A Random Post and Holiday Greetings to conclude my Blog "Year"

 1. After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem.

2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

Skipping ahead...... 

7 Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. 

8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.” 

9 After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 

10 When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 

11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. 

12 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route. 

From The Gospel according to Matthew




Today's post is my first in more than a month.  Skiing has been great (best early conditions in Winter Park in 10 years!), Thanksgiving came and went and I simply have not had the time, or motivation to post. However, for some reason today's weekend interview in the Wall Street  Journal ignited my writing spirit. 

The interview was with Br. Guy Consolmagano  (who has a Doctorate in planetary science) Here are some bits from  the article (I have italicized the passages taken directly from the article-I would be happy to send a PDF copy of the article to any interested) that I found it most thought provoking: 

The Vatican’s Astronomer on God and the Stars

Brother Consolmagno, 66, grew up in Detroit as a self-described “Sputnik kid.” He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona, and then, at 37, joined the Jesuit order. At conferences or when meeting newsmen, he pairs a clerical collar with an MIT class ring. The outfit, along with his thick beard, has a way of confounding expectations.

Here is the introductory paragraphs that that caught my attention:

The Wise Men were led to Bethlehem, says the Gospel of Matthew, by a heavenly sign. “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” the Magi asked, “for we have seen his star in the east.” Two thousand years later, the question often posed to Guy Consolmagno, an American Jesuit brother with a doctorate in planetary science, is what that star perhaps was.

A supernova, the last detonation of a dying sun? No. “When supernovas occur, they leave a remnant,” Brother Consolmagno says. The magnificent Crab Nebula consists of the glowing ashes of a supernova that Chinese astronomers noted in 1054. Nothing similar is contemporaneous with Jesus: “Our radio surveys of the sky are complete enough, we would have seen the radio signal.”

Might the star have been a comet, blazing past Earth the way Hale-Bopp did in 1997? Probably not, given a lack of historical corroboration. “Nobody else talks about such a comet,” Brother Consolmagno says. Worse, spotting one in the ancient world wasn’t a good tiding: “Comets are always described as arbiters of doom.”

Maybe the star was a planetary conjunction—say, in 6 B.C., when calculations show that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn gathered together. This theory, Brother Consolmagno says, is everybody’s favorite. “The particular one in 6 B.C. that’s attractive is—they’re all right next to the sun, which explains why nobody actually saw it in the sky,” he says. “But the astrologers who can calculate these things would have calculated that they should all be there.”

Then again, perhaps the Star of Bethlehem was purely a literary symbol. “Caesar Augustus used a story like this, too,” Brother Consolmagno says, “as propaganda for why he should be the emperor and not his rivals. Maybe Matthew is saying: ‘Better than Caesar Augustus, we’ve got astrologers who could say this about Christ.’ ”

It might seem an odd line of inquiry, especially to a secular world that sees science and religion as separate, if not conflicting, domains. But Brother Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory and thus the pope’s chief astronomer, is accustomed to fielding offbeat questions with good humor. One of his books is titled “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?” His short answer: “Only if she asks!”

I confess that I chuckled at the article's assertion that the writer of Matthew was perhaps countering a piece of "fake news" spread by Caesar  Augustus (or his press secretary!) about a rumored cosmic event.  Some things in history are timeless!  

In reflecting further I could not help but think about the complicated, and intertwined role between religion and politics in human history.  Maybe because at various times in human existence the need to find meaning in life leads us to beliefs based on faith in something greater than ourselves which often conflicts with that of our secular rules of governance.  Certainly if one looks back at the Judeo-Christian history one finds times of both conflict and cooperation between the secular and the religious.  This is true from the time of the Pharaohs, through Roman Rule and down through the middle ages and yes to today.  Certainly the story of Christ  is one of conflict and upheaval with both the existing religious order (The Sanhedrin) and the secular rulers (Herod and later in the story of Christ, Rome).  With this background one cannot help but think of our own increasingly secular society it's conflicts with some traditional religious beliefs and the claims by many as to whose concept of morality is the "correct" one.

While I have no "pat" answers on "correct morality" I can only make this very personal comment:

I for one remain deeply rooted in a faith that our "moral" truths must come from  more than a collection of our own "internal ideas" built upon a series of random acts like the "big bang' and "evolution" (neither are fake news by the way).  It seems to me that to have any true meaning beyond ourselves first requires a belief that an eternal "god" exists.  For me  evidence of God's existence is revealed to us through our stories, traditions and those eternal truths found in places like that manger in Bethlehem a couple thousand years ago.  

With that personal Observation I bid you all adieu and of course:

 A Very Merry Christmas to all of you!

 he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.