My God, It's Full of Stars

Just back from snowy Minnesota, where it is not snowy, for a family visit with the in-laws. While we were there, my mother-in-law, Sue, marveled at an image on her phone from the James Webb Space Telescope.

“Look at this,” she said, passing it around. The photo showed a blazing lightfield filling the tiny screen. “Every dot in this photo is a galaxy and every galaxy has billions of stars.”

I’m an easy mark when it comes to astronomical images. Hell, I still get a thrill from the Buck Rogers-like phrase “space telescope.” It’s almost impossible to believe that a species that worships The Real Housewives of [Insert City] also figured out how to park a camera in orbit a million miles from our home planet.

Sue and Dick are good Catholics and my guess is she was thinking of the wonder of God’s creation. I am not a good Catholic (or even a bad one), but my mind went to the same place. Every pinprick of light an unimaginable expanse of the cosmos, and yet each of those unimaginable expanses no more than a pinprick in the fabric of the universe. We all have different definitions of God, I suppose. I’m not even sure of my own definition, but I believe wonder is as much a gift from on high as any workaday miracle.

I’ve been feeling a lot of wonder over the last few weeks. The cause is unclear. Maybe it’s just seasonal sentimentality. Maybe it’s dehydration. Whatever the cause, it’s been lovely to feel as if I’m seeing this world – and all those other worlds – anew.

What even is wonder, I wonder?

I suppose wonder is the sensation of pleasant unknowingness. So often, the human brain chases itself into fervor trying to untangle, deconstruct, rationalize, contextualize. Wonder does away with all of that, leaving the mind quiet with awe. The normal questions – who, what, where, when, and why – congeal into a single question for which we do not have a name.

I couldn’t find the picture of the galaxies I mentioned, but here’s a new shot of Uranus, heh-heh. Grow up, Michael

Wonder need not arise from grandeur. How many of us have placed our palms against those of our children and felt the same? Or watched waves breaking against the shoreline and felt our skin prickle at the deep geologic time that brought them to us, and us to them? How many of us have found ourselves in awe when confronted with simple acts of goodness?

Of course, wonder can also accompany horror. The wars of the last few years have provoked plenty of that variety, as well. The American doctrine of “shock and awe” was designed to concuss the human brain into apocalyptic dumbness. Behold our might and tremble. We’ve all seen plenty of photos of the grieving and shell-shocked, their faces the dark reflection of the monstrous side of wonder.

But I don’t want to dwell on that today when I remain in good cheer from home-baked Christmas cookies and the joy of being with my college-aged kids and the scent of fresh-fallen snow still in my nose. (Again, there was no snow.) I prefer today, like my cat, to lie in the sun and bask in its warmth during this chilly season. And that is a kind of wonder, too.

After our Minnesota goodbyes yesterday, we boarded the first of two homebound flights. The airports were packed, as they always are this time of year, and I allowed myself to linger on the faces we passed: the father with his baby girl in her tiger outfit, the preppy school kids in their matching blue blazers, the bright pink lipstick on the waitress asking if I’d like more iced tea. I tried to be thankful because thankfulness is its own sort of wonder. We were unrushed and warm and we bought snacks and crammed into our seats and flew over drab fields waiting for their own resurrections.

As we boarded our second flight, from Atlanta to Savannah, I noticed a trio of women in line ahead of us. They were in good spirits and looked like maybe they were on their way to a girl’s weekend. The flight was full and these ladies had volunteered to check their carry-ons, which necessitated them depositing their roller bags at the end of the jetway. I was directly behind them and happened to glance down at their luggage. Written in black Sharpie across one of their bags was this phrase: “Nothing He can imagine cannot exist.”

It took me a moment to piece together the meaning of this double negative. When I did, I felt a warm rush of gratitude. I know it was meant as a statement of religiosity, which is fine. But I took it mean something more, that all is all, and there can be nothing else and nothing less. It’s true, whatever your definition of God, or whether you even believe in God. It was just a small moment in a day of small moments, in a life of small moments, each of them as wondrous as a photograph of a million million galaxies.

We are a lucky species. We get to make music and eat waffle fries and wish for snow that doesn’t come. We get to zip around the skies in steel tubes and send subatomic particles hurtling at near light speed at each other for no other purpose than seeing what happens when they collide. We get to watch squirrels dig for nuts and we get to complain about all the things that are wrong with this great and terrible world of our making. And, every now and again, we get to find ourselves stunned into reverie by a sunbeam shining through a cloud. Small moments and great rearranged into the magical. We are a lucky species because we were given the gift of wonder.