It’s in the Stars

For generations unnumbered, human beings have searched the night sky for meaning. Our ancestors discerned the forms of animals, heroes and gods in clusters of stars. Some went even further, imagining that the alignment of stars and planets on babies’ birthdays somehow hinted at what their lives would be like. On the zodiac, I was born under Leo the Lion.  As a Leo, I was destined to have a magnetic personality and to be charismatic and vivacious.  Hmm. Well, perhaps I wasn’t born in August after all.

But it was indeed the movement and alignment of a star that caused the magi to journey to Judea. Whether or not they were priests of Persia’s ancient Zoroastrian religion, as some suspect, it seems clear they were also astrologers. Matthew’s account of the star moving, then hovering over Bethlehem is likely his astronomically-naive account of an astrological reading. This is not to say, of course, that the Bible puts any stock in astrology: Matthew seems to understand the star’s behavior as a miracle rather than celestial science.

Humanity’s ancient and enduring fascination with the starry heavens could soon be endangered, though. The culprit: light pollution. Astronomers have long had to cope with encroaching artificial light from streetlights, car headlights and advertising signs. They’ve learned to locate observatories on barren mountaintops in remote locations, far from the nighttime glow of urban and suburban sprawl.

If you hike into the mountains of Colorado you’ll see just how bright the stars actually are.  On a cloudless night you can walk around at 3 a.m. without a flashlight and clearly see the pathway in front of you. Add a full moon to the picture, and the way before you is even clearer.

There are actually dark-sky preserves at various remote locations around the world, even in the United States. Some of the great national parks in the West bear this designation including parts of Grand Canyon, Death Valley and Joshua Tree. For urban people — perpetually dazzled by the glare of streetlights and headlights — traveling to one of these starlit locations is a revelation.

But now, even the most remote telescopes may have difficulty scanning the heavens, and dark-sky preserves could become a thing of the past. The problem is still artificial light: but now the light is coming from a different place: the sky itself.

The SpaceX Company has started launching not just single satellites into orbit, but great orbiting arrays. Last summer, the company launched an array of sixty 500-pound satellites into orbit. Eventually it plans to place thousands of these mini-satellites into the night sky. The plan is to bounce radio signals off them to improve Internet access here on Earth.

But radio signals are not the only thing that bounces off these satellites. Each of them is powered by solar panels, and these panels not only collect sunlight for their photovoltaic cells: they also reflect some of that light back to Earth.

Amateur stargazers can already glimpse these new workhorses of the Internet, trudging like a pack train across the night sky, right in front of familiar constellations. The SpaceX people have gone so far as to describe their handiwork as a new constellation. They call it Starlink.

Starlink satellites are tiny, of course, compared to the size of real stars — many of which are larger than our own sun. But they’re a lot closer. A 500-pound satellite in low Earth orbit can appear brighter than a gas giant thousands of light years away.

Astronomers and amateur stargazers are not amused. They’re rallying to oppose these new plans.

For a long time, astronomers have had to discard a fair number of photos taken through their telescopes, because a traditional satellite or even the International Space Station entered the frame, thus rendering the photo useless. Now, though, as hundreds — and, soon, thousands — of mini-satellites show up in their field of view, they’re afraid it may become impossible to snap a photo of the natural sky. They’ll no longer be able to see the real stars they’re looking for, because so many artificial ones get in the way.

Elon Musk has defended his company’s plans as being “for the greater good” — supplying Internet access all over the world — but some astronomers are asking, “Whose greater good?”

“Who has the right to decide that?” asks Dr. Tyler Nordgren, one of the astronomers questioning the SpaceX plans. The night sky has the power to make people feel awe, he points out: “A star-filled night sky reminds us that we are part of a much larger whole, that we are one person in a world of people surrounded by the vast depths of the visible universe.”

It’s the feeling experienced by the magi of old: “Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

We know little about the Bethlehem star — what sort of astronomical configuration, exactly, may have excited the attention of those learned Persian stargazers — although, of course, there are many fascinating theories. But we don’t need to understand the science behind the phenomenon, though, to grasp the luminous feeling of awe that spills over to our earthly spirits as we contemplate the heavens.

We’ve just come out of a Christmas season filled with glowing distractions of all kinds: all the trappings of the secular holiday we know so well. First there were jingle bells, then juggled bills. These lesser constellations in the night sky of our faith are not bad things, in and of themselves, but we all know they have the potential to turn our gaze away from things that truly matter.

When the magi gazed up into the heavens, plotting their star-charts, the backdrop to the Bethlehem star was every bit as dark as the sky still is above the Grand Canyon or Death Valley. Yet, what if it had been otherwise? What if they’d had to contend with light pollution? What if a string of flashing satellites had commanded their attention instead?

So many of the distractions of the secular holiday are like those orbiting satellites — light pollution obscuring the True Light, the Light of the World. These distractions are cheap, tawdry ornaments encroaching on a glittering Christmas tree filled with family heirlooms. We do well to keep our field of view unobstructed.

Way back in 1959, the great Jewish scholar, Abraham Joshua Heschel, had a foreboding of what was to come. In his book, Between God and Man, he warns: “The awareness of the grandeur and the sublime is all but gone. … We teach our children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. The sense for the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the soul is now a rare gift. Yet without it, the world becomes flat and the soul a vacuum. Here is where the Biblical view of reality must serve as our guide.”

To remain spiritually healthy, we must pay close attention to what we’re seeing. We must preserve our access to the visions that inspire awe in our hearts.

The Fault in Our Stars is the title of a 2004 film about a couple of teenage cancer survivors pursuing life and love. Hazel, one of the pair, refers to Augustus (or Gus) as her “star-crossed lover.” It’s a famous phrase from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, of course (the Bard of Avon, like many others of his era, was a fan of astrology). The idea is that the lovers’ tragic fate was somehow written in the stars.

In a memorable scene from the film, Gus confesses to Hazel: “I am in love with you. And I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed. And that one day all our labor will be returned to dust. And I know that the sun will swallow the only earth we will ever have. And I am in love with you.”

We’d like to think the love we share with others on this earth is just as enduring, but considering our lot realistically, we know it to be otherwise. Take a walk through an old graveyard — one with epitaphs on the stones — and you’ll see expressions of love from people who haven’t breathed this earthly air for decades, even centuries. Their sentiments, carved in stone, live on, even though their love itself has long since been swallowed up by — and, we trust, has found perfection in — the greater and eternal love of God.

As fascinating as the biblical account of the Bethlehem star is, and as awe-inspiring as are the constellations above a dark-sky preserve, it’s not the stars we seek. The magi weren’t seeking the stars, either, at least not ultimately. They valued their special star merely as a pointer to the child born King of the Jews.

There’s a fault in our stars — and not just in that blinking sky-train of satellites that is the Starlink array. The fault in our stars is whatever turns our attention from the True Star, the True North Star — he who is the source of everything good in our lives: Jesus Christ.

Let us seek him above all others – at this Epiphany, and in this new year.