“Like sands through the hourglass, so these are the days of our lives.” Those iconic words have introduced a soap opera for what seems like eons, but it’s only been around for 55 years, which happens to be long enough in hourglass hours and days of so many lives that mattered enough to maintain their ratings.
Let me invite us all to turn off the television, unplug it, and step outdoors under the canopy of late summer stars and their sister planets. Here we might use our rusty imaginations to think about the days and nights of our own lives. Better yet, let’s travel back in time to before the hourglass or sundial were ever invented. But why stop there? Let’s go back to the time before there was time. Imagine our shared experiences with those ancient civilizations who realized that there was sunrise and sunset, day and night. No hours yet. They also noticed that the moon in the sky moved in predictable patterns every 30 days or so. People measured longer periods of time in so many “moons”. They also realized that every 365 days or so, the sun returned to its original position for its rising and setting at places like Stonehenge.
Had we been around in those ancient nights, our reckoning of the stars in the skies would have been the same as everyone else’s. They appeared to move across the dome of the evening sky from the east to the west. They also kept pace with the 365 nights that made up a year back then. Then science marched in one day and claimed a new way of seeing things which would move to a whole new way of believing those things. If such seeing is indeed believing, you’d have to give up your stars in the celestial dome. Try to fathom that the stars were not the ones that were moving, and “the lucky ol’ sun was not rolling around heaven all day”. What seemed so naturally obvious to the eye of the beholder, was not the case at all.
Writer Lulu Miller describes it like this: “For some, the letting go of the stars was horrifying. It made them feel too small, too pointless, too out of control. They would not believe it. They shot the messengers. When Copernicus gave up the stars, he was condemned as a heretic. When Giordano Bruno gave up the stars, he was burned at the stake… When you give up the stars you get a universe.” [Why Fish Don’t Exist]
Ever since those wondrous nights of yore, we have had to reimagine our world view and orient our mindset from being the only show in town and the apple of God’s eye to realize we live on a tiny blue speck in some backwash of a vast cosmos. It’s still hard for some of us, who prefer being more down to earth, to give up our stars floating miraculously across our overhead heavens. In church, for example, folk are still talking about the “creator of heaven and earth”, “…descended into hell…ascended into heaven.” Or those words in the prayer: “…thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Holy writ and revered texts from the world’s religions reflect that old version of a three-tiered worldview fit for some museum of antiquity before the big bang exploded into a universe that is beyond the scope of our wildest imagination. Enough to put us all in orbits for the rest of our livelong days and nights.