Twenty-one years ago this month, my wife, Allie, and I began our dating relationship on the basis of a shared love for the night sky. The allure for her was more scientific; mine more literary. To this day, that overlap manifests itself in one of our greatest joint fears: being “airlocked” into space. Now, you don’t have to be a nerd like us to feel those outer space heebie-jeebies. When most modern folks look up at the stars, a sort of primal terror enters us. I mean, who would willingly depart the rich womb of our mother earth to be birthed violently into the sterile cold of that unfeeling void? Crazy people, that’s who.
To the ancient mind, however, the night sky was not known as cold, dark, empty space, at all. It was the heavens: radiant, inhabited, and musical; its harmonic activity influencing the everyday life of all the earth below. Psalm 19 is a good reminder of this vision, where “The heavens declared the glory of God… and night to night revealed knowledge.” Sure, there was still fear associated with the evening sky, but it was of a completely different kind. The ancient person’s question was not whether the heavens are lively and instrumental, but whether or not we could persuade those powers to act in our favor. Or at the very least, live quiet lives sheltered from their notice!
Even though the ancients had their astrophysics wrong, their metaphysics were much closer to the way things actually work. After all, as Arthur C. Clarke has mused, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Maybe we have replaced astrology for astronomy, horoscopes for microscopes, but there’s no doubt that humans still search diligently for any kind of insight that might help us retain a modicum of control over our lives. Wise men know that if there is hope for us, it resides “out there."
This week, we’ll see the familiar Herod and Magi, as they gaze upward, ad astra, in the hope that all the speech and knowledge pouring forth from that enchanted sky might lead them to a child born King. And as always, the question is not whether stars say such things, but what their message incites in us: is it trouble, or joy?
- joshua