By Stephen P. White
I remember a moonless summer night at a camp in North Dakota, almost forty years ago now, when the stars were so countless and bright that it was hard to make out the familiar constellations. The night was so black that I could barely see my own hand in front of my face, yet the stars hung so thick and so low that I thought I might reach up and pluck them from the firmament like bunches of grapes. Billions of stars. It was, in an older and truer sense of an abused and overused word, awesome.
My father, now deceased, loved astronomy. He knew countless constellations and the names of most of the brightest stars. I remember him pointing them out to me on dark nights at home in the Midwest. Right above us were Vega, Altair, and Deneb. They form the Summer Triangle. There was Cassiopeia. And Corona Borealis. Off to the south was Scorpius with the great red giant, Antares. When autumn comes, Scorpius will sink below the horizon and Orion will rise: the great hunter pursuing a quarry he will never catch.
He taught me that our eyes see color best at the center of attention, but that sensitivity to light is a little better just beyond the edge of the center of our vision. The faint star you might not see if you looked straight at it could become barely visible if you looked a little to one side or the other. That’s how he taught me to find the Andromeda galaxy, the most distant object visible to the naked eye. I’ve only seen it once. But I have seen it.
Dad eventually got a telescope—an amateur-grade instrument with an eight- or nine-inch mirror—and would bring it out on clear nights to look at the Orion Nebula, or to see the rings and moons of Saturn, or to watch the crescent of Venus following the setting sun. The telescope was really overkill for inspecting the craters of the moon; binoculars were better for that.
We used to talk about the most amazing night skies we had ever seen. There was that night in North Dakota—never seen anything like it, before or since—when we could see the Milky Way clear overhead, the aurora to the north, and lightning climbing the thunderheads, like luminous cauliflower, to the south.
Over the years I came to realize that those nights with Dad, looking up at all those points of ancient light and wandering planets, were a kind of theodicy.
Dad was a family doctor. He spent his days among the sick and the suffering. He helped many to recover and even to thrive, but he also knew that everything he did was, in the end, a delay. He fought every day a losing battle against mortality. We all fight it, of course; he simply saw it more clearly than most.
Dad’s fascination with the stars was not merely therapeutic—though I suppose it was that too—it was closer to grateful contemplation. It was an exercise in wonder. Do you see what unfathomable glory the Lord has made? What greater remedy to the problem of suffering, to the problem of human frailty, than to behold with wonder the very work of God?
Wonder is not, strictly speaking, a virtue. But it immunizes the soul against cynicism. Wonder begets humility and gratitude—which are virtues—and these go a long way toward transforming the suffering of this life from something one hopes to avoid or at least endure into something that opens onto redemption.
And I find that looking up is a remarkably effective way to instill a sense of wonder.
For most of human history, the wonder of a night sky was something ordinary to encounter, even in towns and cities. “Light pollution” is a relative novelty. It would be simplistic to suggest that our modern world has forgotten its Creator because the stars no longer shine with the clarity of old through the glare of our cities. But the fact that many people in this world live and die without ever having seen a clear night sky certainly does not help.
My pastor once suggested to a room full of parents that their children, who would soon be making their First Communion, should be taken out of the city to see the stars on a clear, dark night. That, he insisted, would be as important a preparation for receiving that gratuitous and awesome Sacrament as anything they were taught in the classroom. He meant it. And I think he was right.
This past week I’ve been out in western Michigan, one of Dad’s favorite places to look at the stars. It gets dark here at night. Maybe not as dark as North Dakota, but much more so than the suburbs of Virginia, near Washington, where I live. My oldest daughter and I went out to look at the stars the other night. I wish I remembered half of what my father taught me, but I can still find my way around the northern sky with something like competence. I pointed out Scorpius and Cassiopeia and the Little Dipper. The Milky Way stretched across it all.
Standing beside my daughter, looking at those bright stars, I could not help but marvel at the love the Father has for His children. And what a wonder it is to be invited to receive and share that same love. Dante spoke of the love that moves the sun and the other stars. His love moves even more than that.
About the author
Stephen P. White is executive director of the Saint John Paul II National Shrine and a fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.