music

"Emily, look at that star. I forget its name."* Still bothering me: according to the online piece in New Scientist, the yellow circle of a tiny segment of our Milky Way Galaxy shows all the stars that can be seen from here as I look up, out and around me. Who or What are You, Mind of the Yahwist Who Walks in the Garden in the Cool of the Evening? 

And Where -- galaxies, planets and stars? This fragile earth, our island home? Hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe; in each galaxy hundreds of billions of stars like our sun, circled round about with billions upon billions of tiny floaty things like our earth. Grösser yet: notions of other universes in a grand multiverse, ever exploded and ever exploding anew with instantaneous Big Bangs of their own in an eternal process without size or time, before time, after time and forever, endless, measureless. On the screen: a changeless and unchanging steady state of logos speaking word, humming the tune and singing the song, Aslan directing a sing-along of eternal beginning, being, and ending.

For whom? Who's watching all this, watching, listening and enjoying? Or bemoaning.

Now and then, looking beyond the moon and on into the tiny sprinkling of stars that are visible to the eye from “this fragile earth, our island home” as Eucharistic Prayer C has it, I wonder. Did I get it right? “Who or what is God?” asked my theology professor on that final exam. God is whoever or whatever God says God is, in and as God's word; whoever or whatever said let there be and it was so, whoever or whatever brought Israel out of Egypt, whoever or whatever Jesus called Father, whoever or whatever raised Jesus from the dead, logos, creating. And why? Amusing self with the elohim, reordering churning chaos, before chaos, in the silence before space. Before space, before light, before silence. Contemplating the yellow circle, one's God seems too small. Too great to make mud dolls in gardens and dig graves on mountaintops. 

Boasting, even as we stand and recite the Nicene Creed, that in our church we don’t have to check our brains at the door, Episcopalians are called to wonder. We are not required, nor do we expect of ourselves, unthinkingly to swallow dogma, the thinking of other men in other ages. Creator's Image, we are called to sputter and choke, even chortle; we are called to wonder. And so in ignorance and blindness I wonder. Wonder --

REBECCA: I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.

GEORGE: What's funny about that?

REBECCA: But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God that's what it said on the envelope.

GEORGE: What do you know!*

-- wonder what’s out there and why we believe what we say we believe. Does deity occupy space? That space? Is the universe the mind of God, that's a fine and dandy theological assertion. Is deity an impulse of my ancient innermost brain, an implant of the logos itself? Of hope for survival? A reaction of fear? With a childhood image of fiddler crabs on a sandy beach scurrying for the nearest hole as my shadow passes over, it so boggles the mind as to send the religious me scampering back under the Tent of Certainty wondering How could you ask such questions? leaving the real me alone on the beach, cold, and staring into space. Out here in the chill morn, with hours to go before I walk, certain of nothing. 

Except love, love and loving. Love that is a feeling after all. Love, feelings, and knowledge that with death will switch off and fade to dark like the lights in the ballpark as electrical impulses in the brain flee into the tunnel of light with my consciousness and huddle waiting, for sleep. I stand out here and wonder, listen, slowly turning the dial to catch a music station.

"Most everybody's asleep in Grover's Corners. There are a few lights on: Shorty Hawkins, down at the depot, has just watched the Albany train go by. And at the livery stable somebody's setting up late and talking. Yes, it's clearing up. There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk ... or fire. Only this one is
straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

"He winds his watch.
"Hm. . . . Eleven o'clock in Grover's Corners. You get a good rest, too. Good night."*

T+ in +Time

IDK. Ignorant and blind, IDK, I just don't know.

*Bits from Our Town by Thornton Wilder