In the age of continual exposure to news of the world, we are relentlessly surrounded by death. Each morning, we wake up to mounting numbers of innocent lives that ended while we slept. Each time we go online, we witness horrific scenes through pictures and videos that capture death in intimate and invasive ways. Christian leaders have felt pressured to speak out, act decisively, and become experts of politics and histories overnight against a backdrop of urgent and persistent life-ending destruction. How, then, can we responsibly ask ourselves and others to pause and acknowledge the loss of even more people for All Saints’ Day?
An answer may be in the stars.
A few years ago, the newest NASA James Webb Space Telescope images unveiled of outer space were detailed and breathtaking. Glowing streaks of hot, flaming fireballs signaling stars being born into existence. Radiant beams of light shining through iridescent “cosmic cliffs” dusted with sparkling, jeweled stars of all shapes and sizes. Colorful galaxies grouped into clusters like marbles. These images seem too fantastic and magnificent to be real.
One particular image of the Carina Nebula caught my attention. As I lingered on it, my eyes moving slowly, I noticed that there were no repeated patterns, colors or shapes. Each pixel was unique, bursting with a different shade of blue or orange, with star twinkles of different sizes. According to NASA, Carina is “a dynamic area of the sky with bursts of star formation occurring alongside star death.”
I reflected on star formation and star death existing alongside each other, moving in vastly different directions but in the same starfield and same cosmic cliffs.
In Genesis 15, God uses stars as a metaphor in promising Abraham multiple offspring and generations to come. The wise men, astronomers in their own right, used the stars as a guide to find a humble stable housing a newborn Jesus and his parents on the run.
When we look up at the stars at night, we wonder and dream about the future. We wish upon them as they shoot across the sky. Their sprawl reminds us of how small we are in God’s bigger picture, how much has gone before us, and how much is yet to come.
Alongside the formation of our spiritual lives, looking at the stars can also remind us of how closely our lives are accompanied by, and intertwined with, death. Those who departed earth before us — some know them as the “saints triumphant” — continue to speak to us from beyond death. Their presence guides and supports us; life shares space with death.
When the NASA telescope images were released in 2022, our company, Kinship Commons, created and offered a worship experience for Christian leaders slowly emerging from the pandemic lockdown. They were in the wake of leading communities of people affected by COVID-19, dealing with dwindling numbers in churches and perhaps even adjusting to dying churches. We wanted to offer the weary a time to rest in the spaciousness of God’s presence. We did not want to gloss over their challenges in the midst of death, but we desired God’s presence to be palpable and profoundly known.
We set up high-resolution projectors in a small, dark room displaying large rotating images from the Webb telescope. Participants leaned back in zero-gravity chairs and immersed themselves in the vastness of the galaxies, sensing the clouds of witnesses and saints with them, speaking from the past through brilliant colors, shapes, supernovas, nebulas and stars forming and dying together. In this immersive “cosmic chapel,” we invited them to rest in the cosmos with the living and the dead, in God’s hands.
All Saints’ Day is about honoring the dead who speak to us and help shape the contours of our spiritual lives and leadership. I am comforted that we are surrounded by them. This year, as we commemorate and honor those who came before us, let us not be overwhelmed by the dead, but let us nestle together, past, present and future, and receive much-needed rest in God’s great cosmos.
But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them.
In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be an affliction,
and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.
For though in the sight of men they were punished, their hope is full of immortality.
Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself;
like gold in the furnace he tried them, and like a sacrificial burnt offering he accepted them.
In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble.
They will govern nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever.
Those who trust in him will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his elect, and he watches over his holy ones.
Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 (RSV)
