This week when NASA released images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and our family pored over each one. But I’ll confess, I had barely remembered last year’s space telescope launch. In the day to day concerns of pastoring, writing, raising children, and so on, it’s sometimes hard to think beyond my week or community, much less beyond our galaxy. But this week my mind is full of Planet WASP-96b, star cluster SMACS 0723, the Southern Ring Nebula and Carina Nebula. As a brand new space nerd, I have never heard of these before, but now these images fill my imagination. I’m eager to read all about the discoveries and learn the new language and concepts to explain the stunning pictures, see what the astronomers and physicists are saying. I’m not alone in my curiosity. Not only are the scientists thrilled, but social media feeds are filled with the images and I’ve heard friends casually chatting about outer space at kids’ pool parties, Blue Front, and the Arts Center.
For me, this wonder is decidedly spiritual. These discoveries are so entirely—literally!—otherworldly, that they catch our breath and imagination.Their beauty, scale, and antiquity feel holy, and refrains from the ancient poetry of scripture resound in my mind and heart. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” And “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years.”
My faith tradition, the Episcopal Church, has roots in the 1530’s establishment of the Church of England. The early Hebrew stargazers and storytellers wrote and marveled in the 11th and 6th century BC. The first deep field images are estimated to show a galaxy cluster that originated 4.6 billion years ago. It is truly mind-boggling. Humanity is catching a new glimpse of galaxies we had only theorized, and realizing again all that we know and cannot possibly know.
For some, this sort of new science is portrayed as a challenge to religion, but for this priest, these expansive discoveries and questions are nourishing mine. As a parishioner said in Sunday school last week, paraphrasing the spiritual writer Anne Lamott, "The opposite of faith isn’t doubt or questions, but certainty.” The James Webb Space Telescope, this expansive international discovery mission, yields answers alongside countless new questions; it offers us an invitation to reconsider our certainty. Albert Einstein, whose incredible work was pivotal to the development of current space exploration, said in 1955, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.” May we allow ourselves to be humbled and amazed, overjoyed at the strangeness and greatness of this discovery. Why not honor our curiosity and questions, celebrate them as expressions of worship? Let us accept this overture to wonder, to consider the heavens declaring the glory of God and the sacred times.