We had a
talk tonight at the Trinity Forum from the excellently-named Dr. Jennifer
Wiseman, an astrophysicist at NASA and, of particular interest, a confessing,
practicing Christian. Dr. Wiseman is a
smart cookie, and a well-credentialed one: from her Arkansas farm roots, she
found her way through MIT and Harvard, sharing a grading curve with a couple of
future Nobel Prizewinners along the way, and even getting a comet named after
her, which, if you’re an astrophysicist, seems like just the sort of thing to
do. Her topic tonight though was only
half about stars and comets and such; the other half being, how does her
understanding as a scientist of the vastness of the universe in space and time, affect her Christian faith?
Dr. Wiseman
showed us a lot of dazzling pictures from the Hubble telescope, and suggested
throughout that she regarded the scope of the universe as something awesome, a
fertile ground for reverence and worship.
Which is a natural response for a Christian to offer. She also noted the range of other responses
people have had, including the very opposite sort of responses from the Carl Sagan
crowd, which sees our speck-o-dust status as a refutation of any human-centric
religion. To my mind the hardest question was this: How do you still believe in the personal nature of, and personal
relationship with, God in the face of such vastness? When the universe was smaller this was easier
to accept. With a sizable, but not
infinite, earth plumb at the center of the cosmos, surrounded by concentric
layers of dome, all packaged within a timespan of thousands, not millions—never
mind billions—of years, it seems easier to envision an omnipotent God caring
about each one of us. But open up the
aperture of time and space to incomprehensible proportions, move from the Grand Canyon up to galaxy clusters, and our smallness,
or fleetingness, seems to curdle healthy humility into a despairing
meaninglessness.
That was my
thought as I walked toward the metro station afterward, until I was interrupted
by a phone call. It was a friend with
whom I’d been playing phone tag for the past month, and who had news about a
new job she’d started this week after a long search, a position as a campus
minister at one of the local universities.
Initially, she’d told them she wasn’t interested, then she agreed to
interview, thinking she could use an offer as leverage for the entirely
different sort of job she really wanted.
Then she got two offers: the ministry job and the job she really
wanted. Easy decision, right?
But a funny
thing happened: the underdog kept sticking in her mind. She prayed about it, thought about it,
imagined about it, and in the end decided that she felt called to take the
ministry job. So she turned down the job
she thought she wanted, and instead signed up for an adventure she never
expected.
It made
perfect sense to me. And the whiff of
the lived experience of relationship with a God, a wind-blowing Spirit, was a
strange but instructive counterpoint to my cosmic ennui. It was such a small moment, in one life (now two lives), and so full of splendor, splendor enough to rival the supernovas and colliding galaxies.
