Hubble and Flight 447

If you go on the Internet and search Hubble space photos you get a succession of mind-blowing images. How can there be forms out there that look like wombs, fetuses, cells, eyes and heads?

It’s like the heavens have become a giant Rorschach card where we humans are able to project ourselves onto the dust clouds of space.

But are we projecting? Perhaps these images are in fact systemic, meaning that there really is some kind of continuity. That at some root level the structure of matter is the structure of life, and matter repeats that structure at ever greater levels of organization until you get actual life, and in fact human life?

But then again, would not androids see electric motors and micro circuits up there? Perhaps, but would that that make any real difference? So long as you’re alive and sentient you will see life and sense everywhere—no matter the specific formation it might take—because life and sense is what it’s all about. Right?

No, sadly, wrong. Because if life and sense is what it’s all about, how come we’re so darn good at blowing it all to kingdom come, and imagining ever more and more terrible models and images of violence. In the Star Trek movies, as the intrepid voyagers explore strange new worlds, what often comes up on “full screen” is a monstrous green crustacean, covered in scales and weapons, exuding galactic fury. Funny enough I didn’t see too many of these super-violent crustaceans up there in the Hubble images. But sci-fi movies are full of them. Why? Pretty clearly there’s something else at play, more than simple life and sense, something earth-grown, terrestrial, very human and deadly. When we imagine these new worlds, the thought of the enemy equipped with fearful violence comes unbidden. It must therefore lurk at the core of our human relationships, capable in a split second of turning the bright morning star into a nuclear holocaust. “Cain said to his brother, Abel, 'Let us go out to the field.' And when they were in the field Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.”

So the Hubble images cannot be the final conclusive sign of life and sense for us humans as we gaze uncertain into space. These cosmic images remain ambiguous, fuzzy, tricks of the eye and ego. The sign we really need, the one with real meaning, must be itself earth-grown, very human, and capable of transforming this lurking violence within.

And, yes, this sign exists and gets more and more airtime and power as the 21st century moves forward and becomes our time. We see it and hear it everywhere on the radio stations and TV channels of our contemporary world, the world of media that girdles the planet. What is this sign? It is the sign of the victim inviting compassion on a planetary scale.

French President Nicolar Sarkozy said it the other day. Commenting on Air France Flight 447 that went down in mid-Atlantic with the loss of all 228 people on board he said that most of the passengers were Brazilian and some forty were French. He then added: “It doesn’t change anything; they’re all victims.” Meaning the French President somehow had already given up the priority of national identity in favor of the universal category of the victim inviting compassion.

What Roman or Greek governor would have used that language? They would have said the fates decreed it, that the gods were angry. They would never have said, “They are all victims.” So where did this sign of compassion for the victim come from, if not from the Crucified, right there at the beginning of our 21 centuries? Jesus, the innocent one who died instilling terrestrial forgiveness and peace.

Tony