Deep-Space Ambiguity

As the hart panteth for the water brooks, so panteth my soul for Thee, O God. 

(Psa 42:1)

Deep Space. Deep Space Tracking Station. Deep Space Network. Deep Space Communications Complex. I wondered, "Why not Far Space?" And Far Space Tracking Stations and Networks? Why Deep? "Deep" seemed subliminally, spiritually, and deliberately ambiguous to me.

Webster's Dictionary [1880] defines:

Ambiguous [Lat. ambiguus, from ambigere, to wander about with irresolute mind] Doubtful or uncertain, particularly in respect to signification; equivocal; as, an ambiguous  course; an ambiguous  expression.
What have been thy answers what but dark,Ambiguous, and with double sense-deluding.   Milton

"Nebulous".....now there's another spaced-out synonym.

"Deep Space" terms seem to suggest not only something "far out" but also "deep within". For me "deep space" has a psychological or spiritual connotation. At Hartebeesthoek, one of the original three Deep Space Instrumentation Facilities of the early 1960s, we were not only probing deep space, we were also, unconsciously perhaps, engaged on a journey inward.

Heart Nebula

Even the etymology of "Hartebeesthoek" implied something more. The word derives from Dutch, from hart  deer + beest  beast + hoek  corner. Hart is akin to "horn" and refers to the antlers. The "hartebeest"  is an antelope. Merriam-Webster traces the word "deer" to "Middle English, deer, animal, from Old English deor  beast; akin to Old High German tior  wild animal, Lithuanian dvasia  breath, spirit". In Afrikaans, though not etymologically related, hart  not only means "deer" but it is also the word for "heart". In Psalm 42:1 the hart becomes the symbol of the spirit. So Hartebeesthoek came to symbolise for me that "corner" within my own heart that encompassed the immensity of deep space!

The Hindu Scriptures must surely count among the most beautiful and inspiring in the World. The Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads are among my favourites. In the Chandogya Upanishad is this beautiful "deep space" gem:

OM.  In the center of the castle of Brahman, our own body, there is a small shrine in the form of a lotus-flower, and within can be found a small space.  We should find who dwells there, and we should want to know him.
And if anyone asks, "Who is he who dwells in a small shrine in the form of a lotus flower in the center of the castle of Brahman?  Whom should we want to find and to know?" we can answer:
"The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe.  The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars; fire and lightning and winds are there; and all that now is and all that is not: for the whole universe is in Him and He dwells within our heart." (Chandogya Upanishad 3.13.7)

It is a thought not alien to Christianity either.

In the words of Augustine (De Lib. Arb., II.41), "Wherever you turn, by certain traces which wisdom has impressed on her works, she speaks to you, and recalls you within, gliding back into interior things by the very forms of exterior things."

William Law (A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life) put it this way, "The outward world is but a glass, or representation of the inward; and every thing and variety of things in temporal nature must have its root, or hidden cause, in something that is more inward."

"All our greatest philosophers and theologians unanimously assert that the visible universe is a faithful reflection of the invisible," says Nicholas of Cusa (Of Learned Ignorance,I.xi).

Scanning the skies with deep space antennas is, in a way,  a scansion of, and a panting for the Divine Imprint within.

In conclusion, a thought for Holy Week...

"Think, dear friend, reflect on the world that you carry within yourself. And name this thinking what you wish. it might be recollections of your childhood or yearning for your own future. Just be sure that you observe carefully what wells up within you and place that above everything that you notice around you. Your innermost happening is worth all your love. You must somehow work on that." -- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet


©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

"Deep-Time Eyes"

Lord, I was blind; I could not see
In Thy marred visage any grace,
But now the beauty of Thy face
In radiant vision dawns on me.
                          -William T Matson


What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth . . .. The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots . . .. When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth's light-coloured surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich colour spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquoise, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.

-Yuri Gagarin

It is the Season of Lent. Good Friday is coming. So is Easter.

Visiting my optician  the other day got me to thinking about these things, especially short- and far-sightedness. Fifty years ago today, 12th April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person to go into Space. Though Gagarin never saw God out there he certainly saw "Beauty", beauty in a way no person had ever seen before.

Recently a Methodist minister had introduced me to a fascinating online discussion series on "Evolutionary Christianity" (http://evolutionarychristianity.com) hosted by Michael Dowd. I heartily commend these conversations to you too. The talks included a galaxy of theologians, scientists, and writers, some who I had previously read or heard speak. They were familiar, trusted voices. Although originally an Advent series of meditations, I made these hour long meditations my Lenten study for this year. What a marvelous time-shift this has proved to be!

Speakers included: Charles H Townes, Owen Gingerich, Richard Rohr, Jim Burklo, Denis Lamoureux, Bruce Sanguin, Mary Southard, Diarmuid O Murchu, Ursula King, Sally Morgenthaler, Philip Clayton, Ian Lawton, Joan Roughgarden, Matthew Fox, Spencer Burke, Brian Mclaren, Michael Morwood, Gretta Vosper, Ted Davis, Tom Thresher, Paul Smith, Doug Pagitt, Ian Barbour, Kevin Kelly, John Polkinghorne, Linda Gibler, Michael Dowd, Gloria Schaab, William D Phillips, Joan Chittister, Ross Hostetter, John Cobb, John F Haught, John Shelby Spong, Karl Giberson, Ilia Delio, Kenneth R Miller, and Gail Worcelo. All Christian scholars and researchers of renown, some Nobel Prize Winners, sharing what they had in common, namely, their love for Jesus as disciples of his and the amazing mystery of evolution they had come to appreciate. It was for me an incredible experience listening to these speakers.

One of the notions that immediately caught my attention was what Michael Dowd, the host of the discussions, called "deep-time eyes"....that is, the ability to look deep down into the mystery of cosmic time and space and there to see and experience the presence of God manifest throughout evolutionary time and realise our own connectedness to all creation.

Evolutionary Christianity points to those who value evidence as divine communication. Whatever our differences, we all have deep-time eyes and a global heart. -Michael Dowd

Though I still see as if "through a glass dimly", I can identify at least four influences in my life, a "Quarternity" if you like, that has affected my own seeing. There are two places and two people: Hartebeesthoek Deep Space Tracking Station - the Sterkfontein Caves; and, Teilhard de Chardin - Jan Smuts.

Hartebeesthoek Deep Space Tracking Station

It was at the Hartebeesthoek Deep Space Tracking Station that I was first introduced to notions of "deep space" and "deep time". The operations at a Tracking Station centred around concepts of space and time. For instance, this idea was especially embodied in what is called "Round Trip Light Time" (RTLT).

In space technology, the round-trip delay time or round trip light time is the time light or radio signals takes to go to a spacecraft and return. (See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-trip_delay_time).  One was constantly being reminded of the relationship between space and time. Every space probe at every moment required of us a constant awareness of this ever changing variable....the RTLT. Nothing was static. Though minuscule in the great expanse of Space, RTLT made one ever conscious of the incredible immensity of the Universe. RTLTs were commonly measured in minutes or hours. However, set against the backdrop of countless Galaxies measured in billions of light years away one was overcome by the incomprehensible wonder of it all. Though occupying minute slivers of space and time, we needed to acquire deep-space-time perspectives or deep-space eyes to see it.

RTLT was also a reminder of the vibrancy of the cosmos we found ourselves in. Everything was in motion. We are part of an amazing, dynamic, living organism.  Spacecraft. Earth. Moon. The Planets. The Sun in it course round the Galaxy. The Galaxies themselves. Potential was everywhere. Everything was alive and pulsating, a cosmic symphony rather than a meaningless cacophony of noise! One became conscious as Gagarin did, of beauty and wonder. If the Earth and Spacecraft were stationary bodies the RTLT would simply be a static straightforward measure of the distance between the two. But not so, all was in flux. Earth, planets, and spaceprobes were all engaged in a complex dance of orbits and trajectories. One needed to disentangle the vast deep-space-time relationships that bound farflung worlds to each other in an timeless embrace in order to make sense of it all. Soft-landings on the Moon were much more enchanting than two lovers throwing kisses to each other between passing trains.  One appreciated the elegance of Space-Time Physics and the precision of the interconnecting laws of nature. I slowly began to understand a little about concepts such as the "dilation of time" and "time slips" and its significance to faith and spirituality, prayer and meditation These were ideas which some have developed further such as Gregg Braden in his book The Isaiah Effect. At Hartebeesthoek I found my deep-space eyes. As Yuri Gagarin once said, "I could have gone on flying through space forever."

But there was more. As observed in a previous blog, not far from Hartebeesthoek were...

The Sterkfontein Caves

In close proximity to the Tracking Station are the Caves. Everyday on my way to work and home again we would drive by Sterkfontein. One cannot drive past these caves without being affected. Whereas at Hartebeesthoek we looked up into the sky here one looked down deep into the earth. Here was a constant reminder that our biological histories goes far back to the dawn of evolutionary time, more years than one can easily imagine. Perhaps not the deep-time of deep-space but here, right on my door-step in Southern Africa on my way to work, was a place where biological and geological time had coalesced the very star-stuff of cosmic space and time and brought forth hominid life and eventually of us all! For me this was a daily engagement  with the huge questions of life, existence, being, and the ongoing passage of time. One just had to cultivate the "deep-time eyes" that Michael Dowd speaks about.

Sterkfontein (Afrikaans for Strong Spring) is a set of limestone caves of special interest to paleo-anthropologists located in Gauteng province, Northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa near the town of Krugersdorp. The archaeological sites of Swartkrans (Afrikaans for Black Cliff) and Kromdraai (Afrikaans and Dutch for Crooked Turn) (and the Wonder Cave) are in the same area. Sterkfontein was declared a World Heritage Site in 2000 and the area in which it is situated, was named the Cradle of Humankind." -Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterkfontein_caves

It was here at the Sterkfontein Caves that I found my deep-time eys. There I first saw into the beckoning eyes of the Taung Child, Mrs Ples, and Little Foot. It took the Caves of Raymond Dart and Robert Broom to open my own evolutionary-eyes as I gazed with them into the fossil record that was being uncovered.

Two Places... but there were also Two People whose thought affected me: Teilhard de Chardin and Jan Smuts. I was only one year old when, in 1947 at the invitation of Smuts, Teilhard planned to visit South Africa. Unfortunately a serious heart attack prevented him but he was able to visit South Africa in 1951 and again in 1953. Just two quotes will suffice:

Teilhard de Chardin

In his, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard has a marvelous section on "the perception of space-time" (p.238ff) in which he speaks of our difficulty with depth perception. He says...

"We have all forgotten the moment when, opening our eyes for the first time, we saw light and things around us all jumbled up and all on one single plane. It requires a great effort to imagine the time when we were unable to read or again to take our mind back to the time when for us the world extended no farther than the walls of our home and our family circle.


"Similarly it seems to us incredible that men could have lived without suspecting that the stars are hung above us hundreds of light years away, or that the contours of life stretched out millions of years behind us to the limits of our horizon."

He then makes this profound statement...

"The least molecule is, in nature and position, a function of the whole sidereal process, and the least of the protozoa is structurally so knit into the web of life that its existence cannot be hypothetically annihilated without ipso facto  undoing the whole network of the biosphere.... Time and space are organically joined again so as to weave, together, the stuff of the universe." (p.240)

The other influence was...

Jan Smuts

Smuts, writing in Holism and Evolution (p.336f)  shares similar deep-time thoughts...

"For we are indeed one with Nature, her genetic fibres run through all our being, our physical organs connect us with millions of years of her history; our minds are full of immemorial paths of pre-human experience. 


"Our ear for music, our eye for art carry us back to the early beginnings of animal life on this globe. Press but a button in our brain and the gaunt spectres of the dim forgotten past rise once more before us; the ghostly dreaded forms of the primeval Fear loom before us and we tremble all over with inexplicable fright. And then again some distant sound, some call of bird or smell of wild plants, or some sunrise or sunset glow in the distant clouds, some mixture of light and shade on the mountains may suddenly throw an unearthly spell over the spirit, lead it forth from the deep chambers and set it panting and wondering with inexpressible emotion. For the overwrought mind there is no peace like nature's, for the wounded spirit there is no healing like hers. There are indeed times when human companionship becomes unbearable, and we fly to nature for that silent sympathy and communion which she alone can give. 


"Some of the deepest emotional experiences of my life have come to me on the many nights I have spent under the open African sky, and I am sure my case has not been singular in this respect. 


"The intimate rapport with nature is one of the most precious things in life. Nature is indeed very close to us; sometimes closer than hands and feet, of which in truth she is but the extension. The emotional appeal of nature is tremendous, sometimes almost more than one can bear."

Teilhard and Smuts shared the same view. Over time such has also been my experience. The conversations at "Evolutionary Christianity" develops this further and has provided us with a much needed theological and scientific framework with which to look with renewed confidence into the future.

Conclusion

I opened with the verse from William Matson's hymn, "Lord, I was blind! I could not see / In Thy marred visage any grace". Deep-time eyes are not blind to our apparently fractured universe. There are fault lines that appear to be intrinsic to the very fabric of Nature. One need not look too deep into space before one encounters violent solar reactions, barren sterile worlds, and battered and inhospitable planets like Venus and Jupiter. One is ever mindful of tragedies that have cost the lives of Astronauts and Cosmonauts. Similarly Sterkfontein is not without its stories of woe. The Taung Child may have been the victim of some prehistoric bird of prey (See http://www.profleeberger.com/files/Taungbirdofpreybc.pdf). More recently, a diver tragically lost his life in the Caves. Without deep-time Gethsemane eyes we may not see the signs of grace in these marred images of cosmic tragedy and loss, death and decay.

Will we ever plummet the mysteries of our deep-space, deep-time experiences? Probably not as long as we are myopic in our theologies of Nature and Creation.  We may well lament the loss of our deep-time, deep-space eyes, as Adam and Eve did, as described in the apocryphal book, once they had been banished from the Garden...

And Adam said to Eve, "Look at thine eyes, and at mine, which afore beheld
angels in heaven, praising; and they, too, without ceasing.

"But now we do not see as we did; our eyes have become flesh; they cannot
see in like manner as they saw before."  (I Adam and Eve 4:8ff)

Deep-time eyes, redeemed eyes, invites us to look deeper and further into the evidence that is before us than we may have hitherto. As Michael Dowds would remind us, deep-time seeing leads to a long-time hope.


©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za