Connecting the Stars

Themes: Science & Religion, Faith & Reason

Principle: Finding God in All Things (e.g., Astronomy, Star Constellations, Science)

What do you get if you connect all the stars together in the right order?

Little Timmy loved gazing up at the stars for long periods of time…

But he didn’t like having to stare straight up when he stood with his head cast straight back. Every time he did this, he would start to wobble and sway until he eventually fell to the ground.

So, if it were summer, he would lay down on the grass and if it were winter, he would either lay down in the snow in his winter gear or climb up on the side of the slanted doghouse roof and lay back against the angled roof.

From these positions, he would love to find the constellations like the Big Dipper, which is part of Ursa Major; or the Little Dipper, which is Ursa Minor; or Orion with its dimming star Betelgeuse (pronounced “beetle juice”).

Staring up at the sky made him feel connected to something so big—in fact, the biggest thing there is—everything. He would imagine space travel and how fast the universe is expanding and alien life and what that might be like. And he would imagine how far they would have to travel to be with us.

Several times, little Timmy would use his finger to point to try to connect some stars together in the right order to form a picture that he had seen in his connect-the-dot books. He connected up an umbrella, then a taxicab, then a donkey, and then a laptop computer.

A couple times, Timmy undertook the ambitious project of trying to connect all the stars together in the sky. But it didn’t take long before Timmy would forget whether or not he had included a particular star. Or, it didn't take long before Timmy would forget what pattern the stars he had already connected were forming. So, he would have to start all over again.

Connecting the stars in this way reminded Timmy of how big the universe is and how small his mind was to understand it all in the right pattern.

“What would you get,” Timmy sometimes wondered, “if you could connect all the stars in the sky in the right order?”

“The face of God!” Timmy one day exclaimed. “It made sense. What else could you possibly get?”

(Notice that the written version is slightly different than the oral version. The oral version is slightly different each time it is told.)

by Tony McCaffrey