Can it be? Can it really be that this earth, massive as it is to us, filled with principalities and powers and Democrats and Republicans, home to 8 billion or so of us and untold trillions of other living organisms, whirling through space in an orbit 93 million miles from its insignificant star…that this earth is under 8,000 miles “through” as the crow would fly if the crow could fly through rock, solid and molten?
7,917 miles is shorter than the distance from Washington, D.C. to Johannesburg, South Africa via jet. In 2015, we made made that trip in about 18 hours. Not long. No wonder my childhood friends and I thought it might be possible to dig a hole from Iowa to China. It’s really not all that far.
It is stunning to come to terms with the smallness of our planet.
We are terrifyingly vulnerable. And yet we treat earth and ourselves as if we are indestructible. Ego-maniac political leaders inflate their importance to cosmic dimensions; armies of tens of thousands massively kill and destroy; buildings stretch taller and cities sprawl farther; untold quantities of natural resources are consumed and their waste products dumped into the waters or pumped into the air our buried in the ground as if there’s no end to nature’s capacity to store our junk.
We ooh and aah over our achievements, inflating ourselves into thinking there’s just no stopping us, no end to our power, no limits on our ability to control the world.
Yet one errant asteroid of just enough mass could bring it all to a quick end…and should someone be watching they would probably say, Earth? Oh that…never amounted to much anyway.
Some of our ancestors had a better sense of our smallness and our vulnerability than do most of us. Not pharaohs and caesars and priests and all their kind…but poets, and prophets, and the poor. They knew their need, and they often held on to belief in something or someone bigger than the mind can fathom in order to try to make sense of the fact that we are here at all. The Jewish and Christian scriptures—the only ones I dare speak about with any authority—claim a creator God who made it all for a purpose and who will bring it all—us all—to our end.
Much of “western” humanity has given up any notion of deity, some of us by carefully thinking and working through relevant issues. Some have posited ultimate determiners other than a god or gods. But I suspect many of us moderns simply find divinities other than ones we make ourselves too damned inconvenient. They push us off our pedestals, and shove us far from being the center of things, and we don’t like that all all.
Perhaps no area of human enterprise is more prone to ignoring anything beyond itself than is politics. That’s why political power aided by religious trappings is the most dangerous of human arrogances.
Earth…not even 8,000 miles from one side to the other? It’s tiny, and we are tinier. Think about it, and pause for a moment to wonder over it…just to wonder.
