Do you need a break from your longstanding anxieties about our global ecojustice crisis? Probably you do. Do you also need a way to get Donald Trump out of your head, at least for a while? I can imagine that you might. My first recommendation for you, then, is for you to follow Jesus’ command: to behold the lilies. To that end, take a walk. Contemplate the flowers you come upon along the way, the spring daffodils or the blossoming cherry trees. Then, if you should be so moved, go read the little book I wrote about beholding the lilies.
Or, for a few moments right now, let me introduce you to or reclaim for you a strange construct. Think of this as what Kierkegaard called a godly diversion. Behold the cosmos! Call this: theological cosmocentrism.
Fear not, you can immediately grasp what this means. It’s behold the lilies writ very, very, very large.
Stand with one of those astronauts of yore who from the moon looked back at that gloriously blue cosmic jewel, planet Earth, etched against the vast cosmic darkness. Contemplate all that cosmic glory! Hear with Josef Haydn the heavens proclaiming the glories of the Lord. See with Vincent Van Gogh the majesty of the starry night.
But also contemplate the deep mysteries of the Lord, the darkness as well as the light of God. Yes, we who consider ourselves persons of faith are, as we sometimes sing, marching in the light of God. But at the same time – although we may sometimes be hesitant about confronting this existential truth – we are also submerged, if I may say so, in the darkness of God.
I invite you then to contemplate, more particularly, all this grandeur, the darkness as well as the light, in one of its current scientific, but also deeply mystical expressions: as seen through the eyes of one of the great cosmological physicists of our era, Jeremiah Ostriker, who recently died. For me, some of his reported encounters with our incredibly vast and profoundly threatening universe, evoke the similarly dark cosmic intuitions of Job. This is from Ostriker’s obituary:
“Jeremiah Ostriker, an astrophysicist who helped set off a revolution in humankind’s view of the universe, revealing it to be a vaster, darker realm than the one we can see, ruled by invisible forms of matter and energy we still don’t understand, died Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87… Over more than four decades, mostly at Princeton University, Dr. Ostriker’s work altered our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve as he explored the nature of pulsars, the role of black holes in the evolution of the cosmos, and the building blocks of the universe. Before the 1970s, most astronomers believed that galaxies were made up mostly of stars.
“‘Ostriker was arguably the most important single figure in convincing the astronomical community that this natural and seductive assumption is wrong,’” David Spergel, the president of the Simons Foundation, which supports scientific research, wrote in 2022, nominating Dr. Ostriker, his mentor, for the Crafoord Prize, the astronomical equivalent of a Nobel. He cited Dr. Ostriker’s “‘eloquent advocacy for the then-radical new model in which the visible stars in galaxies were only a minor pollutant at the center of a much larger halo of dark matter of unknown composition.’”
This amazingly dark cosmic vision, I believe, can and should be claimed for theological purposes today, in order to complement and to deepen the vision of light proclaimed by Haydn in his Oratorio, “The Creation” and revealed to us by Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Recall the affirmation of Genesis that “in the beginning God separated the light from the darkness.”
In traditional theological terms: when God did that, God did not abandon the darkness, for God surely had created both from nothingness (ex nihilo), for God’s own purposes. The good world that God created, biblically speaking, God intended to be an interplay of both the light and the darkness. I believe that that biblical visionary, whom we know as Job, would have said as much, too. Think of Ostriker, then, in this respect, as echoing the voice of biblical traditions.
Which is part of what I mean when I invite you to behold the cosmos.