Walk with an Atheist

Each year around graduation, I slide into a funk.  While I’m excited with students’ accomplishments launching journeys into their dreams, I’m saddened to let go, to give an embrace goodbye wrapped with best wishes into the future.  With good intentions, we vow to grab a lunch and visit over breaks, and many do, but I know with time the reality is … the busy-ness of our careers and families will distance us.   At this time of year, speakers elevated on stages around the world ask audiences packed with millions to reflect upon who made a difference in their lives.  A second question naturally follows.  What significant contribution are you going to make during your life?

Teetering adrift among a navy blue ocean of mortarboards, I felt a surge of insignificance among the colossal number of graduates not only at Queeny Park, but around the globe!

Thankfully, the conclusion of each school year invites me on a long, reflective stroll.  Faces flash with memories of various events from the previous seasons.  Quickly, they entangle memories of previous years.  Chuckles intermittently burst from the silent path.  Occasionally, a tear forms from a missed opportunity or grace unused.  This year, Carl Sagan, an esteemed astronomer and self-proclaimed atheist joined me.  I’ve often discovered wisdom in Carl’s words.  He’s failed to convince me there is no Creator or Prime Mover.  Though an articulate critic of religious hypocrisy and brutality, Carl was a compassionate advocate for peace.  Upon this night, I recalled his request of NASA and Voyager 1.

Voyager 1, a space probe launched September 5, 1977, flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and the moons of Pluto before crossing the heliopause leaving our solar system and entering interstellar space.  Serendipitously, astronomers continue to receive signal information from the Voyager 1 probe, today.  When Sagan initially requested that engineers turn Voyager’s cameras back toward earth to take pictures of its trail, NASA refused.  Sagan persisted.  NASA eventually obliged, capturing the classic “blue dot” images from deep space.

Carl’s words echoed back to life.  “Consider again that dot.  That’s here.  That’s home.  That’s us.  On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religious, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”  

I imagine the Creator smiling in agreement with the astronomer encapsulating how the pale blue dot “underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish it.”  At first glance, earth appears inconsequential smaller than a speck of dust in the universe.  For me, Carl’s words invited two perspectives on just how significant people are.   For me at graduation, I engaged his mindset … Sagan’s intended picture to emphasize man’s vulnerability and fragile existence… alone. 

However, during my walk, I shook that perspective.  In terms of significant players in the lives of the graduates, I doubt many graduates, parents, and guests were thinking of famous musicians, politicians, cinema stars, and professional athletes.  Most honored parents, friends, teachers, coaches, mentors, spouses, siblings and hopefully our Lord … and therein lies tremendous significance … relationships nurtured in love, compassion, hope, mystery, and trust giving essence to life! 

“The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant’s search for fine pearls.  When he found one really valuable, he went back and put up for sale all that he had and bought it.”  Mt 13: 45-46   Jesus is the merchant.  He purchased … with the entirety of his life’s actions and death … the pearl of the universe, the same pearl Carl also discovered, but failed to recognize the gentle hands of our Lord cradling it.

In gratitude, I reminded Carl before we parted for the evening.  Perhaps, God’s grace nudged the hands in convincing scientists to turn the Voyager around to snap some pictures of the “mustard seed” of the universe.  From that seed, the earth, grows the Kingdom planted and nurtured by the Father, as Carl says, in a sunbeam.  Despite all the ugliness associated with man, with religion … there is also hope, goodness, significance even in the smallest, simplest acts rippling through our universe.   The light shines on in the darkness, a darkness that did not overcome it.  John 1:5