Happy New Year . . . What Seems So Real Around Us May Be Illusory, But Truth Wins
By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The welcoming white light was burning at 8:15 a.m. above the pastor’s confessional booth on Sunday, December 26, at St. Thomas the Apostle Church here, and penitents were in line. Christmas was only one day earlier, but the Church recognizes that all may not be as it seems.
Just a day after one of the holiest dates on the Christian calendar, Fr. Steven Kunkel was ready to absolve people’s sins. Had everyone not best prepared spiritually for the great Nativity celebration? This sight after the 7 a.m. Sunday Mass seemed to contradict that expectation.
Also, December 26 is observed as the feast day of St. Stephen, the first willing Christian martyr, only a day after the birth of the Lord, another juxtaposition (St. Stephen being overridden in 2021 by the Sunday Feast of the Holy Family). Jesus barely has found a place in the manger when the stoning death of the first man to pay with his life for faith in Him is recalled.
Two days later is the December 28, Feast of the Holy Innocents, the male pre-Christian babies ordered slaughtered by King Herod in hopes of destroying his potential rival, the “King of the Jews.” The “My Catholic Life!” website says, “There is a more bitter sadness in the unknown of every ‘might have been’ than in any ‘had and lost’.”
Northwest of Kunkel’s confessional, next to St. Joseph’s altar, is the church’s large Nativity scene. Up on the wall behind the straw-strewn stable is a painting, hanging where it always does, of the First Station of the Cross, Jesus being condemned to death at a very different time of the Church’s liturgical year. Birth to death in one glance.
Whether inside the church building or outside it, one experiences the customary distortion of reality in which a person seems to be standing on a flat, unmoving surface when in fact the Earth is a globe — and not a large one, at that, compared to many other planets — revolving through space on its annual rapid trek around its star, the immensely burning hot sun.
Yet if a scientist not far above the Earth were exposed to the void of space without a protective suit, he would freeze instantly. On Earth, a sunny beach with blue skies seems more an illusion when riders aboard a rocket ascend into the blackness.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three U.S. astronauts orbiting the moon sent back striking photos of the blue and white Earth hanging in space. It was the planet on which the whole of human history had occurred, as shown dramatically for the first time this way. We looked lost in the cosmos, but it still showed recognizable shapes.
It was to this spot that the Lord of Heaven and Earth came to suffer and redeem mankind. Did He somehow have to undertake the same mission on other planets, for other people? Or had they avoided the Fall in their own Gardens of Eden? Major 20th century Christian author C.S. Lewis raised those questions.
Addressing the possibility of societies far away, the “Preach It Teach It” Christian website observed how little a part the Earth seems to play in the cosmic scheme, amid “a billion trillion more stars . . . that have yet to be observed. The number of planets in our universe must be mind-boggling.”
It added: “Personally, I have a hard time imagining that the only life in the universe is on our little planet Earth. After all, our sun is just a second-rate star tucked between two spiral arms in the Milky Way galaxy. We are not even in a spiral arm! Our Earth is cosmically insignificant.”
To our minds, this shouldn’t minimize our world and the Lord’s coming to it, but remind us of the infinite creativity of God. If He creates one precious pearl, why not thousands or millions of them? There may be even more surprises awaiting us than we can imagine on the other side of the veil.
As for atheists, what are they to make of this kind of creativity? Even if the Earth were the only planet in the universe, or at least the only human-inhabited one, how did it come into being? An atheist could huff and puff and wave his hands for his entire lifespan, from the cradle to the grave, and not be able to bring a single planet into existence.
And no fair trying to send some rockets into space with loads of Earth dirt and tree seeds to try to get a core started. Creation means to bring forth being from non-being. On the same principle of making a million cakes by just thinking them into existence.
Yet God created not one planet or one solar system but the entire immeasurable universe. The Almighty, All-Powerful, All-Knowing God. By comparison, people are no more than a few dust specks. Why should He even listen to us, or notice us? Yet He sent his Son to die for and redeem us! And He is aware of each of us every second. What value we have as little specks.
Atheists may well have suffered some disappointments in life that simply disincline them to believe in God. Indeed, how many people think they have an excuse to reject religion when they see the kinds of lives lived by some of those who claim to follow Christ? I think of some ostentatious rosary-rattlers in Catholic media who are disappointments to others.
The 1968 astronauts’ pictures of Earth from lunar orbit have long been supplanted by routine images of Earth as seen from the International Space Station, which is said to orbit more than 220 miles above Earth, circling the planet once every 90 minutes. That means moving along at about five miles per second.
Wouldn’t the astronauts be plastered to the walls at that speed? No more than commercial jet passengers are at 550 mph. Or you in your car at 70 mph. That’s inertia.
But how do we conceive of our world when all our oceans, mountains, deserts, tropics, cities, continents and billions of people are seen from millions of miles away?
Some years ago I saw a photo of Earth taken from a solar-system explorer probe looking back at whence it came. Our whole Earth was a little round spot in space, all the hopes, dreams, loves and angers in history far smaller than a marble floating in blackness.
And a photo of Earth as seen from Mars may show an object smaller than a pinhead. About like Mars as seen from Earth. As for being small, every human life begins with two cells uniting, a scientific fact abhorrent to pro-abortionists.
Dominant media would jump up and down in excitement if two-inch humanoid creatures were found swimming in recesses on the Red Planet. But when the creatures do it all the time inside the Mom Planet, media propagandists cringe in anger. It’s all in the perspective.
We go into the new year of 2022 with downright scary challenges coming from, among various locations, the White House to the Vatican. Who can imagine what may be about to be here?
Think back to the beginning of 2020, when the January helicopter death of California Catholic basketball luminary Kobe Bryant was a major story. But it soon was far surpassed by the Earth-shaking arrival of the COVID biowar.
Every year begins with hope, a necessary optimism to keep us going, but often dashed in the realm of human experience. However, the saints didn’t become so by taking it easy and expecting a guaranteed stress-free existence.
There’s another distortion of truth we have to look beyond. The lives and settings around us may seem to be the defining reality, but they always are passing away, as noted long ago in the Bible.
Even if a person lives for 100 years on Earth, that time must end, as it always has and will. Beyond that lies the everlasting, either unending joy or the opposite. We’re so time-bound on Earth, moving along through the hours and days, that it’s hard to think of an eternal present. But, be assured, it’s more real than any life we know here, and we’re bound to enter it.
The white light above the confessional is a beacon to point us to a welcoming future. Happy New Year!
