We are stardust...in the highest exalted way.

I shared this with the students on the Nature Retreat last month, and with the Campus Ministry staff last week, but I can only hope they don’t hold it against me for doing the same thing again. I keep coming back to it in my own prayer life, and even though it’s just a picture, it continues to feed my theological and spiritual imagination. Below is a picture of what is called the “Hubble Extreme Deep Field”; it was taken by pointing the Hubble Telescope at a single, tiny spot in what looked like a nondescript section of space and leaving it to collect light for weeks on end.

Imagine holding a grain of rice at arms’ length – that’s about how much of the night sky this image represents – and then remember that this tiny area was chosen precisely because it looked uninteresting. That is, just about any grain of rice-sized segment of space would look more or less like this. There are on the order of 5,500 galaxies (not stars – GALAXIES) visible in this tiny little slice of the night sky, some as far away as 13 billion light years – nearly to the absolute origin of the cosmos.

Here’s a question for you: looking at this image, imagining the scope and scale of the cosmos that it represents, do you find yourself feeling small, or feeling big? It is easy to feel small – the universe has been around a very long time, I am infinitesimally small in comparison to the scale of the cosmos, and when I die, I don’t imagine that the universe will much notice. But what if you looked at this amazing photo, imagined the sweep of the cosmos, and felt big? Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson notes that the atoms in our bodies can be traced to the hearts of stars that forged light elements into heavy elements and then went supernova at the end of their life cycles, exploding and scattering their “enriched guts” (as he puts it) across the cosmos. In a very real way, then, we are stardust - we are a part of the tremendous and magnificent unfolding of the cosmos, we are connected to one another and everything around us, we are caught up in a grand story in which the universe becomes conscious of itself in us.

What does any of this have to do with a Campus Ministry blog? I love my job, but the one part of this work that I hate is encountering wonderful students who don't feel comfortable around Campus Ministry because they expect it to be only for the Catholic students at SLU. On the other hand, my FAVORITE part of the job is walking with students (and staff! and faculty!), wherever they are in their spiritual journeys, as they attempt to wrestle with the big questions of what it means to be fully alive, what touches their hearts, what breaks their hearts.

Much has been made of the (often) acrimonious relationship between religion and science, and while I have neither the space nor the expertise to lay out a theology of that relationship, let me simply say that the passion for the tremendous and fascinating mystery that animates the theological enterprise seems alive and well among people like Dr. Tyson, who calls himself an agnostic but uses religious language like someone who is on a deep spiritual journey. This should not surprise anyone - the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner spoke of all people being inherently oriented toward a horizon of mystery (he calls it the supernatural existential) - but it is easy to forget that members of organized religions don't have a monopoly on spirituality. Wherever we are in our relationships to organized religions - theist, atheist, nontheist, posttheist, what have you - AWE remains the appropriate response to the wondrousness of the universe around us, in us, and between us and our fellow human beings, and there is incredible untapped conversation and community and shared work for dignity and peace to be opened up in the sharing of that sense of wonder.

Patrick Cousins
Campus Ministry