Exegesis on Galaxy Clusters

There can be thousands of galaxies in a galaxy cluster. One of our larger ones has a mass of three quadrillion suns and is a billion light years across.

It’s out there. To us, a speck. But useful. We employ it as a young child might a toy magnifying glass, hovering over a crack in the sidewalk, peering deeper and deeper, prying into the affairs of the edgeless cosmos.

Lemurs don’t know about galaxy clusters. At night they look up into tamarind trees, choose one juicy leaf after another, and lounge the whole day long. They settle all their disputes quietly, through ‘stink fights’.

The poet of Psalm 8 didn’t have access to an infrared telescope, or means to launch it if he had. He knew some names of constellations, coined in Mesopotamia. Also knew the startling fabric of the Milky Way, and strained to see beyond its lazuli-blue lace.

And what he saw were the irises of Yahweh. And forgetting his personal conflict, dropped to his knees and uttered a question:

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained, what are mortals that you are mindful of them, what are humans, that you care for them?

It’s a question we’ve since vivisected, data-mined, and tied to a chair to beat out our proprietary answers. And every answer brings another stinking war. All the while failing to see it was never a question to be answered, but a possibility, to be held: spellbound, enrapt, in awe of being. All of us, huddling together in perfect humility.