Maybe a little cosmic perspective will help us now

Years ago, while reading Annie Dillard or maybe Kathleen Norris -- at any rate, some smart female author -- I was struck by the idea that there is something in each of us that is older than we are. Indeed, we carry around atoms that were part of stars that had once exploded.

As Kansas City area singer/songwriter Greg Tamblyn notes in his song "All These Atoms":

Fifteen billion years ago
The big bang was quite a show
All this time and now here we are, but
parts of you were once a star 

Greg might have been a billion or two years off on the age of the cosmos (today it's usually put at something like 13.7 billion years), but he's right that parts of you were once part of a star.

It's both a humbling and an encouraging idea, and I've just run across it again in Timothy Snyder's new book, On Freedom, a book I mentioned in passing recently on the blog here.

At one point in the book, Snyder writes about nuclear fusion, which, he says, can be -- and should be -- our source of energy for the future if we want to avoid the worst results of climate change that's being driven by human activity.

"When stars die," he writes, "they expand and then contract; and in doing so fuse more massive and more chemically complex elements, with more protons and neutrons. The building blocks of your body, molecules of carbon (six protons) and oxygen (eight), were created in this way by fusion inside a prior generation star. Our human bodies are archives of the universe, records of the life and death of stars."

Fusion, Snyder insists, is "the original source of almost all the energy needed by life on Earth. If we could harness it directly, a new kind of freedom would present itself."

I was pondering all this the other day as I was watering the newly expanded native plants Peace Garden at my church. The plants we put into Mother Earth on Oct. 27 are settling in for the winter so, we hope, they'll bloom in the spring, summer and fall of next year. But each of those plants also contains atoms from long-ago exploded stars. Which may be why Indigenous people here who retain their ancient culture understand that plants have been around a lot longer than humans and, thus, we should learn from them.

Plants and larger trees have ways of communicating with one another and helping each other to flourish even when they're quite different. It's a model humanity would do well to adopt, especially in the aftermath of a brutal election season that revealed to us both the best and the worst in humanity.

So I hope the star-carrying native plants that I now water once a week (today's my day again) will survive the winter and emerge with fresh strength and a lively future. And I hope the same will be true for those of us who are star-carrying animals, ones that puzzle over the meaning of life and of our purpose here. (And one of our purposes, surely, is to think about all of this.)

(The image of the Big Bang above today came from here and the caption there bears this note: "Image credit: Romolo Tavani via Getty Images")

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WHAT SOME CHRISTIAN VOTERS FORGOT OR IGNORED

Immigrants from Latin America and their descendants played a big role in the outcome of this year's presidential race. Now one of them, Miguel A. De La Torre, professor of social ethics and Latinx studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, has a sharp word to say from an evangelical Christian perspective to white evangelicals (and others) who supported the winner:

"I do have good news, my dearest white evangelicals. You, too, can be saved. Salvation is just as much for you as it is for those you have relegated to your margins. It begins with the rejection of eurocentric theology and philosophy. Like the rich young ruler who asked how to obtain salvation, the answer begins with putting away your idols, specifically this idol you call god. . .

"We all find our salvation, our liberation, when we live in radical solidarity with the oppressed of the earth, signified by the broken body of Jesus given unto us. Those at our margins whom we think we must save are the ones who will bring about our own salvation."