Starry Nights
I like looking at the stars. Always have. It doesn’t matter the time of the year—warm, cold, somewhere in between. There’s never a wrong time to gaze into the cosmos. In the winter, the air is crisp and the lack of moisture makes the sky appear to glow just a little bit brighter than normal. But in the summer, I can find a patch of soft grass and create a pillow from the earth to rest on while I observe the contours of the visible universe.
As a teenager, I often snuck out into the front yard after everyone else had gone to bed. It was typically so quiet in the deep recesses of my little mountain town that all I could hear were the katydids singing in the trees. The insects hiding in the forest proved to be pleasant company. However, listening to their chirps in the distance, I sometimes wondered whether the myriad sounds pulsating from the lonesome pines weren’t really just pleas to a callous God from his fragile creation. I thought about God often. For some reason, I still do.
My faith was always tenuous, even in the best of times. Eventually, I became insistent that the only type of craftsman who could have so seamlessly sewn brokenness into the very fabric of existence was as sadistic as he was omnipotent. What other kind of divine entity, I thought, would intentionally breathe blistering bewilderment into the bare nucleus of being itself? Maybe the thing that troubled me the most was my fear that, upon completing his fragile masterwork, God had carelessly retreated back into the domain of the infinite, either unaware or unbothered by the unbearable weight of what he had created. The Lord almighty didn’t appear to give a damn for any of his finite subjects, all of whom have been fated to clumsily stumble through the muck and grime of our empty lives. God couldn’t be bothered to care so long as his play-things found the time to shout “Amen” and toss their weekly tithe into the parish coffer.
One summer night, I slumped over on my back in the wet grass, put my hands behind my head, and looked up at the sky admiring the orbs of fleeting gases arching over the earth. It all made me feel insignificant. In a way, it was comforting realizing how little my life actually mattered. Could I ever do anything to change a theoretically infinite universe? Would not attending a respectable college, or getting married to a good-looking man, or living the same dead-end life that pushed so many of the people I had grown up with into the arms of self-destruction make the earth rotate any slower or faster around the sun? Still, an incredible loneliness lingered in the midst of that awareness. My new freedom wasn’t free at all.
Staring into the luminous heart of celestial ambiguity, I felt sure that, even amongst the vast emptiness of space, despair always finds a home. The moon, the stars, the distant glimmer of uncharted planets quietly slumbering in the vacuum of space— each just another reminder that whenever we bow our heads in prayer, it amounts to little more than misguided appeals to an empty sky. There is no watchmaker, just the purposeless ticking of a metaphysical bomb waiting to explode and drag us all back into the nonbeing from whence we came.
All at once it was clear to me that we —each and every human on this earth—are nothing more than the products of contingency, all clumsily sorted into our particular form by the tumultuous trials of natural selection. Cursed with complex sentience, we are simultaneously too foolish to stop searching for purpose and too clever to ever forget that it’s all any of us really want. In my high school physics course, I learned that scientists refer to things that both take up space and have mass as “matter”. Atoms, and by extension compounds made up of even more atoms, constitute everything from the grass that I rested upon to the galaxy effortlessly hanging above me. I just sighed. We all might be composed of matter, I thought, but the reality is that nobody really does.
It’s been a while since I stretched out on the front lawn of my Appalachian homestead and studied the stars. Since then, I’ve found new reasons to think that the books and the poems and the treatises— the collected wisdom of humanity’s theological lineage I’ve spent the last decade of my life exploring — all amount to spit in the wind. If I am right and there truly is nobody up there looking down at me, what’s the point of it all?
Somehow and for some reason I can’t quite articulate, I keep looking up.
