Chet Raymo is one of my favorite authors. He writes about the connection between science and religion... a subject near and dear to my heart. Although a scientist by trade, he writes with the spirit of Emerson, Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists. Raymo is a retired professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College and a retired science columnist for The Boston Globe. But he is still writing books and his own personal blog.

His book Skeptics and True Believers is the culmination of "his own quest to reconcile the miracle stories he learned as a child with the science he learned as an adult."¹ In this book, Raymo describes the wonders of watching the Hyakutake Comet in the spring of 1996 on the Stonehill College campus. The comet could be seen for several nights with the naked eye.

"On most clear nights," he writes, "I was at the college observatory, together with a crowd of eager watchers drawn by the campus grapevine. Apparently, comets have not lost their old power to excite the imagination-to spook, to exhilarate. The turn-of-the- century naturalist John Burroughs wrote: 'The night does not come with fruits and flowers and bread and meat; it comes with stars and stardust, with mystery and nirvana.' The [Hyakutake] comet did not offer pyrotechnics, no billowing, sky-brightening special effects, just faint light and beauty. Most of my companions in the observatory were genuinely excited to see Hyakutake, and especially to stand in the cold dark with others who had come to celebrate nature's capacity to dazzle with stardust and nirvana.

"It was, I submit, an experience as close to the primal origins of religious feeling as we can get in this increasingly virtual world. We celebrated. We partook of mystery. No longer are comets portents, warnings, harbingers of doom. Today we calculate their precise orbits-months, years, centuries in advance. We encounter them with spacecraft. We examine their substance with spectroscopes. We probe their gases. In all of this, the comet is a revelation of the mathematical order that underlies creation, of the material foundations of life and consciousness in the dark forge of space."²

There is something so mystical about the night sky. The English poet Sir Thomas Browne wrote: "Light that makes things seen, makes things invisible. Were it not for night and the shadows of the earth, the noblest part of creation had remained unseen and the stars in heaven invisible."

I love to be out at night when the weather is clear. In fact, one of my favorite household chores is to take out the trash and recycling on Thursday nights, placing the bags and bins on the curbside for the Friday morning pickup. It's an excuse to be outdoors even with 10 million other things to do.

My street is in a suburban housing development. There are few street lights and neighboring houses aren't too close, so there is little to interfere with my view of the sky. When there is no cloud cover, I stop in the middle of the driveway to look up. I linger as long as I can, breathing the fresh air and gazing skyward. I love it when the moon is visible ...more so when it's full. As I stand there in awe, my spirit seems to grow beyond my insignificant little self. I forget the cold for a while and feel connected to the Universe.

In ancient times... before Copernicus and Galileo said otherwise... most people thought that Earth was the center of the Universe. And in the ages before modern science, the gods of heaven and earth seemed capricious... following rules and motives of their own, unfathomable to ordinary human beings. Miracles abounded. And since the Universe was relatively small, according to the old religions, divine or supernatural activity was aimed mainly at our planet. Gods were busy either creating or destroying our world... or fighting for our human attention. And these activities of divine creation and destruction were motivated by emotions which we, ordinary mortals, could understand: love, pride, greed, jealousy, and the desire to win the devotion and/or obedience of a tribe, a country or of people everywhere. In this regard, the gods were all too human.

In ancient times, the gods and humanity were intimately connected. If people acted in harmony with divine purpose, then the gods would smile on them with rain and good harvests or success in the hunt. But if people did something to displease the gods, then misfortune befell them. Celestial omens might appear, such as a comet streaking across the sky or solar eclipse, creating terror about the apparent death of the sun. Signs and omens from the heavens announced a warning or a portent about a person or a nation. If soothsayers and prophets could read the signs properly and people heeded the prophecies, then bad outcomes might be averted... or good outcomes guaranteed.

The story of the Star of Bethlehem is thus not unique. The star which announced the birth of a special child, the Messiah who came to save the world, is descended from many earlier myths about stars and other celestial omens.

Of course, we also know that people in these ancient cultures were much closer to nature in their daily lives than we modern folks. For farmers, fishermen, herdsmen and hunters, it was important to keep track of natural rhythms. Farmers had to know when to plant their crops or to plan their harvests. Shepherds had to prepare for the lambing season. Fisherman needed to know when to launch their boats or to bring them ashore and hunters when to set off for migratory prey. So very early in human culture, great structures such as Stonehenge were built to follow the cycles of the sun and the moon, the equinoxes and solstices, the months and the seasons. Thus the early sciences of mathematics and astronomy began.

But beyond their pragmatic purpose, these stone structures signaled an important development in human spirituality. In addition to the mysteries of life and death, people began to wonder about the mysteries of the heavens. How, they wondered, were the cycles of the moon connected to women's menstrual cycles? How were the seasons on earth linked to the appearance of different constellations of stars in the night sky?

These man-made stone structures which forecast the seasonal cycles were sacred places. They were temples linking people to the gods. In ancient Mesopotamia, where astronomy and astrology were born, the creator god Marduk was linked to the planet Jupiter and the goddess Ishtar to the planet Venus. Other great gods were identified, of course, with the Sun and Moon. How could it be otherwise? From our human vantage point here on Earth, they are the largest celestial bodies.

In Greek mythology, the sun was personified as Helios. Helios was imagined as a handsome god crowned with a shining aureole of the sun. Every day he drove his chariot across the sky. And Selene was the goddess of the moon. She was important enough to the ancient Greeks to inspire a Homeric Hymn. The Hymn to Selene describes the beauty and power of this moon goddess:

"Muses, sweet-speaking daughters of Zeus Kronides and mistresses of song, sing next of long-winged Moon! From her immortal head a heaven-sent glow envelops the earth and great beauty arises under its radiance. From her golden crown the dim air is made to glitter as her rays turn night to noon, whenever bright Selene, having bathed her beautiful skin in the Ocean, put on her shining raiment and harnessed her proud-necked and glittering steeds, swiftly drives them on as their manes play with the evening, dividing the months. Her great orbit is full and as she waxes a most brilliant light appears in the sky. Thus to mortals she is a sign and a token." ³

Ah Homer! How beautiful his imagery! But today we know better. Right? We know that celestial bodies aren't really gods and goddesses. Nor are they places where gods live, hurling thunder bolts down on our world. And we certainly know that the Earth is not the center of the Universe. It's just one small planet circling one medium-sized sun. And we know, through the wonders of the Hubble Space Telescope, that our sun is just one among a trillion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And that our galaxy is just one among an estimated 50 billion in the Universe.

According to the more hard-nosed realists, the grand forces of the Universe don't seem to care one way or another what happens to mere humans here on Earth. We have fallen from our special place as the center of divine attention in that old Universal scheme. It can be pretty humbling stuff... this modern science.

Yet does science destroy our sense of awe as we gaze up at the night sky? I think not. In fact, as we become aware of the vastness of space and time, it just shifts our perspective. We stand more in awe of the greatness of creation, enlarged by it, not diminished. And we are still unique in the Universe...as far as we know. We are the part of creation which stands in awe and which acknowledges the Creator. We are, in short, spiritual beings.

The Unitarian Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay "Nature":

"Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball - I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me - I am part or particle of God."⁴

Chet Raymo is the spiritual descendent of the Transcendentalists and other mystics. His main point in Skeptics and True Believers is that, despite our modern understanding of nature and the universe, we can still be moved by a deep sense of awe and wonder. Raymo wrote about his experience viewing the Hyakutake Comet:

"Best of all was the evening of April 3, when we forsook the observatory for a broad dark field where we watched the Moon rise in full eclipse, a spooky pink pearl. The comet was in the northwest, showing a degree or two of tail. Venus had joined the Pleiades, a blazing beacon. Meteors streaked the firmament. I was with a group of young people, students at the college. I was impressed by their reverence, wonder, worship even-and especially by their intense desire to know."⁵

He concludes:

"As we stood in the dark field watching Comet Hyakutake, we were not the first who had watched a comet. But we were different. We were post-Copernican, for one thing, and post-Darwinian. We knew the comet was not meant for us. It was not a portent. It followed a preordained ellipse-mathematical, Newtonian. ... We are not playthings of the gods, comet-warned and fearful; we are the comet's offspring, volatile compounds made animate, made conscious. We watched the Moon rise in Earth's shadow, Venus in the Pleiades, Hyakutake dipping westward. The universe took form in our minds, a snowstorm of galaxies. [And despite giving up the ancient dream of personal immortality,] Our knowledge is immortal, a growing thing, the mark of our divinity-in our knowledge we will live forever." ⁶

I agree with Chet Raymo. We are unique. We are the part of creation which stands in awe and acknowledges the Creator. That is worship. We are, in short, spiritual beings living on this small planet Earth revolving around an ordinary sun. Within each of us lies the spark of a Divine consciousness. This is to be celebrated. Amen. Blessed be.

1 Chet Raymo, Skeptics and True Believers (New York: Walker and Company, 1998). Quote from paperback book cover.

3 "Selene in Greek Mythology." (n.d.) Mytholography. Retrieved December 7, 2007, from Loggia.com website: http://www.loggia.com/myth/selene.html.

4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" in Nature/Walking, by Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991) 8.