A million alien Gospels

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.

A Case of Consilience

Check out Ken MacLeod's wonderful sf story "A Case of Consilience."

It's about a Presbyterian minister who struggles to evangelize sentient mycoids, with unexpected results.

"The Reformation. The racialist heresy. The age of the Earth. Biblical criticism. Darwin. The twentieth century had brought the expanding universe, the gene, the unconscious—how quaint the controversies over these now seemed! Genetic engineering, human-animal chimerae, artificial intelligence: in Donald's own lifetime he'd seen Synods, Assemblies and Curia debate them and come to a Christian near-consensus acceptable to all but the lunatic—no, he must be charitable— the fundamentalist fringe.

And then, once more, just when the dust had settled, along had come—predictable as a planet, unpredicted like a comet—another orb in God's great orrery of education, or shell in the Adversary's arsenal of error-mongery, the greatest challenge of all—alien intelligent life."

I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised by this story- not only does it have cool scientific ideas, it has humour, and best of all it includes some thoughtful insights into the nature of missions work and incarnational theology. MacLeod references C.S. Lewis, James Blish, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven and, obliquely, Ray Bradbury. I think he's commenting on the way Luke 8:5-8 fits in with John 12:24. And there are, no doubt, references that went over my head.

Here I had ordered the appropriate anthology from the library so I could read it, and then today I discovered it available online. D'oh! Oh well.

Here's some information on Ken MacLeod. From what I've gleaned from various places, including his blog, he's a strongly committed atheist & secular humanist. One of his greatest passions seems to be socialist politics. Why would someone of his persuasion write a story like this? I don't know,* but I'm glad he did.

*He does seem to prefer moderate religious people to the wild-eyed enthusiastic kind. Perhaps in his ideal world there would be no religion at all, but, given the stubborn endurance of religious belief, he'd rather imagine a future where Christians are mostly quiet moderates.