September 17, 2006

Glynn Cardy

Pentecost 15     Mark 8:27-38

“What does it profit a person to gain the whole universe and lose their own soul?”

When I was a teenager I spent many nights each year sleeping under the stars. There is nothing quite like falling asleep beneath an enormous canopy of twinkling lights, variously arranged, and different each evening. Being a child of modernity I knew that the blackness of the sky was not a great dome that encompassed the earth and above which a kingly God sat. I knew the blackness was all I could see of the fathomless depth beyond, where the experience we call God might or might not be. For everything that astronomy could tell us there was always more it couldn't. Yet, like the best of theology, its purpose was to ignite wonder.

As adults, wonder is not a daily experience, unless we make it so. The journey from childhood to adulthood is usually marked by a diminution of wonder. As explanations from science and history are given to the child, linking effects with causes, the moments of awe often evaporate. So while the acquisition of knowledge can be exciting there can also be the sense of loss.

Some interpret this sense of loss as a direct attack on God. Like the Pentecostal bishop in Kenya this week who wants to hide away the fossils of pre-humanity currently in the Nairobi Museum, they see knowledge as threatening religion. Yet the religion they wish to defend is the sort that can be threatened by knowledge. It is the sort that tries to give you answers instead of better questions, offering a kitset God: 'Just follow instructions and all will be well.'

What could be called the theological task of the sciences is to open the windows of the mind to all the possibility, awe, and wonder of the universe. The enormous space that astronomy opens us to elicit in many people not batten-down-the-hatches fear but mind-blowing delight.

“Honk if you love Pluto” declares the T-shirt. Not too dissimilar to the old ones promoting honking for Jesus. And, like so often happens when discussing God, the Pluto debate is up and raging. The International Astronomy Union meeting in Prague last month adopted a new definition of a planet – one that knocked Pluto out of the club.

Pluto is used to being knocked about. Living on the extremities of planetary imagination - even with the Hubble Space Telescope it is still merely a bleary sphere in shades of grey - Pluto didn't join the club until 1930. That was the year when a 24 year old American Unitarian by the name of Clyde Tombaugh mapped movement where movement had not been mapped before. A young girl from Oxfordshire suggested the name of Pluto, Roman God of the Underworld. Beyond Pluto was the abyss of unknowing. Many imagine that Pluto got its name from Mickey's dog; but not everything originates in Hollywood!

Since the 1930s Pluto has shrunk. With each advance in technology Pluto's measurements have diminished. It's now smaller than our moon. Hence the T-shirts, without the honking, that proclaim 'size doesn't matter!' and 'is a dachshund not a dog?'

What does matter to the astronomical elites is the discovery in the 1990s of other Pluto-like bodies on the edge of our telescopic vision. And not just one, or five, but hundreds, and probably thousands!

Interestingly this naming debate has spilled over into popular consciousness. The public wanted a voice. The planets mean many different things to many different people. Pluto was not just a bleary dot out in space it is something people love. It inspired and inspires myths, art, and poetry. It is part of astrology charts – 'Pluto direct' is a way of talking about transformational energy. Kids identify with Pluto's smallness. Adults relate to its marginalization ['poor oppressed planet!]. In particular those who forlornly hope that 'whatever has been will forever be' find its demotion out of the Big Nine major league of planets difficult to accept.

The pragmatists of astronomy suggest that instead of knocking Pluto out of the club that they change the rules. In other words expand the definition of planet to include not only the eight and Pluto but also Eris [formerly known as Xena] and Ceres. The purists though argue that this will open the doors to hundreds maybe millions of potential new planets. This is a debate about who can join the club, who controls who joins the club, and the fear of loosing control of the boundaries. Sounds very much like the Church to me!

In ancient times the word 'planetai', meaning wanderers, was applied to the seven heavenly bodies that moved. They couldn't see Neptune and Pluto. Also, being pre-Galileo, it was assumed the sun was one of the seven and the earth wasn't. The definition of planet was therefore not fixed but to be influenced by changes in science and thinking in the years ahead.

This is not so different from the Christian history of God. Within the pages of the Bible God progresses from being a personal deity ['the God of Abraham'], to a tribal deity ['the God of Israel'], to a deity who is pan-tribal [a God of Jews and Gentiles], to one that transcends all human constructs [the God of earth and heaven]. The location of God moves from the desert, to the Temple, to a literal realm in the sky, to the presence of the historical Jesus. Later in the early centuries of Christianity, via an intricate weaving of Greek and Hebrew thought with the experience of transformative love, God was woven into a magical carpet called Trinity. But the development of God didn't stop there, locked in the 4th century. God as 'process', as 'go-between', as 'liberator', as 'power within', as 'matrix of grace', as 'deep silence'… were all still to come.

The influence of science and philosophy on the definition and development of God is not to be underestimated. Indeed it is the interplay between experience, history, and science that has pushed at and shown as puny the easy and simplistic notions of God.

I find it interesting when language runs out. Language is a system of signs and codes that is based around the visible and tangible. When language has to be found for the invisible and intangible then we are into the realm of multiple metaphors. We say the thing we are trying to describe is something like this, but also not like that. It is also something like this, but also not like that. No one set of metaphorical clothes quite fits. In theology we surmise that such is the nature of God that no sets of clothing will ever quite fit. God is both knowable and unknowable, both here and beyond.

There are two words in theology that defy close definition. One, of course, is God. The other is soul. Soul, or 'heart' as it's sometimes called, is an attempt to talk about God in us and us in God. It blends passion, feeling, wisdom, and wholeness. A person can gain the whole world, nay the whole universe, be as rich and successful as he or she could possibly imagine, yet without attending to their soul they gain nothing. To nurture the soul, the task of spirituality, is therefore very important. All sorts of little things help – that walk in the bush, playing with the dog, listening to a child, smelling the coffee before you drink it, laughing lots… Yet answering the question of why these things help is harder. It is as if the universe is inside us and all the spinning, pulling, moving and amazing wonders need to be held together in some way.

The Pluto debate asks some deeply theological questions. Firstly, who has the right to name heavenly bodies? Secondly, what is their matter? Thirdly, does the re-naming of them matter when their matter doesn't change? Or does it? And lastly, what do we do when we reach the limits of our knowledge and speech?

Theology and astronomy have at heart the same purpose: to excite the imagination, to encourage us to wonder, and to think about that which we struggle to name and understand.

For the sake of your soul, look at the stars tonight and the dark beyond.