Universal peace

Universal peace

Photo by Tim de Groot on Unsplash

Originally published 25 December 1989

For­get for the moment that the actu­al year of Christ’s birth was prob­a­bly some­time between 7 BC, when Augus­tus ordered a cen­sus of Judea, and 4 BC, when Herod died. For­get that the sea­son of birth may have been spring, when shep­herds watched their new­born lambs by night. Let’s focus on the tra­di­tion­al place and time, Beth­le­hem in Galilee, on the night of Decem­ber 24 – 25 in the year 1 BC (as his­to­ri­ans reckon).

A com­put­er and some help­ful soft­ware can recon­struct what the shep­herds saw as they sat with their flocks in the hills above the town.

The night is bright. A wax­ing gib­bous moon stands near the Pleiades in the con­stel­la­tion Tau­rus. Sat­urn is in Gem­i­ni, and Venus is the evening star. As the long night pro­gress­es, the moon moves with span­gled win­ter con­stel­la­tions to its west­ern set­ting sev­er­al hours before sun­rise. As the moon sinks below the hori­zon, Jupiter ris­es in the east with the stars of Vir­go. The sky grows bright. It is the first Christ­mas morning.

I will leave it to oth­ers to add the angels to this celes­tial scene, but their pur­port­ed mes­sage is real enough to any­one who con­tem­plates the night sky: Peace on Earth, good will to men.

Christ­mas and Chanukah are cel­e­bra­tions of light, root­ed in the nat­ur­al sym­bol­ism of the sol­sti­tial sun that now begins its jour­ney back into the north­ern sky, tak­ing us out of win­ter darkness.

Fol­low back in time the thread that is sci­ence and the thread that is reli­gion and soon­er or lat­er they will come togeth­er in the night sky. The stars evoke a sense of won­der that can­not fail to excite the imag­i­na­tion. To recap­ture that prim­i­tive sense of won­der, let’s look at night from anoth­er place.

Drawing of night sky view from a planet near Alpha Centauri

In the draw­ing, I have illus­trat­ed the night sky as it would appear from a plan­et in the star sys­tem Alpha Cen­tau­ri. So that the view will not go unno­ticed, I have placed Cen­tau­ri­an observ­er at the entrance of her shel­ter. Let us imag­ine that evo­lu­tion has brought our lit­tle E.T. to the thresh­old of reflec­tive intel­li­gence — to the point our human ances­tors reached, say, 40,000 years ago, at the dawn of sci­ence and religion.

Both Cen­tau­ri­an suns have set, the yel­low sun and the orange sun. The night is dark and ablaze with stars. The Milky Way drapes across the sky like a sash of pale light. The W‑shaped group of five stars at the low­er right of our view is the con­stel­la­tion known on Earth as Cas­siopeia. At the upper left is the beau­ti­ful yel­low star earth­lings call Capella.

Between Cas­siopeia and Capel­la, almost cen­tered in the view from the mouth of the cave, is anoth­er yel­low star, almost the twin of Capel­la, a star that has nev­er been seen in the night­time sky of Earth. It is the Earth­’s day­time star. It is the sun.

At the dis­tance of Alpha Cen­tau­ri — 4.3 light-years — the sun is just one more night­time spark of light. It is not even the bright­est star in the Cen­tau­ri­an night. It floats in the stream of the Milky Way, one of hun­dreds of bil­lions of stars in that spi­ral galaxy. The plan­et Earth has shrunk to invis­i­bil­i­ty, an imper­cep­ti­ble dot of light absorbed in the sun’s greater glare. Per­haps our extrater­res­tri­al won­ders if out there in the immen­si­ty of space there are oth­er intel­li­gences like her own. Per­haps she won­ders if she alone imbues the uni­verse with con­scious­ness and life.

No moment on any plan­et any­where in the uni­verse can be more spe­cial than the moment of first life. On Earth that spe­cial moment hap­pened near­ly 4 bil­lion years ago, not long after the for­ma­tion of the plan­et itself. Per­haps life hap­pened here as a freak acci­dent, a once-in-a-uni­verse chance arrange­ment of organ­ic mol­e­cules, the roll of a die with a thou­sand bil­lion faces. If that is so, then there is no Cen­tau­ri­an at the mouth of a cave near that oth­er star and we are alone in the immen­si­ty of the galaxy.

Or maybe life is inevitable. Maybe it is built into the very stuff of nature, singing at the heart of mat­ter as a poten­tial wait­ing to be real­ized, wait­ing for the right place and right time to spring into exis­tence. Then, some­where near anoth­er star, anoth­er crea­ture watch­es by night and won­ders. Anoth­er crea­ture looks into the night and hears the mes­sage invari­ably evoked by the deep and span­gled dark­ness: Peace, good will.

Share this Musing: