentedly from outer space.
Scientists at NASA use these measurements to determine a number of things – first, to help figure out how old the stars are. Second, the measurements help them determine if there are planets orbiting those stars – to discover that perhaps we are not alone in this vast expanse of interstellar space, to quote Eucharistic Prayer C, otherwise known as the Star Trek prayer.
But the second way stars sing has nothing to do with us – the stars are also singing all on their own, as they build themselves. Scientists in India and England have discovered that as stars collect and absorb material, mostly through their surface, they are making sounds. They are singing their own Genesis, but at such high frequencies – a trillion Hertz – that we can’t hear them, that even bats and dolphins would have trouble understanding them.
There is, in fact, a music of the spheres.
I have said that my favorite theologians are Madeleine L’Engle, an Episcopalian author of many books including the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time, and the poet Mary Oliver, whose work I read from earlier this morning, who vacillates a bit between agnostic and Christian. I may add Joni Mitchell to that list:
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
We are stardust, say the scientists. We’re made up of those same silvery, singing constellations that we watch for in winter, the same stars that purr like ancient cats in the sky.
Two husband-and-wife scientists at Stanford, Karel and Iris Schrijver – he’s an astrophysicist and she’s a geneticist and pathologist – have written a book about it (Living With the Stars: How the Human Body is Connected to the Life Cycles of the Earth, the Planets, and the Stars). In an interview in National Geographic, Iris says, “Everything we are and everything in the universe and on Earth originated from stardust, and it continually floats through us even today. It directly connects us to the universe, rebuilding our bodies over and again over our lifetimes… our bodies are made of remnants of stars and massive explosions in the galaxies.”
Today’s scripture readings might be a little unconventional for the season – Psalm 96, 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a and Luke 3:1-6 (click here for the texts) – one is from Advent, one from Christmas and one from Epiphany – I’m hoping Father Mark doesn’t tell me they are liturgically heretical. But they may reflect something of this threshold season holding all of what is to come in it – the trinity, the birth, the holy spirit, Lent, Easter. And as I read the Corinthians passage in particular, I thought about the singing stars.
Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth hold some of the most lasting messages in all of scripture. This particular passage he wrote in order to encourage the church members to stop arguing about their roles – who was more important than whom, which roles were most vital and most honorable. These arguments are certainly relevant today.
But this letter speaks to something greater, as well, to the body of humanity beyond the body of the church. Earlier, I spoke of Advent being a journey – both an individual one and a communal one. We cannot forget the second part of that. Indeed, Advent and the seasons it points to, starting with Christmas and Epiphany, is all about that communal journey that even the Creator stepped into, taking on temporary, vulnerable, mortal and humble form.
We share the same stardust. We are all singing together, you, me, the cat, the stars. We drink from the same spirit, as Paul writes. None of us is lesser than, or greater than, whatever our differences of birth, family, faith, origin, vocation, grief, joy. Everything we bring, everything we do, however quiet or rejoicing, strengthens the whole. We share the same journey, when we leave this place, to go out into the world loving and being. O come, Emmanuel.
Amen.
Photo from NASA; credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/IRAM