What Do The Heavens Declare?

My daughter Glory and I had an opportunity to see the San Antonio Symphony perform the orchestral suite The Planets at the Tobin Center on November 5^th, 2014. Composed by Gustav Holst (1874 – 1934), The Planets includes a piece for each planet in our solar system.

Thoughts came to my mind as I listened to and watched the symphony presentation.

I couldn’t help but think about mankind’s love of imagination.

We look beyond ourselves, in this case to the planets, and we name them after gods imagined, gods desired.

We imagine a god of war and assign him to red Mars.

We desire a god of love and beauty, call her the bringer of peace and assign her to the brightest planet in the solar system, Venus.

We work to correlate things unseen to something we can see, hear, and touch, mapping the ideas of war, love, beauty, and peace to color, music, and matter.

We send ships out to space to get a closer look, but planets are just rocks and gas, less exciting than we dream.

Some say we are too little to matter, less than a speck, yet our blue marble small, one thousand three-hundredth of Jupiter large, holds life loved infinitely deep, so it must not be the size of matter that matters most.

We might look small from the outside, especially if we zoom out to the edge of the solar system, where Earth transforms to only a pale blue dot, and we cease to be seen. But we have the close-up, inside scoop on man; eternity miraculously fits inside him.

We desire a god who has a message for us, so make him Mercury, mischievous and double-minded.

Our minds make up messages, but what do the heavens declare?

Image of Jupiter by WikiImages from Pixabay