One of my favorite novels is Contact by Carl Sagan. I like the movie, too, starring Jodie Foster as a young scientist who listens patiently and stubbornly to sounds from space, and discovers a signal transmitted from beings in a star system far beyond our galaxy. In the movie, the young astronomer asks her father if there’s other life in the universe. His response went something like this: “If there isn’t it’s a terrible waste of space.”

At Dickinson Island, you can actually see the Milky Way, the constellations, and all the bright named stars. I picked out Vega, the star of the Sagan story. Looking out into the starscape, along with reading books on current theories of how the universe came to be, I can’t imagine that a God worthy of our devotion wouldn’t have come up with way more ideas than…well, just US.

A poem I go back to again and again was written around the turn of the 20th century by Alice Meynell, a well-known writer in her day. She reminds me that while it is very important to cherish and live out our own stories, we really have no idea of all there is.

Couldn’t we begin to explore the universe simply by listening very carefully to each other?
 
 

CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE
 
 
  With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.
 
 But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.
 
 Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.
 
 No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.
 
 Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way,
Or His bestowals there be manifest.
 
 But, in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
 
 O be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

 
Alice Meynell   (1847-1922)