In the picture framed by the window, I see heads bent in nature study: spider in a jar, spinning silk. Bare feet kicking hot summer air, creating a breeze in a breathless August afternoon. They brandish digital cameras and itouches in juxtaposed irony–endeavoring to capture bugs in jars and pixels.
And I want to press palms to soft cheeks, look deep eye-to-eye and declare,
“You are filled with the stuff of stars, you are”.
It’s true. Minds capable of holding more, grasping more facts than mine, have figured it out, boiled it down to hard science. Through formulas and Einstein’s figures, theories and stellar observations of supernovas, science claims we humans are filled with the elements that swirl in the heated center of our very own sun: magnesium, calcium, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen (and more).
This somehow reasserts the Big Bang Theory that blasted elements into an airless space producing a planet, a home and a backyard friendly to life that hold the spider in the jar with his sticky-silk thread, the bees that miraculously keep our earth’s ecology intact and the brown-skinned little scientists with bent heads? This somehow bolsters the idea that these common elements mashed together over millennia into the inquisitive minds that now watch the captured creature under glass?
To me and my mind this is a conclusion unacceptable.
But that we share the same vital elements as the stars, well this is lofty stuff. That the energy contained in the minuscule walls of each atom, enough to burn dozens of earths, is safely balanced within physical, human bodies, that is baffling and awe-inspiring.
I think both scientists and mothers become silent in the wonder of it. That great blessing of life sustained.
At our very soul-centers we hold the elemental attributes of the Son.
Our cores hold the eternal, elementals of God. Created in his image, we are. We crave love, truth, knowledge, hope, relationship.
We engage in the creation and see a creative god at its center, or we don’t.
And in that moment of choice, that response that occurs in the universe of one’s private person, we each exhibit proof of that god we accept or deny. It’s in the flexing of the free will that we resemble God the most.
We freely choose. Whether or not we see the data as proof of a big bang or a big god won’t have much of an effect on the interplanetary future. One atheist remarked, “God isn’t real. Deal with it. Move on and enjoy this life. After this, it’s curtains.”
You may choose curtains, finality, fatalism. You may spin webs in a jar, as the captured and suffocating, preparing to capture imaginary prey, planning on life in an airless world.
You may not know God but you’re still filled with the stuff of stars. Your DNA is unique, your fingerprints unlike any other. The patterns of color that fleck upon your irises is yours alone. The swirling core of your soul speaks for God when your knees won’t bend and your voice won’t speak his name. He put the stuff of the sun in your body and the truth of his existence within your soul. Perhaps it’s true that your only escape from him is death. In ceasing to be alive you can flex your ultimate freedom from the idea of god.
But let me put palms to cheeks and tell you, “Jesus loves you. Your freest moment will be in opening your inner universe to his breathing spirit. No more striving, just being, living, orbiting round that beautiful free spin of a Christ-centered life. His gravity holds you, keeps you, makes your life possible. Accept it or not. You are the god of your own choosing, or not.”
What if you’re wrong? You may ask me.
What if I am? If life ends in curtains dark then I won’t notice or care, my efforts at web-spinning in the dying earthjar will matter not.
But what if I’m not wrong? What if my lines of intellectual and spiritual reasoning lead to the reality of what we cannot see here, yet?
What if? It’s a question I’ll always ask, until the word are gone from my lips and the breath leaves this body. What if?
Psalm 8
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
linked with Laura at Playdates at the Wellspring & L.L. Barkat for In, On and Around Mondays & Heather at The Extraordinary-Ordinary
Alyssa Santos
