In the Christmas story told in the gospel of Matthew a bright star guides three strangers to a stable where a baby named Jesus is born. The three men, known as “wise men” because they studied both the stars and the scriptures of the Jews, bring gifts to a child destined to change the world.
The story links the mystery of the universe with human life on earth. As an adult, Jesus would teach his followers a prayer that begins: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The life of Jesus embodies this prayer and more than two billion Christians continue to say this prayer and to celebrate the birth of Jesus.
Every person who has ever lived, however, is also a child of the stars. In their book Journey of the Universe authors Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker write that “the stars are our ancestors.” In the heat and pressure of stars, and then in their supernova explosions, stars give “birth to the elements that eventually form our planet and our bodies.” Stars are, Swimme and Tucker affirm, “wombs of immense creativity.”
The star in our galaxy we call the sun makes life on earth possible. And as its temperature has increased, the earth “has adapted itself so as to remain in the narrow band that enables life to flourish. By drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere via photosynthesis, Earth altered the composition of its atmosphere to keep itself cool, as the Sun grew hotter. This adaptive dance between life and nonlife changes our thinking about our planet. Earth is not just a big ball upon which living beings exist. Earth is a creative community of beings that reorganizes itself age after age so that it can perpetuate and even deepen its vibrant existence. This dynamic or reorganization is possible because of life’s most essential capacity—its power to adapt.”
“The deep truth about matter,” Swimme and Tucker explain, “is that, over the course of four billion years, molten rocks transformed themselves into monarch butterflies, blue herons, and the exalted music of Mozart.” We are, however, “the first generation” to learn that our sun is one of trillions of stars “in one of the billions of galaxies in an unfolding universe.” Our human responsibility “is to deepen our consciousness in resonance with the dynamics of the fourteen-billion-year creative event in which we find ourselves.”
The universe story, Swimme and Tucker suggest, “has the power to awaken us more deeply to who we are.” For “as the Milky Way is the universe in the form of a flower, we are the universe in the form of a human. And every time we are drawn to look up into the night sky and reflect on the awesome beauty of the universe, we are actually the universe reflecting on itself.”
The scientific story of the universe was unknown to Jesus, but he knew the earth story offered us the challenge of doing “on earth as in heaven” the will of the one he called “Our Father.” May we be inspired this Christmas to “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) in these stories.
Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (Yale University Press, 2011).
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