You turn men back into dust
and say: ‘Go back, sons of men.’
To your eyes a thousand years
are like yesterday, come and gone,
no more than a watch in the night.
You sweep men away like a dream,
like grass which springs up in the morning.
In the morning it springs up and flowers:
by evening it withers and fades.
Make us know the shortness of our life
that we may gain wisdom of heart.
Lord, relent! Is your anger for ever?
Show pity to your servants.
In the morning, fill us with your love;
we shall exult and rejoice all our days.
Let the favour of the Lord be upon us:
give success to the work of our hands.
Psalm 90:3-6, 12-14, 17
'All of
the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium
in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in
the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star stuff,' wrote Carl Sagan some
46 years ago. The science of the last century has made such enormous changes to
our self-understanding and to our knowing our place in the great scheme of
creation. Even the notion of 'creation' itself has become just another human
construct to explain a beginning. A
beginning that can only be hypothesised as a big bang. And before this event
not a single atom existed.
The
psalmist who wrote and sang (what we call) Psalm 90 already knew that when our
life story had been lived we returned to the dust from which we came. And in
the same way that the universe's 3.8 billion years have flashed by, our own
lives are, 'no more than a watch in the night'.
Of interest,
is that the Hebrew writer of this psalm attributed its authorship to Moses to
give the prayer great weight and
dignity. It is generally held that the Hebrews did not believe in an afterlife,
but firmly believed in living. And if
that life was lived well, we would gain true wisdom. Now the writer didn't know
the science we know, but s/he had carefully observed the passing seasons. The
extraordinary promise first made to Abraham - that he would have descendants as
many as the stars in the heavens and sand of the seashore (Genesis 22:17) - is
a precursor to the eternal life that the disciples of Jesus would come to
understand. Abraham's genes would enable him to live for eternity. Only much
later with the influence of the Greek's understanding of body (soma) and flesh
(sarx) do the (now) Jews begin to explore life after death.
As
Fathers' Day ebbs away for yet another year, it helps to understand how our
ancient forebears saw their genetic gift as continuing their lineage. The
exponential growth of genealogical websites is a clue to our desire to know
where we come from, to know our origins and to link us to the community of our
fellow human beings. We need to focus on living as our Hebrew fathers and
mothers taught us, confident that each morning we awake to, the One who loves
us more than we love ourselves will fill us with love, and now as then, his
favour will be on us and the work of our hands made successful. This is life.
Life among the stars.
Peter
Douglas
That dot
by Carl Sagan
“Look
again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you
love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever
was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands
of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and
forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization,
every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father,
hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt
politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader,"
every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of
dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The
Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at
least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes.
Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our
stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
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