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The Two Books of God. Day 12.

St. Francis of Assisi attempted a new perspective on Creation centuries ago. Here are some verses of his Canticle of the Creatures, written in 1224:

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord! All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing. To you, alone, Most High, do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which you give your creatures sustenance.

What kind of song would St. Francis write today?


Read the entire song here.

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The Two Books of God. Day 11.

The Hubble Space Telescope. Our six-day zoom-out tour of the heavens is complete. I hope you enjoyed it, but why does it matter? It matters because our perspective is changing. For most of human history we’ve been looking at the sky with eyes designed for hunting game and gathering plants. We were unable to appreciate the wonders of the Universe because we couldn’t see them.

Then everything changed. Using God’s gift of reason, we created new eyes that can see the faintest light and make far things appear near. They’re called telescopes, and with their help we looked at the universe and saw so much more than we did before. With better sight came new perspectives. How will these new perspectives change our understanding of God?

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The Two Books of God. Day 10.

Wonder F. The Hubble Deep Field. In 1996 astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at the sky and opened the shutter. I let the writers at Astronomy Picture of the Day tell the story:

“Galaxies like colorful pieces of candy fill the Hubble Deep Field – one of humanity’s most distant optical views of the Universe. The dimmest…are very distant galaxies and represent what the Universe looked like in the extreme past, perhaps less than one billion years after the Big Bang. To make the Deep Field image, astronomers selected an uncluttered area of the sky and…pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a single spot for 10 days accumulating and combining many separate exposures.”

I experience vertigo as I look at this image, and alternate between wonder and terror as I contemplate it. Whatever plan God has for the Universe, surely it involves more than just planet Earth and its inhabitants.

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The Two Books of God. Day 9.

Wonder E. The Andromeda Galaxy. This is the galaxy closest to our own – though close is a relative term. The light that made this image left Andromeda 2.5 million years ago, back when the early ancestors of humans were living in Africa.

The Andromeda Galaxy holds a special significance for me. One summer, when I was twelve years old, I was at church camp. It was late at night. We were all in bed, sleeping soundly. For no apparent reason, our cabin counselor woke us up and led us outside. He pointed to an oval patch of light in the eastern sky. “Do you know what that is?” he asked. We shook our heads. “That’s the Andromeda galaxy.” I was overwhelmed with awe, and at that moment began to believe in God. I am grateful for that camp counselor, who cared enough to awaken a young boy to wonder.

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The Two Books of God. Day 8.

Wonder D. M56. This star cluster is Messier Object 56. (Messier was the astronomer who discovered it.) M56 is a globular cluster, a ball of ancient stars that lies outside our galaxy. Globular clusters were often mistaken for comets before the era of telescopes, because they look like fuzzy balls of light to the naked eye. But they are not comets; they are tiny satellite galaxies that orbit our own.

There are over 150 of these globular clusters, arranged in a halo around the Milky Way. They are 10 billion years old, more than twice as old as Earth. But without powerful telescopes and the insights of astronomers, they would only be hazy patches of light, rather than the glorious fireworks display shown this image. What other glories of God are awaiting discovery in the unturned pages of the Book of Science?

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The Two Books of God. Day 7.

Wonder C. The Tarantula Nebula. This nebula — a cloud of cosmic gas lit by nearby stars — lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits our own. Its protean folds of gas give birth to hot blue stars at a prodigious rate. The glowing center is not a single star, but hundreds. The nebula itself is immense. If it were located nearby — about where the nebula in the Orion Constellation is located — it would span half the sky.

What is your response to this gargantuan beauty?

  1. Awe
  2. Overwhelm
  3. Joy
  4. Puzzlement
  5. (Your reaction goes here)
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The Two Books of God. Day 6.

Wonder B. Saturn. This is Saturn seen from the Cassini spacecraft. The sun is behind the planet, making the rings glow and casting the planet’s face in shadow. In the upper left, just above the bright rings, you can see a pale dot. That’s Earth. It’s a powerful image, almost overwhelming in intensity. How could this possibly exist? And yet it does.

In our last town, I volunteered at the local observatory helping with tours. Whenever I showed Saturn through my telescope, schoolchildren would either say, “Wow!” or “That’s fake!” Saturn didn’t look quite as powerful as this image, of course, but just the glimpse of Saturn’s rings was enough to make believers or skeptics of everyone. No one reacts indifferently to God’s wonders.

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The Two Books of God. Day 5.

Wonder A. Earthrise. This photo shows the earth – a blue swirl of water and cloud – rising over the moon’s surface. It was taken on Christmas Eve 1968 by the Apollo 8 astronauts. That evening, the astronauts read the Book of Genesis, Chapter 1 – the Creation Story – as they orbited the moon. Their reading stands in history as an attempt to relate the Bible to the universe we know today.

Consider this picture of our planet – a fragile ball floating in the blackness of space. This planet is where we are born. It is our home. It is where our families are raised, and where we do our work and live out our lives. How will we take care of this beautiful home we call Earth?

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The Two Books of God. Day 4.

And this is how we see the world today. The sun is now the center of the solar system and the planets orbit around it. The earth is the third planet from the sun, at just the right distance for liquid water to exist, which allowed life to develop.

It took humankind thousands of years of scientific investigation to come to the point where an artist could depict the solar system correctly. It’s not what we expected. We are not the center of the universe. There are other worlds that turn around our sun. And yet we are here to witness this new reality. And this is only the beginning of the wonders.

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The Two Books of God. Day 3.

The Greeks provide a major update to the Biblical model. The earth is still the center of the universe, but it’s round rather than flat. The sun and planets now orbit around it. Beyond them lie the stars of the zodiac and the dome of heaven.

This is still a biblical picture, but it’s more recognizable. The earth is round, as we know it is. During airplane trips you can see the curvature of the horizon. And yet the earth does feel like the center of the universe. I don’t think this is hubris. The sun and stars appear to rise and set around us, while the earth seems stationary. But this earth centered model is not accurate either. There’s so much more.