But in the eternities
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
O be prepared my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.
The final two verses of an elegant little poem entitled Christ in the Universe. It was written by Alice Meynell, a British writer, suffragist and convert to Catholicism. She lived from 1847 to 1922.
I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's longer poem Christus Apollo, which includes the lines:
Christ wanders in the Universe
A flesh of stars,
He takes on creature shapes
To suit the mildest elements,
He dresses him in flesh beyond our ken.
There He walks, glides, flies, shambling of strangeness.
Here He walks Men.
Among the ten trillion beams
A billion Bible scrolls are scored
In hieroglyphs among God’s amplitudes of worlds;
In alphabet multitudinous
Tongues which are not quite tongues
Sigh, sibilate, wonder, cry:
As Christ comes manifest from a thunder-crimsoned sky.
He walks upon the molecules of seas
All boiling stews of beast
All maddened broth and brew and rising up of yeast.
There Christ by many names is known.
PS: This is news to me, but apparently Christus Apollo was set to music in 1969 by the prolific film score composer Jerry Goldsmith.
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6 comments:
My dad used to sing a song that was something along the lines of "if there are men on mars, then I'm sure he visited them there". I'll ask him what it was and get back to you.
Larry Norman, "UFO"
. . . and if there's life on other planets,
then I'm sure that he must know,
and he's been there once already,
and he's died to save their souls . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duvog9TQ7kQ
Perhaps so. I hope to find out.
Excellent post. Been somewhat randomly following your blog for a few years past. Love the theme - dear to my own heart and mind also.
In relation to the subject of this post I'm sure you're aware of C. S. Lewis's essay 'Religion and Rocketry' that conveys similar sentiments (to be expected of course from the man who wrote Perelandra).
Cheers, DOJP
http://silkandhornheresy.blogspot.com/
(my own Gene Wolfe-themed blog)
I've often wondered about this myself. I don't think too many Christians would be open to considering it when we actually bump into it.
For one thing, read some of the comments on Amazon dot com re "The Lost History of Christianity" - some of those trinitarians are quite dismissive of the book for not condemning the 'heresies' of Nestorianism, and other forms of Christianity. In fact, they reject these faiths as Christian because they supposedly don't follow the Nicene Creed.
So what would we find out there if the Ewoks, e.g., had a Christ figure and a book?
Fun to speculate.
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