Weaving Constellations
Weaving Constellations
Chris Carter
Intimate Stars
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. My first memory is a moment when distant stars drew near to rock me in their light arms until dark gave way to day.
Up above the world so high like a diamond in the sky. That night was so deep, and my infant body was so vulnerable and fragile. Without my mother’s arms gently swaddling me against the night and her voice singing me a sweet lullaby, I would have been lost to the dark.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Though the burning bodies of the heavens are fearful and giant, they found me as a baby boy wrapped in my mother’s love, and they kissed me goodnight, a reminder that the night can indeed be good.
Later years would introduce me to the distance and grandeur of the heavens, but I first met the stars in stories. They were bards and playmates who got down on their knees to fascinate my boyish wonder. In them I encountered a universe woven together.
Weaving Constellations
When I was in 7th grade, my school whisked us to the woods for a week of science camp. One night after a day of talks on chemicals, deciduous trees, and animal droppings, we hiked to a clearing in the woods. As I lay down on the soft earth, I looked up to a heavenly cathedral spangled with a million lights. The army of twinkling dots overwhelmed me with their sheer numbers. The stars I saw danced on the outer rim of my eyesight, yet they were the closest celestial bodies I could watch unaided. Even these were the outliers of a more expansive galaxy nestled among billions of other galaxies.
Todd, our docent, stopped us from trying to contain the mass in our visual field. Instead, he pointed out clusters and traced the shapes of animals and people. He recounted the seven sister stars of the Pleiades who “glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid” (Alfred Lord Tennyson). Then Todd moved to a neighbouring cluster, Orion, and whispered of a fierce hunter able to slay any beast in the forest. Some myths, our storyteller-docent mused, even place Orion in an eternal pursuit of the shimmering Pleiades.
This modern myth-teller touched a nerve of wonder in my young heart. When Todd told us stories, he took the imperceptible stars and weaved them into constellations, making heaven a little more human. His words made me want to reach my hand to the celestial wanderers and bring one home to regale me with the tales of its revolutions. Yet my arm could only extend so far, and a deep dark separated me from the stars.
“Seek His Face Always”
From parents to preachers, I heard that I should know God. “Look to the Lord and his strength,” they implored me. “Seek his face always” (Psalm 105:4). But like the vast array of stars bombarding my vision at science camp, I couldn’t gather the vastness of Him into a visage I could see. Job, a man who asked the same questions and shivered with the same wonder, once said that God “is the Maker of the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south.” He fashioned every star set in the galaxies. He lit the burning billions in His furnace. God “performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted.” Who was this Creator mighty enough to hammer out the endless sky? “When he passes me, I cannot see him; when he goes by, I cannot perceive him” (Job 9:9-11). I cannot see him, yet I prayed for a story that would weave God into a constellation I could see and savor. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.
Between Two Infinities
Through science, and science camp, I started to learn what it meant to know God. In chemistry, my teachers talked of molecules and atoms, neutrons and ions, quarks and preons. Each particle was smaller than the last. Scientists search for the elusive constitutive element, yet every new discovery demonstrates itself as a smaller component of a larger whole.
As chemists seek the minute, astronomers gaze at the grand. Advances in telescope technology opened a fine-tuned lens to receive distant light. First we studied our neighboring planets. Then we photographed nearby stars. Someday we’ll meet pictures of other galaxies. With every leap in spatial imaging, we realize how little know and how little we are.
My forays into science humbled me with my limited capacity to grasp both the minute depths of molecules and the titanic magnitude of stars. Blaise Pascal characterized humanity as a pole fixed between these two infinities. No matter how ardently we pursue the perimeter, the edge of our knowledge always expands and slips through our fingers. “Who will follow these marvelous processes?” Pascal queried. “The Author of these wonders understands them. None other can do so.”
When I considered the thoughts of this French philosopher, I was once more a teen recumbent in an open field, trying to understand the stars. With Pascal I groaned, “What is a man in the Infinite?” The only hope of reaching eternity’s edge, he argued, is knowing God. “These extremes meet and reunite by force of distance, and find each other in God, and in God alone.” Again I was back to the advice of parents and preachers: “Seek His face always.” But how could I know Him if He fled in every direction I looked? Where was God? When we try to grasp infinities, Pascal argued, “they escape us, or we them.” This stargazer soon found himself a fugitive.
Fleeing Transcendence
In Luke 15, Jesus told a story of two boys who wished for their inheritance. So, they approached their father and demanded their money. The younger son fled to a far land and squandered his wealth in dissipation. The older brother, however, stayed home and carried on with his work.
I saw myself in the diligent elder sibling. My hands worked whatever field Providence set me to till. The Law is simple, summed up in a list of 613 dos and don’ts; I could strive to love my neighbour better, go to church on Sunday, and eschew cursing. “Put me on the plow,” I told God, “and I’ll reap you a righteous harvest.” But in the speaking and doing, I never looked back at the Lawgiver. Why did He command me to love and to honor my father and my mother? I quickly buried these questions under a mound of pious deeds. Looking up from the ground of my work to the sky of the Lord’s infinity seemed an overwhelming sacrilege. Like Pascal asked, “What is a man in the Infinite?”
“In This Cloud and This Darkness”
Considering God felt like staring at a star so bright and brilliant it blinded me with its light, which I perceived as darkness. I wasn’t the first wayward pilgrim to find himself blinded on the road to the Lord, however. An anonymous 14th-century English mystic anticipated my sightlessness when he wrote, “The first time you [contemplate God], you will find only a darkness, and...a cloud of unknowing.” When I extended an open hand to the stars at science camp, I was greeted by only the black night. The anonymous mystic, however, told me to keep gazing, to keep my hand stretched out, and to stay in this shadowed place of non-understanding. I had to see what I couldn’t see. I had to know God by first not knowing Him.
In my struggle to make peace with unknowing, I often drifted back to that nighttime field at science camp. Todd was a kind storyteller. When my classmates and I looked at the stars, he saw our young eyes growing as wide as the galaxies they observed, and he brought us home with a story. Although he told us to keep looking, he showed us how to look. He weaved the far-flung stars into a tapestry using a thread of myths. Every tale he spun gave the stars names, faces, and lives. Like the wise men of old, Todd pointed me to a star and a story that would lead to a Savior.
Stars and Stories
Young children love stories because they see enchantment in the world. They implicitly believe that our physical space is simultaneously home to a spiritual dimension. Narnia may not be hiding in my wardrobe, but heaven lingers lightly behind true stories. They are a thin place where the barrier between earth and eternity is a curtain instead of a wall. All it takes is a gentle wind to blow it back.
For me, that Spirit gusted in through the open window of stories. As I got older and more skeptical, I needed fairy tales and fantasy to rediscover my primal enchantment. They reawakened that longing to know. Fairy stories, G. K. Chesterton wrote, “say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment we found that they were green.” Constellations tell mythic tales to remind us for one mystical instance that infinity walks our finite plane. Indeed, stories are lighthouses guiding lost sailors through the great cloud of unknowing. They introduce us to the Stranger of infinity.
The Word Made Flesh
As I became older and more aware of how much I didn’t know, I stumbled on a moment of mercy when the stars made sense. The Apostle John started to weave the constellation for me. He opened his gospel with a single Word who lived in Heaven. This great being fashioned worlds and spun creation’s fabric.
At first reading, tremors began to quake my nerves. This holy man was guiding my eyes up from my works to the expanse of eternity. He dared me to walk through the darkness of what I didn’t know. Surely, I retorted, I was just a lost prodigal bumbling on unholy ground. Moreover, where did this apostle find the audacity to claim to know God and to describe Him? Didn’t his own contemporary, Paul, assert that the Lord “lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:16)? Yet John dared to look in God’s face when he wrote, “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us” (John 1:14). The unknowable God, John claimed, became a rather knowable person. He became a specific person in a specific place at a specific time. This Jesus was a common Jew who did common things like eat, sleep, and live. To the everyday person, Jesus is so unremarkable because He’s so everyday.
I heard Christ’s story from pulpits every Sunday. Each hearing, however, elicited a yawn of disinterest. I remember thinking once that Jesus wasn’t exciting like Frodo or Harry Potter; he had never picked up a sword or cast a spell. I knew about Jesus, yet I missed Him completely.
Despite Christ’s quotidian life and my arrogant boredom, He managed to surprise me. He would say odd things like, “Before Abraham was I am” (John 8:58). Did He truly consider himself to be God? And He would do odd things like forgive sins. Did He do what only God can do? When I witnessed this rather usual man doing unusual things, He won my attention.
Slowly Harry and Frodo started to seem like shadows cast by a greater light. Indeed, it was these figures who prepared me to leave the dark cloud of unknowing and to see the light. Jesus never uttered a spell, but He held crowds spellbound with His words. Christ never snuck into Mordor to destroy the Ring, but He did ascend Calvary’s hill to destroy death. Harry saved Hogwarts for a generation, and Frodo secured Middle Earth for another age. Jesus, however, liberated our world for eternity.
The Maker of the Stars
All those years ago when Todd told me tales of the heavens, he made the stars something I could grasp. Slowly the stories of Christ weaved the Infinite God into a constellation I could see and hear and touch. The prophet Amos declared that the One who ignited stars and traversed infinity had a name I could know. “He who made the Pleiades and Orion,” the Old Testament seer wrote, “who turns midnight into dawn and darkens day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land— the Lord is his name” (Amos 5:8).
For me, Jesus was the face of God. When my mom lulled me to sleep with lullabies, Christ was singing with her. When my eyes were drowning in a sea of glittering infinity, Jesus spoke through stories to weave the stars into a constellation I could see. When I wandered through the cloud of unknowing, Christ told me tales that guided me out of the fog. He who was the great morning star got down on his knees, swaddled me in his arms, and sang me into His Kingdom. Because of Jesus, I know God. Twinkle, twinkle, little star…
Chris Carter
Writer & Photographer
Chris lives in Washington, D.C. He is an avid reader, writer and photographer. If you would like to sample more of his work, see his website www.ccarter.me and Instagram
Photography by Zeus Ramirez