Some of us will vividly remember the first astronauts’ vision of planet Earth from the perspective of “outer space.” Let your mind call forth that image: see that gorgeously blue planet, our island home, hovering graciously in the midst of the vast darknesses of the universe. Amazing. But what if we were to reverse the perspective?
What if we were to join with countless other humans throughout the ages who, with their feet firmly planted on planet Earth, often found themselves, late at night, contemplating the grandeur and the mystery of the stars? Think of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Contemplate that great cosmic cathedral.
That would situate you with an angle of vision not unlike that of the three ancient astronomers, who, according to the New Testament narrative, were on their way to contemplate that infant Star of all stars, who, they had been led to believe, had just been born in Bethlehem of Judea. To that end, according to the biblical story, they had been searching the heavens in order to find a way to follow a single star to the place of that extraordinary birth.
Which leads me to this Epiphany question. What is the cosmic vision given to you and to me from the innermost recesses of the Christian faith? What do we see from within when we contemplate the vast swath of the heavens at night?
This sounds like a countercultural question, to be sure, at least for many in our time. The latest thing, it seems, is for many spiritual seekers today to search deeply – within, rather than above. Which surely can be a good spiritual strategy. The great Jesuit paleontologist and Christian mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, often championed precisely that kind of spiritual adventure: to travel deeply into what he called the Within. But for Teilhard, that was only a first step along the way to a far greater, indeed a cosmic spiritual journey, to the Without.
Today, however, more than a few spiritual seekers, although not all by any means, appear to be reluctant to embark on such a cosmic spiritual journey, perhaps those of a Christian persuasion more so than others. For have we Christians not been taught to sing “Jesus, the Light of the world”? Wasn’t that precisely the lesson that the “Wisemen” learned: to turn away from the stars and to contemplate that single Child? Didn’t the star they were said to have been following lead them to that particular baby? Yes – and No.
Yes, go to Bethlehem and see. But when you arrive, bearing whatever gifts you might have brought with you: in addition to everything else on your spiritual agenda, contemplate in that Child as the Light of the cosmos. In a word, I’m proposing, with the voices of countless witnesses throughout the ages, that the way to the universal is through the particular.
We have an early Christian hymn in the New Testament, as a matter of fact, which presupposes precisely that angle of vision, expressed in words that perhaps those Wisemen would have been delighted to chant, had they been so inspired that Christmas morn.
And you don’t have to be a Wiseman – or an astronaut, for that matter – to be claimed by these words about Jesus: “he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible…. All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Col 1:15-17)
That, in part, I believe, is what the Epiphany season offers you and me, as we imagine ourselves standing near a peasant’s hut with those sages of old, marveling at a certain birth: a cosmic vision from inner space.