Sunday
I have been reading through Arnold Benz’s Astronomical Psalms for a Vast Universe (Crossroad, 2025), a series of poetic reflections by an astrophysicist expressing his wonder at the diverse features of the universe. As Benz says in his introduction, “Aristotle considered wonder to be the origins of science and a motive behind all great questions,” and then notes how, through his amazement, he participates “in the cosmic performance.”
The book reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the Prayers of the People, Eucharistic Prayer C, where someone from the congregation will read, “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.”
To this the congregation responds, “By your will they were created and have their being.”
In this spirit Benz writes that, “while God’s presence is not susceptible to scientific demonstration, my personal perception of reality does hint at something or someone beyond what can be scientifically observed.” His verses, he says, echo “the ancient literary genre of the Psalms.” As such, they “aim to link the present-day universe story told by science with a faith-grounded response.”
In one of his poems he writes,
A quintillion is a million trillions.
A trillion is a million millions.
I can calculate these numbers,
I can write them,
but I can’t imagine them.
Space where galaxies dwell,
and where physical laws apply
is unimaginably vast.
Is there a Presence in it or behind?
It must be unimaginably larger.
Is this God?
One of my favorite of his poems is “Energy,” which gives you a sense of the whole:
The universe is unfathomably lavish with energy.
Consider the solar atmosphere:
Swirling hot gas,
sets magnetic fields in tension
like spiral springs.
When the tension becomes too great,
energy bundles explode.
Within minutes, a magnetic eruption
releases a hundred million times more energy
than the largest atomic bomb,
ten thousand times more energy
than all power plants on earth can produce in a year.
Or: Massive stars explode
as supernovae,
hurling energy into space
every second somewhere in the universe
billions of times that of a solar eruption.
Or: Two black holes merge
with a hundred times more energy than a supernova;
space-time shakes throughout the whole universe:
A gravitational wave.
We humans, insatiable in our hunger for energy,
have access to only the tiniest share
of the cosmic abundance,
like a nutshell full of water
compared with all that’s in the sea.
We need energy to live.
Are we entitled to energy?
No,
it is given to us freely
from an unfathomably prodigious source.
For this we give you thanks, gracious God!
The book is a powerful response to those who see science and religion at odds. It addresses in a deep way how we can be at the same time infinitesimally small and yet somehow connected with divinity.
