We don’t know what star the sages followed to Bethlehem. But the word star comes from an Indo-European root, meaning “that which burns” or “that which shines.”
I spent the first 21 years of my life in a very big city. Light pollution made it impossible to see more than a dozen stars. I thought books with constellations were ridiculous. But When I was 22, I found myself camping in Northern California, at exquisitely named Whiskeytown Lake. In September that big state park was deserted except for me and two brand new friends. Before climbing into our sleeping bags one of my new friends showed me his giant hunting knife. He said, I always sleep with this handy. I said, that sounds like a good idea and I showed him my black baby buck knife with its sad four inch blade. To sleep among good strangers. And Looking up from my sleeping bag I saw a sky filled with thousands of stars, thousands! And about every 15 seconds there was a shooting star. The heavens were alive and dancing for me.
Your mention of showing Debra the comet through your telescope in a parking lot reminds me of a similar event when Angelee and I had met and were engaged but not yet married, and I took her to a parking lot (where I worked at the time) at 3am, in April of 1983 to see the moon occulting Jupiter through my telescope.
I am reminded of a passage in my favorite non-fiction C. S. Lewis book, "The Discarded Image" about the Medieval worldview. In the chapter called "The Heavens" he talks about how Medievals "saw" and thought about the universe and the sky and the heavens in particular. I wish I could quote the whole chapter, but I'll settle for one passage pertinent to my (and your) comments here. Lewis is talking about how "large" they imagined the heavens to be, and writes this in relation to that perceived "size":
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"These facts [about the medieval "calculated" size of the universe] are in themselves curiosities of mediocre interest. They become valuable in so far as they enable us to enter more fully into the consciousness of our ancestors by realizing how much a universe must have affected those who believed in it.
The recipe for such realization is not the study of books. You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the center, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves.
The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this.
The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything -- and so what?
But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. The furthest sphere, Dante's 'maggior corpo' is, quite simply and finally, the largest object in existence. The word 'small' as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance. Again, because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into the mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest -- trees forever and no horizon.
To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.
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Whew! Ok, sorry for the length there (though I wish I could quote even more, so wonderful is it). But I'll just conclude that I think it is a sad state of affairs that probably most people these days have no idea about what the night sky is like to, as Lewis says, "walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology." Where I live, I can see maybe 5 to 10 stars in the entire sky, so light-polluted is the area in big cities.
And I think we as a society have lost something truly wonderful and awe-inspiring for that lack of a true night sky and familiarity with the stars and their constellations and, well, wonder. And I think that loss negatively affects our ability to appreciate beauty and joy and wonder in art and literature and nature all around us. As I've said often enough before here, that is one more reason why Word and Song seems like such a necessary remedy and incentive for our beauty-starved society.
My parents too gave me a small telescope one long-ago Christmas. I remember using it with my Dad and a neighborhood friend. I don’t know what happened to that telescope, but the wonders it exposed me to and the experience of sharing them with my Dad and my friend will always be a part of me. They are all gifts of grace that have drawn me closer to God in whom they find their origin. Thank you for evoking the memories, yet another grace.
I spent the first 21 years of my life in a very big city. Light pollution made it impossible to see more than a dozen stars. I thought books with constellations were ridiculous. But When I was 22, I found myself camping in Northern California, at exquisitely named Whiskeytown Lake. In September that big state park was deserted except for me and two brand new friends. Before climbing into our sleeping bags one of my new friends showed me his giant hunting knife. He said, I always sleep with this handy. I said, that sounds like a good idea and I showed him my black baby buck knife with its sad four inch blade. To sleep among good strangers. And Looking up from my sleeping bag I saw a sky filled with thousands of stars, thousands! And about every 15 seconds there was a shooting star. The heavens were alive and dancing for me.
I had a Japanese chemistry teacher in high school. You should have heard him wrestle with the word tellurium.
Your mention of showing Debra the comet through your telescope in a parking lot reminds me of a similar event when Angelee and I had met and were engaged but not yet married, and I took her to a parking lot (where I worked at the time) at 3am, in April of 1983 to see the moon occulting Jupiter through my telescope.
I am reminded of a passage in my favorite non-fiction C. S. Lewis book, "The Discarded Image" about the Medieval worldview. In the chapter called "The Heavens" he talks about how Medievals "saw" and thought about the universe and the sky and the heavens in particular. I wish I could quote the whole chapter, but I'll settle for one passage pertinent to my (and your) comments here. Lewis is talking about how "large" they imagined the heavens to be, and writes this in relation to that perceived "size":
---------------
"These facts [about the medieval "calculated" size of the universe] are in themselves curiosities of mediocre interest. They become valuable in so far as they enable us to enter more fully into the consciousness of our ancestors by realizing how much a universe must have affected those who believed in it.
The recipe for such realization is not the study of books. You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the center, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves.
The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this.
The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything -- and so what?
But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. The furthest sphere, Dante's 'maggior corpo' is, quite simply and finally, the largest object in existence. The word 'small' as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance. Again, because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into the mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest -- trees forever and no horizon.
To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.
------------------------
Whew! Ok, sorry for the length there (though I wish I could quote even more, so wonderful is it). But I'll just conclude that I think it is a sad state of affairs that probably most people these days have no idea about what the night sky is like to, as Lewis says, "walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology." Where I live, I can see maybe 5 to 10 stars in the entire sky, so light-polluted is the area in big cities.
And I think we as a society have lost something truly wonderful and awe-inspiring for that lack of a true night sky and familiarity with the stars and their constellations and, well, wonder. And I think that loss negatively affects our ability to appreciate beauty and joy and wonder in art and literature and nature all around us. As I've said often enough before here, that is one more reason why Word and Song seems like such a necessary remedy and incentive for our beauty-starved society.
My parents too gave me a small telescope one long-ago Christmas. I remember using it with my Dad and a neighborhood friend. I don’t know what happened to that telescope, but the wonders it exposed me to and the experience of sharing them with my Dad and my friend will always be a part of me. They are all gifts of grace that have drawn me closer to God in whom they find their origin. Thank you for evoking the memories, yet another grace.
Wonderful! Thank you!