ANGLE OF VISION
by Galen Guengerich
January 5, 2003
Tomorrow is the twelfth day after Christmas. According to an ancient legend based on stories in the New Testament, the three kings arrived in Bethlehem on the twelfth day after Jesus’ birth. They found the infant child in a stable and presented him with precious gifts. Thus, the twelfth day after Christmas is known to many Christians around the world, especially those from Orthodox and Hispanic traditions, as Three Kings Day.
The New Testament says that the three kings–also known as wise men or Magi–had seen an unusually bright star in the sky on the evening Jesus was born. They were learned men who looked to the heavens for clues to the meaning of earthly events. Their craft was an ancient blend of what we today call astronomy and astrology. What exactly did they see? What was the star of Bethlehem? Many possible explanations have been suggested; nearly four hundred major scholarly articles were written on the subject in the 20th Century alone. Some scholars propose that the Magi saw an exploding star, called a supernova; others suggest they saw a comet, perhaps even Halley’s comet. The explanation I like most has to do with the alignment of the planets Venus and Jupiter.
According to the calculations of modern astronomers, the brightest planets in the sky, Venus and Jupiter, would have appeared to merge into a dazzling star-like beacon about the time Jesus is thought to have been born. In regions to the east of what was then the kingdom of Judea, observers would have seen these aligned planets shining from the direction of Jerusalem. It would have been an auspicious sighting. In those days, astrologers associated Venus with fertility and Jupiter with the birth of kings. This meeting of Venus and Jupiter took place against the backdrop of a constellation known as Leo the Lion, which was often associated with Jewish people. The brightest star in Leo is named Regulus, because the ancients closely identified it with kingship. Seeing these sights, the Magi headed west toward the land of the Jews, looking for a newborn king. According to Professor Hollis Johnson of Indiana University, there had not been a brighter, closer conjunction of Venus and Jupiter so near to the kingly star Regulus in the 2,000 years before the birth of Jesus, nor has there been since.
If this conjunction was what we call the Star of Bethlehem, it must have been quite a sight. When Venus is in the night sky, it is so brilliantly dominant that there is no mistaking its celestial preeminence. It is the planet closest to Earth; thus its brightness in the sky is second only to that of the Moon. This time of year, Venus appears just before dawn in the east, where Jupiter rises just after sunset. Named for the king of the gods, Jupiter is the largest of the planets; all of the Sun’s other planets could fit inside it with room left over to rattle around. Through even a small telescope, you can see the shimmering brown bands of cloud that obscure its surface. You can also see, some fifty degrees higher in the eastern sky, what to my eye is the most magical of all celestial sights: the exquisite planet Saturn, with its incomparable rings. Especially when its rings are tilted earthward, as they are now, Saturn is a breath-taking sight. As the science writer Timothy Ferris says in his recent book titled Seeing in the Dark, some people "call Saturn too good to be true, whatever that may mean."
This sense of awe and amazement must have been what the Magi felt as they looked up at the dazzling beacon in the night sky. With no light pollution or air pollution to cloud their vision, the stars and planets must have seemed so close as to be almost within reach. There was much for the Magi to see, and much for them to wonder about. There still is much to see and much to wonder about. I am reminded of something Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. "What is life but the angle of vision?" he mused. He added, "People are measured by the angle at which they look at things. What is life but what we think of all day?" Like the Magi of old, we become wise when our angle of vision takes in not only the wonders of life here on planet Earth, but also extends to the mysteries of the heavens beyond.
Why? Because an expansive angle of vision nurtures the religious dimension of our lives, which I believe is made up of two distinct but related impulses: a sense of awe and a sense of obligation. The story of the Magi illustrates these two responses. According to the story, when the Magi saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. Then they journeyed to where they could worship the child, offering gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. The religious impulse arises when we experience being struck by wonder and amazement. "This is too good to be true," we say, or "I almost can’t believe it." We feel both exhilarated and humbled. This sense of awe leads to the second part of the religious experience: a sense of obligation or duty. Something has changed in us; we cannot go on living as blithely or naively or narrowly as before. Some new way of seeing or understanding has laid claim to us, and we are obliged to respond.
Over the centuries, many people have felt a sense of awe upon hearing the story of a god who takes the form of a human prophet, and have responded with a sense of obligation to the teachings and commandments of this prophet. Others, including most of us here this morning, find such an angle of vision too narrow, the story too implausible, the obligations too idiosyncratic. Which is why we come to All Souls and join other like-minded companions: to expand our angle of vision, and in so doing to increase both our sense of wonder and our sense of obligation.
How can this happen for us? How can people in the early 21st Century be amazed? One way is to follow the example of the Magi by looking into the heavens and pondering what we see. We can see much more than they were able to see, so there is much more for us to wonder about. In the centuries since the Magi lived, we have learned that our solar system lies near the edge of a slightly larger-than-average galaxy of stars and planets called the Milky Way, which is itself part of a small neighborhood of galaxies known as The Local Group, which is but one suburb in a metropolis of galaxies known as the Virgo Supercluster. This supercluster we call home is scattered across more than 100 million light years of space and contains nearly 30,000 galaxies and more than 500 trillion stars. There are eighty such superclusters within a mere one billion light years of Earth.
Beyond that, as we peer into the nether reaches of a universe that today stretches across 30 billion light years of space, things get dim and distant. But once, all the stars and galaxies that are now splashed across unimaginably vast expanses of space were impossibly close together. Fifteen billion years ago, at the moment when time as we understand it began, everything that now exists was compressed into a super-dense particle of energy smaller than a golf ball. From that one founding particle came everything–everything: Mozart and the Milky Way, the planet Saturn and chocolate mousse, human memory and the Virgo Supercluster, the laughter of children and the Andromeda Galaxy, not to mention neutrinos, nectarines, Rembrandt, and billions of galaxies we have never seen. All from one tiny founding particle. Where did that particle come from? We do not know. What happened in the microseconds before the Big Bang? We do not know. Why is there something rather than nothing? We do not know. Like the Magi of old, we gaze into the night sky with awe and amazement. The more we learn, the more there is to wonder about. Which is why science does not conflict with religion, but rather provides a means whereby our sense of awe and duty is rekindled. Science explains how; religion asks why, maybe even who.
Physicists believe the universe began in a moment of utter simplicity, when everything was literally one. At that instant, what we now understand as the various forces, particles, elements and substances that make up the world had not yet begun to differentiate themselves. Everything was simple, unified, one. As the universe expanded and developed, it did so according to principles set in place at the moment of creation. Which is why many scientists think the existence of other civilizations like ours is highly likely. One recent study cited in Scientific American concluded that there could be up to 10,000 civilizations at our level of technological advancement in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
Does it matter if there are other human-like civilizations in our galaxy or elsewhere in the universe? Does it matter if there are none? Does it matter if human beings are patient enough to probe the most distant reaches of time and space? Does it matter if we are smart enough to someday discover an utterly simple principle of creation, a grand explanation that physicists believe will itself be sublimely elegant and breathtakingly beautiful?
In one sense, these things matter very little. The symmetry of Saturn’s rings or the flower-like beauty of the Orion Nebula does not diminish the ugliness of racism or the pain of loneliness or the torment of poverty. Even if someone discovers a grand unified theory that accounts for everything, we will still need to take down the Christmas tree, write thank you notes, clean the closets, pay the mortgage, and make sure the homework is done.
On the other hand, I believe the wonders of our universe matter a great deal, because pondering them nurtures in us not only a sense of awe, but also a sense of our duty here on Earth. As I thought about the Magi’s star, it occurred to me that our lives imitate in a curious way the motion of the Earth, which moves through space in three distinctly different ways. The Earth turns on its axis once every 23 hour and 56-plus minutes, and the daily rising and setting of the Sun upon our horizon establishes the elemental rhythm of human life: eating, working, resting, sleeping. The Earth also orbits the Sun once every 365 and a quarter days, the tilt of its axis occasioning our annual journey through the four seasons, each one in turn. This annual sweep around the Sun paces the human march toward more distant goals. We catalogue in years the milestones in our lives: birth, childhood, adolescence, graduation, adulthood and a sense of vocation, sometimes marriage or commitment, perhaps parenthood, retirement, and death.
There is yet a third way the Earth moves through time and space. For fifteen billion years, the universe as we understand it has been expanding. As far as we know, the universe will continue to expand for perhaps 100 trillion years into the future, slowly cooling as it does, its energy ebbing into an infinite oblivion. There is no cycle to this movement, no daily rotation or seasonal repetition. In the cosmic sense, the Earth’s journey is a singular one; it will not pass this way again. From the founding particle it has come, into the distant stardust it will go.
The same is true of our lives as human beings. Our journey too is a singular one; we will not pass this way again. For a time, however, like the Magi, we have been given the gift of looking into the heavens, of being amazed by the daily rise of the sun in the morning, the annual coming of the new year and the unfolding of the seasons, the indescribably vast heavens through which we move. Our duty in response is to honor the cycles of life that surround us–to respond in faithfulness to the gift of a new day and the possibilities of a new year and the singular journey of this, our lifetime. We will not pass this way again. In other words, as Timothy Ferris puts it, "While life is in us, and we are in it, let’s keep our eyes open."