Sunday Evening May 25th 1947
SPACE
I wonder how many of you on this lovely summer day have gone into a field, stretched yourselves out on your back and gazed into the sky, through and beyond the slowly moving clouds into the blueness of space. If you did, I wonder what passed through your minds? Did you find your thoughts wandering and losing themselves in the immensity of space? Did it set you wondering what lay beyond – beyond the small space of this little earth and beyond the scope of your own short life. I think young people getting near to the time when they will be men and women often begin to wonder and ponder in this way, and at their time of life to be alone in a wide field gazing at the sky means more than it has ever meant before for them or will ever mean again.
The thought of the immensity of space seems, however, fascinating and stimulating to children of all ages in the school. Lately in my classes on light I’ve notice (sic) how the whole group seems to wake up, even to become excited, when I tell them of the immense distances of the stars, when for instance I show how one of the nearest “fixed” stars is so far away that we are now receiving from it rays of light that left it in the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign; and that it has taken 90 years in spite of the fact that light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Then we go further and discover that the great galaxy of stars that fills the sky, and the milky way, make up a plate shaped mass, which great as it is, is only a small cloud of matter in the immensity of space, and that far and away, beyond all that we can see with the naked eye there are nebulae or island universes, whose light – the light we now see from them through a telescope – started out from them perhaps when our earth was too before life had begun on our earth. We find ourselves wondering what lies beyond and beyond and beyond, and our minds cannot grasp the immensity of it all.
H. G. Wells once wrote a story about a man who had to be operated on for what appeared to be a dangerous cancer. After he had taken the anaesthetic, when the surgeons knife was cutting deep into his body, the man found himself outside his body watching as the operation went on the surgeon became anxious, desperate. The man, or his spirit – saw the operating theatre recede and fade away, found himself floating away into space. He saw the city dwindle away before him until it and all the details of the earth’s surface were lost and the whole earth was seen as a bright ball spinning and glittering in the sun’s rays. He passed out through the solar system and on through the stars. The sky was an oily impenetrable black which the sun shows as a bright intense white disc. He passed out through the edge of our universe of stars into utter darkness. But he woke up in the operating theatre to find the surgeon bending over him with a look of relief on his face. The operation after all had been successful; he had come back from the very edge of death. No one has expressed as effectively as well in his imaginative stories, the immensity of space and time and the tininess of man with all his successes and failures, hope and anxieties.
When we think of time, too, our minds go wandering on with the past or the future and we find ourselves baffled by its endlessness. Haven’t you often thought, as you have listened to accounts of early history, or of pre-historic ages, or of the beginning of life on this planet, what was there before that and before that and before THAT? When did it begin, did it ever begin, or can we go back endlessly through eternity of the past? Or if you travel into the future with Well’s Time Traveller to find the earth cold and unutterably bleak, to find human life and the sun a vast dull red plate motionless and covering nearly the whole sky, if you think of the air freezing to a liquid and eventually to a solid so that the earth becomes utterly lifeless; don’t you find yourselves wondering whether human life really means anything at all? We all feel intensely alive don’t we? We can all say to ourselves “I am I” with the greatest conviction. Absolutely certain that there is nothing so important as our own existence and the life that bubbles up in us and the people we live with. Can this really come to an end in utter coldness, merged in universal death?[1]
Whenever men have contemplated this immeasurable space of the heavens, and the eternity of time, and our own inescapable end in death, they have felt how insignificant man’s life is. In one of the Psalms there are these lines: “As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he flourisheth. The wind passes over it and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more”. The men who thought about these things in the learned world of Greece before the time of Jesus were oppressed by this picture
But is this all? The psalmist has much more to say and you should read psalm 103 to learn what it is. For the moment we want to say something different. Have you ever thought of the limitless universe inside man? Consider your own mind; try to explain it, to discover whether it has any beginning or any end. Isn’t it every bit as mysterious and fathomless as the mysterious universe outside us? Think of yourself and of the mind that controls your actions. Are you like a clockwork toy that once it is wound up just performs the same old series of mechanical actions? Are you like a musical box that can play only a few times over and over again? You know you are not, you know that the thoughts you think tomorrow will be different from the thoughts you think today. That thoughts, ideas, feelings, will flow through your mind in endless variety. There seems no limit to man’s power of imagination. A great Quaker Scientist who died a few years ago could hold in his mind a cubic centimetre of matter in a star millions upon millions of miles away and tell us how much it weighed. Inside that vulnerable body, the front cranium of that man, there lived a mind so endowed with imagination and mathematical ability that it could follow the stars far out into space and get to know more about them than most of us know about the floor we walk over. The universe may be immense and limitless, but so also are the mind and spirit of man.
Have you ever thought about what exists inside other people, perhaps your friend? Have you ever tried to imagine yourself as someone else, to think what it would be like to be him for a while? If you have, don’t you find yourself on the threshold of a mystery as great as the mystery of the universe, being forced to recognise that in another human personality there is something just as difficult to measure and understand, that calls for every bit of imagination you’ve got in just the same way as the stars claimed it from Eddington? You would think, wouldn’t you that the mother and father of a happy family would know each other through and through? Sometimes they think they do, but sometimes one will say to the other “I wish I could be you for a five minutes”. But I know I can never know what it Isn’t it strange that although we think we are so near together, we can never think each other’s thoughts, or know really what it is like to be the other!
Yes, each one of us is a mysterious universe and some men have been as frightened by the mysterious otherness of people around them as the men I have told you about have been frightened by the enormity of space and time.
Where does all this lead us to? There is something we yet have to find if life is to make sense for us. Before the time of Jesus, the pagan philosophers and writers could not help but take a tragic view of life. Just as the scientist sees puny man struggling on a tiny speck of matter in a vast universe that cares nothing for him, so the Greek poets saw man as a helpless creature struggling vainly in the toils of fate – a fate as inexorable as the laws of science. It was Jesus and Jewish thought through him that made life worth while and brought joy and hope into a life of suffering and pain crises and defeat. For him the heart of the universe was warm It was Jesus and Jewish thought through him who made life worth while in spite of its suffering who brought joy and hope to carry us through crisis and defeat. For him there was this other universe – this personal universe – and the heart of this was warm. Perhaps nothing appals us so much as the thought of the utter coldness of space – if we pass out of the earth’s atmosphere into the space beyond it, we pass into a region of intense cold where in spite of the sun’s rays, the temperature drops almost to absolute zero. Except where there are bits of matter like the sun or our earth, that is what the universe is like. But Jesus showed that there was another reality to which we could turn for the warmth and courage that are necessary if we are to get over our feeling of helplessness and insignificance. He spoke of God as our Father because he wanted people to know that what held us together was something warm and loving. For him God made every struggle worth-while and life worth living. He could have known nothing about our scientific knowledge of the universe, but he did know only too well what a tiny helpless creature man was if he tried to fight on his own, alone and unsupported against the immense forces of evil in the world. I don’t think young people children need to be told that life is worth living; they know it better than most adults. But they have yet to meet the responsibilities, the rebuffs, the disillusion and the deception of the adult world. If they are to meet all this, to endure it without losing their faith their courage and their energy they need a conviction about life, or at least a feeling about it that gives it real significance. They need to be able to feel that at the heart of the universe there is something warm and tender, not the cold logic of the mathematician or the bitter cold of interstellar space. If life is really as trivial and as passing a thing as the scientist’s description of the universe make it seem then either there is no point in going on with life at all, or the one thing left to do is to get the maximum of pleasure for ourselves out of it. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”, a policy that leads only to despair within us.
There are sure to be several of you who feel that religion is “all bunk”. I would agree that there is much in it that is humbug, mumbo jumbo, even evil. But beware lest you ignore something in it that we need at the very centre of our lives. Something that makes sense of this life of these millions of tiny creatures crawling about on the speck of matter we call the earth. This something exist in the Christian religion in the sort of life that Jesus gave us. It is nothing distant, supernatural, mystical – but something quite real to all of us. When Jesus said that God was our Father he made us see that at the centre of our existence is something human and warm and loving, that it is love and friendships that makes sense of life. If we can accept this - the universe ceases to be terrifying; we find ourselves at home in it.
[At the bottom of the final page there appears a manuscript note in handwriting that is not Kenneth Barnes’ which reads “Is this a continuation of the previous page ( ie the paragraph that ends “a policy that leads only to despair within us.”) – or a serafs?]
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 26