Living out our small lives on a small scale, it’s hard for us to imagine that a million miles above the earth is the largest telescope ever built, the James Webb Space Telescope, which this July is sending its first images showing galaxies so far away they take us back to the dawn of the universe 13.5 billion years ago. There is no end to the wonder and astonishment they trigger in us.
However, on our home place we do not gaze with such reverence. We strut about as though it was ours alone and take the measure of things by their market value. We view it all with a greedy eye. And so we end up with a destabilised climate, polluted air, soil and water and the extinction of species whose hymn of praise must now be forever missing from the cosmic harmony.
What will save us from ourselves? Another COP workshop? Another appeal from children, yet unborn, asking where will they play? Or a startling photo from deep space of new stars being born in an unfolding ballet and a new alphabet to learn with words like nebula, exoplanets, galaxy clusters.
Or perhaps by listening to the prophetic voice of John Moriarty as he asks that we ‘move our gaze from seeing to beholding the world’; in other words, that we gaze upon it from the place of soul. As Martin Shaw, mythologist, said of John; ‘the Earth was grateful to have his gaze on it’.