Monday Morning Music Ministry

8-29-22

Many physicists and indeed many average folk are agog over the first images from the James Webb Telescope. I personally have almost exhausted my supply of agogs, and I am not even sure what an agog is.

In fact, the more that the newest of humankind’s massive, far-flung telescopic cameras shows us… the more it does not show us. Quickly I explain: the pictures reveal more stars – indeed more galaxies and nebulae – than we knew existed. (“We,” meaning everyone from early humans Ug and Glug looking up at the night skies and scratching their heads, to egghead professors only months ago.)

But at the same time, scientists mix their astonishment and excited discoveries with questions. There are not only new pin-points on charts of the heavens, but anomalies, contradictions, challenges. More questions than answers? Maybe.

It is all galvanic, of course. I find it satisfying to see Americans revive a little bit of the amazement that spread across the land during those early space shots. What I do not see is what I am experiencing: the translation of these staggering mysteries – their scope, their extent, their significance – to increased confirmations of belief in God. Further proof, we might say.

The Creator God. In ancient tongues, among many names ascribed to God, Elohim.

The statistics and explanations, inadequate as they are, rekindle thoughts from the Ug-and-Glug stage of my own sentience.

• We have a new, seemingly tangible, awareness of how big the Universe is. But do we? What is beyond the farthest we can see? Where does it end? Can it end? What is on the “other side” of the end?
• We are told that the old estimate of the Universe having a sextillion planets might be a modest estimate (one sextillion is even larger than the latest inflation numbers). How, really, did the planets all form?
• We have measurements of the “farthest” galaxies – the newest discovery estimated at 13.5-billion light-years from earth. A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year; that is 186,000 miles per second or 5.88-trillion miles a year. If correct, that’s 13.5-billion x 5.88-trillion. Years. You do the arithmetic; my brain hurts. These are scientists’ numbers. How old is old?

You might see where I am sidling. It amuses me to hear scientists talk about the Big Bang (often omitting that is the Big Bang Theory) and I wonder why their brains don’t get cramps, as they invent and rely on elaborate denials of a Creator God. Certainly it is the case that the increasingly erudite explanations of the Big Bang increasingly resemble the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. Hmmm… The Webb’s snapshots incite in me, too, more questions. At random:

• If there was a “moment” of the Big Bang, Who or what caused it… and what was “there” previously? And for how long back in time?
• In every other aspect of life, something that has been created had a creator. Why does the scientific mafia think that life, itself, is the exception?
• Every one of the sextillion (give or take a skillion) planets in the perceived Universe is spherical (or generally so: oblate spheroids, given isostatic adjustments). Why? Friction? No, there nearly is no matter in empty space that would wear them down. “Gravity” is the agreed-upon culprit.

We have “theories” of Relativity and Evolution; and “laws” of Gravity… but I do not need the “what” of Gravity explained as much as the “why.” With virtual shrugs of shoulders, scientists call Gravity an “invisible force.” As a former Editor at Marvel Comics, I confess that this sounds more like the Silver Surfer than Albert Einstein.

Yes, Einstein postulated that Gravity pulls on light as well as mass. That’s the “meta” explanation; the “micro” evidence is the moon pulling on mighty oceans. Gravity pulls “downward,” essentially inward, which explains planets being spheres (but not why we have never observed an evolving “new” planet still in the shape of, say, SpongeBob SquarePants); but my brain hurts again. We still don’t know the How of all this. Or Why.

And that’s Okay.

The Big Bang Theory initially sounded silly to me; now it is discussed with gravity (sorry) by professors. The latest quest – to formulate a “Theory of Everything,” I kid you not – sounds sillier.

And yet the skeptics challenge us: “Because you can’t explain something you just say, ‘Oh, it’s God’.” (My friend Gary Adams has reminded me that Dr Frank Turek calls this the “God in the Gaps” argument.)

My response: Yes, pretty often. Now that we understand that, let’s move on.

My further response: “You folks, when you can’t explain something that generations of people have trusted, but challenges your ways of thinking… when your “accepted facts” of science are disproven, overturned, or superseded in the face of factors like architectural and anatomical discoveries… when things you dismissed as legends are revealed as actual history… you just say, ‘Oh, those are anything but God’.”

My final response: The Creator God, Elohim, has revealed Himself in uncountable ways. His fingerprints are on all of animate and inanimate creation. He has redeemed you through the Blood of His Son Jesus Christ, telling you that you are the most precious of His creations – including bright stars and colorful planets. With those photos from an outer-space telescope, He chooses to remind us of His sovereignty and majesty. I know these things because I see them; because He told us; and because I personally have been blessed by that Creator God. His Son, you see, is my best friend. And He reassured us: “If it were not so, I would have told you.”

We don’t need a “Theory of Everything” when the Bible already provides us the Answer to Everything.

I close with a quatrain I memorized as a kid, from the Rubaiyat, but that expresses my message here:

All the saints and sages who have discussed

Of the two worlds so learnedly are thrust

Like foolish prophets forth;

Their words to scorn are scattered; their mouths are stopped with dust.

It’s a big universe, after all. But there’s no place like Home.

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An old Gospel song with a spoken reference to God flinging the stars across Creation:

Video Click: When All God’s Singers Get Home

5-4-15

Let us toss a pinch of cosmic pixie dust this week to the Hubble Telescope, the latest toy – a term I use with deep, proper, appropriate reverence – that allows us to view the universe more clearly. To appreciate creation better. To renew our sense of awe. To understand God more fully?

Not really, no. The stunning images of the universe we have received for 25 years allow us to see God’s handiwork in ways that scientists throughout history could never dream, and dreamers could never explain. At best – which is very good – the images we are graced to receive from Hubble’s penetrating gaze remind us of a God who is all-powerful, bigger than our biggest thoughts, and audacious to a degree we cannot comprehend. But… we don’t automatically understand Him better. I “understand” Him less, in fact, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In sixth grade, the father of my friend Eric Wells took a group of neighborhood kids to New York’s City’s Hayden Planetarium for Eric’s birthday. We beheld, there, that era’s best representation of the infinite heavens, the projection of an enhanced night sky on the planetarium’s interior dome. Under thousands and thousands of virtual stars and planets, I leaned over to Mr Wells and said, “It makes one feel rather insignificant, doesn’t it?” I later heard that the remark impressed him, but I was either swiping a Peanuts gag, or simulating one. (I was destined for a life in comics. More than a life in astrophysics. Believe me.)

These images do, however, make us feel insignificant. Even if we are on the “inside track,” knowing God, satisfied with the mystery of creation and God’s ways – that is, not having to know every detail of matters that are wholly God’s domain – and grateful to be part of His plan. Even then, as King’s kids and co-heirs with Christ, we are still awestruck by the majesty and mystery of Creation.

Are we Luddites, living in happy ignorance and distrustful of knowledge? Of course not. It is an exciting time in history, to look heavenward, as did Adam and Eve, or the Neanderthals Ug and Glug did, or as the impressionable wise men in Egypt and Greece and Phoenicia, or as did uncountable poets and philosophers and lovers, and ask “What is there? What more is there? Do we see what we think we see?” For the first time in history, humans nudge a little closer to seeing, almost feeling, the reality of unknown worlds.

Like the first Enlightenment thinkers, we appreciate science for opening paths to God. (This is contrary to what our schools teach about the Age of Reason, ostensibly when science “liberated” itself from superstitious religion.) Science should not make us greater skeptics: it should bring us closer to an appreciation of God’s greatness; better to behold His handiwork; to advance civilization by rational incorporation of spiritual inspirations. Newton saw things that way. As did Bach. Their main goals were to explain and glorify God by the scientific tools they employed.

Other questions, like How did the universe start, and When did it begin, almost seem like setting off stink bombs at a debutante’s ball. The questions are real… but ultimately more silly than profound. The “Big Bang,” only recently a rock-solid explanation of creation, is now undergoing a sort of scientific recall. Second thoughts. New facts. Matter and anti-matter, once the property of science-fiction writers, has now been appropriated by PhDs and professors. Good for them. Carbon-dating, for instance on the Shroud of Turin, is now being reassessed too.

I have always thought that the more detailed the explanations were of the Big Bang, the more they simply sounded like mumbo-jumbo restatements of the Book of Genesis anyway. All the saints and sages who have discussed of the universe’s origins inevitably are stymied. The universe started… when? And what was it the moment beforehand? Creation started as an atomic particle exploding? What surrounded it before the explosion; who caused the explosion? The universe is expanding? Into what? How far? What is beyond that? Who started all this? If “nobody,” then…

When your head stops hurting, you will affirm that unanswerable questions do not prove the existence of God by themselves, but abstract skepticism – ultimately, rebellion – surely does not disprove God’s existence. I’ll take Awe. I don’t often quote Matthew Harrison Brady, who inherited the wind, but I am persuaded to be more concerned with the Rock of Ages than the Ages of Rocks.

“Have you not known? have you not heard? has it not been told you from the beginning? have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is He that sits upon the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are as grasshoppers; Who stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in: Who brings the princes to nothing; He makes the judges of the earth as nothing. Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown: yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth: and He shall also blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble. To whom then will you liken me, or shall I be equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold Who has created these things, that brings out their host by number: He calls them all by names by the greatness of His might, for He is strong in power; not one is missing” (Isaiah 40: 21-26).

It pleased the Creator God to fill this mysterious void with billions of galaxies, colorful, ever-changing, intriguing. It pleased Him to create a species of beings in His image, and fill our world with wondrous animals and plants and mountains and seas. It pleased Him to embrace us with love, and provide a means of salvation so that, wherever and however, we will spend eternity with Him. And it pleases us that He ordained science, which confirms His greatness and omnipotence, more and more frequently. Thank you, Hubble. Happy birthday!

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Click: Adagio by Tomaso Albinoni

11-24-14

The Rosetta, a mother craft that hurtled through space for 10 years, recently dropped a landing craft called Philae on a distant comet called by scientists 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The comet is relatively small, fewer than three miles in diameter, its arcane name bestowed to distinguish it from thousands of other comets and asteroids. Gotta keeps things straight when these objects are a third of a trillion miles from earth, speeding at something like 35,000 miles an hour.

These numbers alone should make us take notice. It is not a bad thing, amidst cruelty, oppression, barbarity across our own planet, to appreciate the potential of the human mind – and the human spirit – by focusing on other planets, other objects in space, fellow residents of the universe.

The saints and sages of ancient Egypt and Athens used to gaze at the stars, and chart them. Before them, primitive grunters around the world would look heavenward and wonder. Most of us still do more than occasionally. What is out there? How long has this all been spinning? Where does it end? – and, then, what is beyond that boundary? What is our place in all this?

Such has been the inspiration for theologians, philosophers, scientists, poets, and lovers since time immemorial. Which is good. It is good to look up. It is good to look away, sometimes, from our own concerns. “Keep your eyes on the stars,” Theodore Roosevelt once said, “but keep your feet on the ground.” The scientists behind Rosetta had a very specific goal: to test the comet for the presence of elements, and water, that might be similar to those found on earth.

Their idea, since current theories identify comets as leftover crumbs from the Big Bang, like rock-solid dust bunnies under the universe’s bed, that if any of them slammed into Earth in primordial times, then perhaps a droplet of water eventually led to… well, you get it, iPads and all the rest. Maybe so. I am not a proponent of a 5-billion-year-old universe, but let them have their fun. Who knows what will be discovered?

Whilst I seriously am in awe of this mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the inspiration it will foster, I am amused by some aspects of the mission and its guiding earthbound crew. As I chuckle I am also grateful for the following:

When the scientists made their first joint comments to the world’s press, they fumbled with microphones that didn’t work, or got tangled between them;

The lander bounced like a tennis ball on the low-gravity comet. This was always a threat, especially if (as turned out) solar panels were turned from, instead of toward, the sun. A shame, but some data was collected and beamed to earth;

One of the scientists wore a wild shirt in a press conference, a colorful silky affair festooned with drawings of sexy women. It was decried by various troops of the Thought Police as sexist and inappropriate, but a) it was hand-made for him by his girlfriend; and b) the fellow, as a scientist, should have a right to assert his Inner Nerdiness;

In a subsequent press conference, the brainiac broke down crying, as he apologized for wearing the shirt. He plants a (virtual) spec on a (virtual) dot almost a trillion miles from home, and he loses his composure when the Shirt hit the fan.

… all are examples, or reminders really, that humankind is not approaching superhuman status, neither our emotions nor even our brains. We still bumble and stumble, sort of walking into trees and puddles while gazing at the stars. We build fancier toys, shinier too, but hardly are closer to understanding Everything about life – hardly Anything. The Big Bang is the latest answer to Why and When questions about creation. But… the more I hear scientists explaining it, the more, it seems to me, that they are just restating the first chapter of Genesis. Merely with less clarity.

Those news stories about chess masters playing against computers? Sometimes the computer wins, and folks start talking about the threat to human beings, if computers become smarter than we are. I would remind the nervous folks that there are always the options of removing batteries or pulling plugs; and at the root of the matter, human beings make computers, human beings program computers, and human beings, at least around here, screw them up on occasion. I think we are safe.

How is this essay a message for Thanksgiving Week? To me, simple; a lot simpler than landing a vacuum cleaner on a comet. The ESA triumph, even with glitches, makes me give thanks for the minds wherewith God has graced us. The renewed inspiration provided by an astonishing space mission makes me give thanks for the spark of creativity God has placed in all of us – we literally cannot create anything, but we can rearrange and discover things, therefore able to appreciate the quality of creativity that He allows us to emulate.

And I am thankful as a child of God that my fellow creatures – all of us – whether through space missions or a sport-shirt selection, may remain humble. Servants knowing our places in the universe. We don’t have to be rocket scientists to be thankful for that.

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Human achievements. Creativity. Mysteries of the universe. Let us give thanks this week, by resting upon sincere prayers of gratitude. Also I nominate on oratorio by Franz Josef Haydn, “The Creation.” An amazing work of profound spirituality. Haydn is remembered for his symphonies, string quartets, and chamber works, but seldom for his choral, religious, and oratorical work. “The Creation” is a masterful account of the Genesis story. This video (Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood, dir.; performed in English) is a work of art in itself, with orchestra, chorus, and soloists in a magnificent cathedral… and the camera examining every corner of the cathedral’s design and decorations, and amazing, amazing videos of nature’s glories – God’s glories!

Click: The Creation by Josef Haydn

12-31-12

One of the great Sunday pages of the Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz shows Linus walking outside while it is snowing. He looks up, he catches snowflakes on his hand… and goes wild when he sees that two are identical. He rushes to show them off, but before his sister Lucy, or Charlie Brown, or anyone else, can see them, the snowflakes have melted. Good grief.

What would have made that discovery special, of course, is that we are told that no two snowflakes are exactly alike; of the uncountable snowflakes that fall, or have fallen, their crystalline, geometric appearances are all unique.

This seems miraculous, when we think of it. It IS miraculous. There is no logical, structural, organizational reason it that it must be so, but it is. God could have made snowflakes standard-issue; or of two basic designs; or any finite number. But He chose Infinity for that category in nature – a unique way, to my way of thinking, to reveal Himself. A unique way, but not rare: there are many things in nature that are astonishing in their variety. Consider:

Rainbows arrange themselves by the color spectrum, but we never see the same display in the same place, and they vary in full arcs, portions, double arcs, in different intensities.

We never see clouds that are identical in the same sky, or miles apart, or years apart – even moments apart. They constantly change.

Despite the best efforts of breeders, no two flowers are ever alike. Compare roses, plumerias, tulips, not to mention wildflowers, and you will always find differences of coloring, size, intensity. A rose is NOT a rose is NOT a rose…

The distinctive colorization of birds, even the patterns on peacocks’ tail-feather displays, distinguish them from other species, but are always different – from nuances to brilliant features – from bird to bird.

Famous markings on many animals, like leopards’ spots; giraffe markings; stripes on tigers, zebras, and tabby cats, are like trademarks we instantly recognize. Yet from animal to animal, no two are alike.

And with humans: we each have only two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and hair on our heads – a small number of features that constitute our appearance – yet among the world’s 7-billion souls there are no doppelgangers. The idea that we all have a “double” somewhere is a fiction.

God’s infinite variety is wondrous.

We can choose the same patterns in all our ways, but we humans tend not to. When you think of it, when we create (that is, invent) things, almost immediately a march toward standardization commences. Someone comes up with, say, a Model T Ford, or a Hostess Twinkie, or an iPod… and right away the factory assembly lines stamp out clones by the millions.

Humans tend toward the same in their goods; uniformity in their practices; conformity in their ideas. Do tastes in fashion change? I maintain that is merely a seasonal adjustment in a new set of orthodoxies. The same with musical trends, slang phrases, interior-decorators’ colors, widths of lapels and ties: on the surface we want to be different, but we rush to the same, same, same, individually or in our groups.

Years change – which is what brings me to these thoughts – and time marches on. At New Years’ times we feel obligated to look back and look forward. We look at the same old world, and behold the things that really don’t change, magazine cover stories to the contrary notwithstanding. Some things shouldn’t change; in other areas we are stubborn. It is frightening to consider how little human nature has changed when we think about the wars and brutality and oppression and abuse and the things we do to one another. Sin.

But God, the Unchangeable, declines to stop changing the physical world – the miracle of creation – in which He, in unfathomable mercy and kindness, has placed us. Creation is for His pleasure, but it pleases Him to please us.

And surely there is a message beyond an amazing God choosing to create eye-candy for His children. If we would only notice it more often. Every bit of creation – every different element and aspect – is a manifestation of a God whose love for us is as limitless and infinite, and distinctive, as the numberless snowflakes and rainbows and flowers.

My prayer for us all in 2013 is not only that we stop and smell the roses, but that we stop and BE the roses.

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Like roses among thorns, a profound message can grow in the weed patch of pop music. Such was the case in the late 1960s, another troubled time, when a pair of songwriters approached the jazz icon Louis Armstrong with a spiritual but not sectarian song, certainly not jazz, “What a Wonderful World.” The first rule in the creative process often is that there are no rules, and a classic recording, a perfect marriage of lyrics and meanings and vocal style and personality, was their result. It is worth a listen in this New Year, especially for the spoken introduction by Satchmo (“Pops”) before he sings.

Click: What a Wonderful World