A few weeks ago I enjoyed listening to singer - songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae speaking on the first episode of the Radio 4 series ‘Living for the City.’ Her description of growing up in Leeds, hopping on and off buses, and walking for miles to get from A to B, always with a song in her head, took me back to my own childhood.
Church and faith were a huge part of Corinne's life growing up and continue to run as a thread through her work. Corrine’s first husband tragically died in 2008 and her song ‘walk on’, released in 2016 speaks of continuing through difficult times. There are strong echoes of scripture: ‘There’s a light, that shines in the darkest night. There’s a whisper in the silence….. The stars and the constellations know your name!’ These final lines of the song were a revelation to her – the idea that everyone is known and is valued, has a place, and there’s cosmic significance, and no-one is forgotten.
Hundreds of years ago the Psalmist looked to the stars and pondered the apparent insignificance and transient nature of human life. He asked: ‘When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?’ (Psalm 8.3-4). The Psalmist answered his own question: "You have made him little lower than the angels." He knew from his own experience that the creator of the night sky is also a God who is intimately engaged with every moment of human life. He had experienced God’s love and knew that we are cared for, that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139.14); eternally precious in God‘s sight.
The night sky with its shooting stars, comets and moving planets and sheer immensity has always fascinated people. One of my earliest memories of looking up at the night sky was one clear night on a camping holiday beside the River Swale near Richmond. I remember feeling shivers down my spine as my dad told my sister and I how we were staring back into the past, hundreds and thousands of years, and that some of the stars we were looking at may no longer exist. Looking at the night sky as a child raised some interesting questions of existence for me. Like idealist philosopher Bishop Berkeley, who postulated that the tree in the quad ‘continued to be since observed by yours faithfully, God’, I wondered in what sense the stars we observed continued to be because we observed them and whether in fact we might continue to be forever after if God kept us forever in his sight.
That same night, I also thought of my grandparents many miles away in Richmond, Surrey. I imagined them stood at the top of the Terrace Gardens, watching the same night sky. A few years later and the romantic song from ‘An American Tale’, ‘Somewhere out there’ had become a favourite in my walking, day-dreaming, star-gazing, repertoire: ‘And even though I know how very far apart we are it helps to think we might be wishin' on the same bright star. And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby it helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky,’
As we approach remembrance-tide my thoughts have been turning to the ways in which the stars can bring a feeling of connectedness with the past. Somehow the night sky can seem to hold all the memories of lives lived before us, of loved ones we once star gazed with. The stars hold the memories of the wars fought and the fallen we now commemorate. The stars we will watch tonight are the same stars that shone over the soldiers sleeping in dugouts or quietly working digging more trenches, putting up barbed wire, or keeping watch on night patrol. They are the stars which have shone out over the tears shed for the sons, brothers and husbands killed in action. The stars we watch tonight are the stars which shone over the cheers and laughter, singing and dancing, and church bells ringing as the world celebrated an end to war 100 years ago.
Tonight when we look out at the stars, perhaps we may spare a thought and a prayer for people who are hungry or homeless or caught up in wars today. And (particularly as we respond to the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), I wonder, will people look up at the stars in one hundred years from now and thank us for the sacrifices we have made today for the precious people of tomorrow?
God bless,
Camilla