September 9, 2009

The Sombrero Galaxy

2009 1525 page23 capEEDING MONEY IN ORDER TO TRAVEL TO EUROPE THE SUMMER AFTER graduation, I parked cars at hotels and restaurants along Miami Beach during my senior year of high school. For a few months I worked at the Newport Beach Hotel, still on Collins Avenue and 167th Street.
 
Up the block was a small business that gave helicopter tours. One sweltering afternoon, as I was parking a car, the helicopter landed at a bad angle and lopped off a man’s head. The accident itself was out of my line of sight, but the sirens, the flashing lights, the police cars filled my ears and eyes for hours.
 
The next day before work I walked by the place. The tour office was closed, the chopper gone. I saw no blood, nothing to indicate the beheading. Instead, I watched mothers pushing babies in strollers; I saw kids skateboarding along the sidewalk; I saw folk meandering about as on any Florida day; I saw a convertible go by, leaving a trail of music mixed with exhaust fumes and laughter.
 
2009 1525 page23Time and space were so out of kilter: a person died, right here—and a whole universe, at least the one that existed in his mind, died with him. Yet within a day of where it happened, it was as if it had never occurred!
 
Not long after, I was behind the Newport Beach Hotel at night, staring at the stars over the ocean. My thoughts were already bruised, not so much by the man’s death but by how quickly it seemed erased from reality. Now, looking at the stars, thinking of their vast distances, which made earth feel so small, I was overwhelmed by my own meaninglessness. How could I, so miniscule in contrast to the cosmos, mean anything—especially when I could die and the next day the spot where I expired no longer revealed my death? Time (the little I had) and space (the little I took), when added together, made me feel less than zero.
 
My immediate reaction was dread. It’s not easy for a human, a 17-year-old, to admit that you, your life, your thoughts, your everything, really, mean nothing. Right after that moment of terror, though, a wave of calmness rose up from my bones and filled me with ease: Just chill out, party hard, and don’t take life too seriously. How could what’s meaningless be serious, anyway?

Obviously, that philosophy of life didn’t work for me, at least not in the long run. (If it did, I wouldn’t be where I am today.) But who, still, can’t feel overwhelmed by the vastness of time and space in contrast to our tiny and fleeting existence within them?
 
The screensaver on my computer is a shot of the Sombrero Galaxy taken from the Hubble telescope. The first time I looked at it I almost burst into tears. The astonishing beauty is one thing, but the size, the distance, the vastness, the scope, the grandeur of it all in contrast to me, to earth, to our solar system seemed incomprehensible. How unfair to be confronted with a reality we can’t grasp, a reality that’s dangled before us, teasing and mocking our triviality, size, and ignorance. Who among us can begin to fathom the knowledge, the power, the reasoning, the truths, and the purposes that went into the Sombrero Galaxy, which is just one among billions of others? Here we are, so small and so isolated, a speck of the creation with so much in our view but so infinitely beyond our grasp.
 
The only thing that can save us from this absurdity is the gospel, the hope of redemption, the promise that our lives are of infinite value, and that one day everything will be resolved, made right, and explained by God. Without Him, and all that He has offered us, what do we have but heads chopped off down here while glittering galaxies parade at fantastic speeds through the cosmos above, mocking us, teasing us, and leaving us stranded in our trinket of space and speck of time? 
 
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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.
     
 

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