Community

“It is not good that Man be alone” (Genesis 2:18)

     The Bible starts out on quite a high note. The Lord God, in a supreme exercise of His omnipotence, creates ex nihilo the Universe and all it contains. And in a great procession of acts, all is pronounced good (“And He saw that it was good.”) – light, sea, land, sun, moon, fish, birds, plants… all good, good, good. But it doesn’t take long for the first hint of the darkness to come to make an appearance – page two, in fact. The first man is ensconced in the Garden of Eden and all seems well, but God says otherwise. “It is not good that the man is alone,” He observes. This is the very first “not good” in The Bible (and sadly, not the last). And what makes it “not good”? Just this: the lack of community. It may not be the greatest of earthly evils, but it seems certainly to be the source of so many. We are a long way from Eden today, but how many awful things around us would just disappear were we simply to put community first? I can’t imagine a person defrauding, taking advantage of, or persecuting another human being whose needs he puts before his own. Saint James was even blunter: “What is the cause of this violence and discord amongst you? Is it not your desire to put yourself first? You are willing even to kill to ensure that you get what you regard as yours before anyone else.” (James 4:1-2)

     By far the most horrifying image in Dante’s Inferno is that of the last, lowest circle of Hell, in which the very worst of sinners are completely immersed in ice, frozen solid and utterly severed from all human contact. In place of the Heavenly Beatific Vision, these wretches have only the eternal sight of Lucifer himself (C.S. Lewis called it the miserific vision), who is likewise imprisoned in the frozen Lake Cocytus. Ultimate damnation is to cut one’s self off from others.

     But we should by no means think of community as simply a remedy against potential evil. It is an objective great good in itself.

     On the 25th of March*, 2009, my wife of 33 years lost her 14-month battle with pancreatic cancer. I had been preparing myself mentally for this outcome for some time before the end, when it seemed certain how the disease would end – but to no avail. Suffice it to say, I suffered a complete collapse. Even now years later, I’d rather pick up live coals with my bare hands than revisit the memory of those days. At first I had a lot of help. Diane’s sister stayed with me for a week or so, my eldest daughter moved in with me for the better part of a month, and I had the ten thousand loose ends that inevitably accompany anyone’s passing to take care of. Friends and neighbors dropped in every few days to check on how I was doing. Work was a huge plus, surrounding me with co-workers and keeping my mind busy for the better part of the day. But then the evenings would come. Dinner was eaten, dishes washed and put away, the dog walked, and it was maybe 7 PM. I found I didn’t have it in me to face the evenings alone. Four nights out of five, I ended up passed out on the family room couch from alcohol by 8 PM at the latest. Considering my own health issues at the time, this was nothing short of a slow motion suicide.

     But then, on the 19th of July and hundreds of millions of miles away, a miracle occurred. A comet slammed into the planet Jupiter, not far from its North Pole. The media picked up on this event, and for some reason I became intensely interested, searching for all the information I could find on the internet. I found a reference to members of the Howard Astronomical League meeting at nearby Alpha Ridge Park to attempt to view the impact through their own telescopes. I decided to go out there and see for myself. I was overwhelmed by the friendly reception I got.

 Impact Scar on Jupiter from Comet Collision

     After all, I was not an active stargazer at the time – just some guy who wandered in off the street. I thought to myself, “Hey, these people meet in the evenings – the very time I am having the most trouble keeping it together.” HAL turned out to be exactly what I needed – human contact with caring individuals in the dark of night. I know many people who can easily tell you how important amateur astronomy has been to them in one way or another, but how many can say it literally saved their life?

     I think about this as I scan the great Sagittarius star clouds on the way to tracking down Ross 154. They are so stunningly beautiful that it is all too easy to abandon the search and just end up cruising along the Milky Way, taking in the uncountable star clusters and nebulae in the region. The massive globular M22 is actually one of the signposts along the way to our target here, and coming upon its jewel-like sparkle is fraught with the same peril that Odysseus faced as he sailed past the Sirens so long ago upon the wine dark sea.

     No, no matter how convincingly I make the heartfelt case for searching out and observing uber-faint red dots in the back lots of the galaxy, it’s hard to beat the unalloyed joy of chancing upon a field of view packed to capacity with stars of varying magnitude, clustered in knots and streaming off in every possible direction. Pure magic. On the clear, dark moonless nights when such things are possible, it’s time to throw away the carefully thought out observing plan, pack up the high-magnification, narrow-field eyepieces, slap in a widefield, and let your eye roam wherever the stars might take it.

     Recall what my daughter told me (as recorded in the very first posting to this blog), “So, you look at a whole bunch of dots!” And right she is. Sometimes, it is not good for a star to be alone.

Messier 22 in Sagittarius

* March 25th is laden with significance. In the Middle Ages, the world itself was presumed to have been created on that date. The Jews regard March 25th as the day the Israelites passed through the Red Sea, with Pharaoh's army in pursuit. March 25th is the Feast of the Annunciation, the day Christ became incarnate in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is also the generally accepted date of the Crucifixion. In Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the One Ring was consumed in the fires of Mount Doom on the 25th of March.