Island Home
Island Home
“ ... the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home,” Eucharistic Prayer C (BCP 369ff) says to God.
According to Museum Tour, email newsletter of Informal Education Products, Milwaukie, Oregon, scientists recently completed the first ever census of the number of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, of which our solar system is but a tiny speck. Extrapolating from the number of planets in the small slice of the galaxy that has been observed by telescope, scientists estimate that there are approximately 50 billion planets in the Milky Way. Approximately 50 million of these have the temperature conditions to be potentially habitable. Since there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies, there are a lot of places to look for life in the universe.
100 billion galaxies times 50 million potentially habitable planets per galaxy? Unless a zero was overlooked, that’s 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the universe that might have life. It’s beyond human imagining. Incomprehensible.
The Creed of Saint Athanasius (BCP 864) says, “The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible. And yet they are not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible.”
With incomprehensible opportunities and an incomprehensible God, do we suppose that we are the only intelligent beings? An “intelligent being” is arguably one who can have one’s own self as one’s object for contemplation. How big is our ego, and how small is our God? With fifty thousand quadrillion potential opportunities, do we think we are the only ones? Or that this fragile earth our island home is the only place God could visit? Has the Logos, the Word of God, not visited other planets? Other solar systems, other galaxies? Other universes? How big is our God? Is God limited by human imagining?
And how significant are we to the One whom Jewish prayer addresses as “King of the Universe”?
He has been dead nearly two decades, but thirty years ago the Reverend Canon Bryan Green, an elderly Church of England evangelist, visited us in the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania, Harrisburg. His preaching was powerful. If we used such a common phrase in the sophisticated Episcopal Church, one might even say that many were led to Christ, many were saved.
Over and over again in his proclamation, Canon Green used the phrase, “speck on a speck.” He preached that looking out into the universe, with it’s billions upon billions of galaxies, stars, solar systems and planets, earth is but a tiny speck; and yet God loves me, even me -- a speck on a speck. The notion is incredible. Who can believe it? Beyond human imagining. It empowers anew the creation stories in Genesis One, where God is transcendent, speaking from above and beyond all things -- and Genesis Two and Three, where the Lord God walks in a garden, forms humans from dirt (making us truly earthlings), breathes into us the breath of his own life, is sad when we sin but makes clothes for us before sending us off to fend for ourselves, and cares for us, worries over us endlessly, never gives up on us.
A speck on a speck. God loves a speck on a speck. Even me. Even you. It boggles the mind. Can you imagine that? Can you believe it?
Sabbath. Shalom.
Right shoe first and praise The Lord.
TW+
Photos: Milky Way galaxy of which earth is a part. Chris Picking, "Starry Night Skies Photography"