Solstice and other miracles

We’re officially in winter, now. Solstice passed, the sun turned around from its descent, and now the days are getting longer—although the coldest weather and heaviest snow are (historically, at least) still ahead.

It’s easy to understand why people have always understood this annual return of the light to be a miraculous thing. It’s easy to understand why major faith traditions mark this time in late December as a holy time. Thinking about this, I realize that many apparently "ordinary" things strike me as miraculous. I don’t mean “miraculous” in a religious sense, although some folks might understand these things that way. I simply mean that they are so remarkable in their complexity, so striking in their steadfast reliability (so devastating when they abandon us) that words fail. For instance:

Solstice. Consider that marvelous morning when you can wake up and know, simply know that the days will get longer now. This seems so simple, but think about what it means. These massive planets are circling around a star, with all of them exerting tremendous force on one another. This sun star is surrounded by other suns, some (we now know) with planets of their own. These collect in spiral arms and wheel around a black hole that steadily consumes everything, including light itself. This pinwheel flies through the universe (maybe one of several universes) at unimaginable speeds, moving among other galaxies, all  pushing and pulling on one another. And the space around them all is laced with dark matter and dark energy that we can’t  see even with our most powerful instruments, although they make up most of the matter and energy in the universe as we know it. 


Yet, despite the complexity of all this, our particular tiny planet moves around its particular medium-sized star with such precise timeliness that we know what day will be the shortest of the year. Miraculous.

The Hubble space telescope. Launched in 1990, repaired and up-graded numerous times, the Hubble telescope continues to transmit the most amazing pictures of far outer space (like the one above)—as well as lots of other data that are not nearly as interesting to us lay people. This telescope, orbiting outside earth’s atmosphere, has taught us more about the forces at work in our universe than all of the work done before its launch. Miraculous.

The heart. Last year, I had a medical event (turned out to be nothing) that sent me to the hospital for tests. Among those tests was a heart ultrasound. I got to watch the monitor during that procedure, and it honestly left me speechless. The kids would say it was “awesome,” and so would I, and I would mean it literally. I was awed, stunned by the thought that this rhythmic pattern had gone on for decades, all day, every day. The various chambers and valves alternately contract and relax, open and close with timing as precise on a miniscule scale as the movement of celestial bodies on a scale too vast to imagine. And they just keep doing it day after day after day. Miraculous.

Evolution. Thinking about this heart thing got me pondering on how it came to be, this brilliant, intricate, precise, beautiful system for circulating nutrients and waste. Some would argue that such beauty could only come from a divine creator. Personally, I believe that, whether or not the process is guided by a God, evolution has crafted this remarkable organ as well as the other organs and organisms that make up our world. In my mind, this makes it all not less but more astonishing. 


How many tiny steps, how many mutations and adaptations, how many dead ends did it take to create an opposable thumb so we could grasp? An ear, with all its internal intricacies? A brain? And how many steps to fashion the precise lines on the face of the alpine forget-me-not, the colorful patterns drawn in feathers on a blackbird’s wing. How many gradual adaptations formed the varied shells on Galapagos tortoises that allow them to feed on their particular island but that would make it impossible to feed on others? What prolonged process of change resulted in the odd system whereby a newborn kangaroo clambers the distance from its mother’s womb into her pouch? Miraculous.

The Post Office. I know this seems like a leap from the sublime to the ridiculous, but think about the service that the post office provides for pennies. I heard someone on the NPR program “Wait, Wait! Don’t Tell Me!” put it like this: For less than 50¢, you can send a letter to a particular individual at a particular address in a particular town in a particular state, and within a couple of days, it will be delivered to precisely that person. Imagine how much you would pay a messenger to make that delivery! I’ve thought about this often and have always found complaints about the post office misguided. But I’ve especially thought about it during these last few days just before Christmas. I've seen several postal carriers climbing over snow banks long after dark, using headlamps to find their way, delivering mail to people’s homes through the holiday madness. Sure, the post office messes up some times. But usually, they get it remarkably right. Miraculous.

There are so many other things I could mention: the Constitution, prenatal development, the Mars rovers, language, the curiosity of small children, the way spider's web catches the dew. All, simply awesome!