The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
— Psalms 19:1
I’ve always loved space. Like most children, I loved laying in the grass and looking up at a clear, starry night in wonder. I have a memory of a 4 or 5 year old me doing a school project which involved poking holes in a shoebox and then shining a powerful flashlight through to create a starry sky on the ceiling in the dark, an experience that delighted me. I also believed in God, and contemplating the cosmos has always connected me to God’s power, creativity, genius and goodness. Just like mountains or the ocean, stars and planets and nebulas have been evidence to me of God.
These fascinations allowed for a natural foray into my eventual love of scifi and all things cosmic. I grew up watching reruns of the original Star Trek TV show and now, scifi movies are among my favorites. Need a buddy to watch The Martian or Interstellar? I’ll be there faster than you can say “supernova”. I never miss the opportunity to see a good scifi movie on the big screen, and I’ve spent more time googling space-themed clothing than is probably normal.
It’s hard to argue with Spock about humanity’s false concepts about God, after all.
About three years ago, I was reading an incredible book Jesus and Mary recommend called Through the Mists for the first time. I copied down practically ever other paragraph of this book into my journal, but one of the many amazing passages I wrote down relates to space, and it absolutely blew me away:
{Myhanene to Aphraar} “Paul said he at one time ascended into the third Heaven; he also once assured the Ephisians that Christ ‘hath ascended far above all Heavens’; and of God we are told that ‘the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain Him.’
We are thus scripturally warranted in using the plural number in speaking of the Heavens, just as Christ spoke of the many mansions. Now, the foundations of part of these mansions, or Heavens, are not so invisible to our friends on earth as is generally believed. I think they estimate the number of stars discernible at about one hundred millions, but of all this number with the added darker bodies remaining invisible, so far as I have learned, those that serve the purpose of preliminary existence, as earth, do not exceed the numbers of your fingers.”….
{Myhanene} “The rest are nuclei for varied grades of spiritual ascent. You have already seen how one class of soul is held bound to the earth, the influence of which attenuates until one is able to break away and seek other conditions?”
{Aphraar} “Yes.”
{Myhanene} “So from the material body of every star does there radiate an attenuated substance from which a serried ascent of spiritual conditions is built up, forming the divinely majestic staircase linking Heaven with Heaven, until the Heaven of Heavens is reached.”
My understanding of this passage is that Myhanene is saying first of all that there are no more than ten planets that sustain human life like earth, and possibly far less. So that’s a pretty cool thing to know in and of itself. Also, my interpretation is that Myhanene is saying here that the stars in space, that exist and we can see in the physical world, are actually the foundation of certain matter that the spheres of the spirit world are built from. That the stars we see from our blankets in the park are essential for the very structure of the spirit world. Talk about changing the way we look at the night sky! I had a proper nerd flip-out when I read that passage.
I recently started watching the American show Cosmos (check Netflix). It’s an educational, documentary-style science show focusing on space. The first few episodes I watched discussed how the earth and our moon were formed, how stars are born, and how the entire universe formed even before that. A few of my favorite quotes so far from host Neil DeGrasse Tyson:
“Stars die and reborn […] They get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All was cooked in the fiery hearts of long vanished stars… The cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.
The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.”
Most astronomy shows, whether educational or scifi, do not discuss God at all and certainly don’t present all the science in the context of them being God’s creation. We currently live in a world where astronomy–and science in general–and God are often considered mutually exclusive. The opposite has always felt true for me: astronomy and learning things about space has always strengthened my faith in God. And with my new understanding from Jesus and Mary’s teachings, I have come to also feel that science presents evidence of God’s Love.
One particular day, I was connecting in my geeky little heart to all of this and was laying on my bed, gazing at the ceiling and thinking about the wondrous things I’d learned from this Cosmos show I’d watched, and thinking about the Through the Mists passage. There I was, lost in my cosmic contemplations about God and the formation of the universe and the earth and the sun and my heart flooded with warmth and the sentence that came into my head was, All of that was made by God, for love, with love. I thought, if we are, as Jesus says, “the greatest of Your [God’s] creations, and the most wonderful of all Your handiworks, and the object of Your great soul’s love and tenderest care”, then that must mean that all the cosmic miracles that have happened over billions of years were intended by God, planned to create a massive playground for God’s adored children. It baffles me that so much time passed in space before humans were even a part of it. All that planning, all that time, all those monumental events, and of every incredible thing in space that God has made, Her children are Her highest creations. Could it be that right from the beginning, it was all for us?
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.
It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is deprived of its warmth.
— Psalm 19:1-6. (New International Version)
So these are some of my musings recently. Full disclosure: this blog may just have been a thinly veiled excuse for me to nerd out on space and God and post Star Trek quotes and cool pictures of starry nights! Best wishes in your galactic musings. 🙂
Live long and prosper,
Courtney
God, Love, and Truth 