Reading the Paper

As a retiree, I am fortunate to be able to indulge in a slow beginning to my morning, drinking my coffee and reading assorted online newspapers. Of late, the news has been depressing. But on November 30, there was a confluence of news that made me smile with appreciation and gratitude, with awe and wonder.

First, there was an article in the NY Times about a Dutch church in The Hague which has taken in a family of asylum-seekers, a family from Armenia which has been in Holland for 9 years. Exploiting a centuries old tradition that government authorities cannot enter a church during worship, the church is holding round-the-clock worship to protect this family. This continuous cycle of worship had been going on for a month as of the day the article was published.

The closing of the article read, “… after initially using local preachers to deliver the service, the church has now reached out to others and has received offers of help from some 500 people from different churches as far away as Belgium. That support gives the locals strength to carry on, hoping that they can open talks with lawmakers and the government about the family’s plight. ‘As long as it’s useful to contribute to the dialogue, we will continue with the church service…’”  The article did not mention God by name, but I felt like God’s fingerprints were all over the story.

I am addicted to the weekly essays called “Modern Love” in the NY Times. Some weeks are better than others – some stories are appalling and others are profoundly moving. On November 30, a young woman wrote about being confronted with a diagnosis of bowel cancer in her 33-year-old partner and, looking for a distraction, she immersed herself in a British TV program called “Love Island.” On this “reality’ program, assorted people are assembled in a remote place in hopes they will fall in love, and the TV audience gets to vote on the best couple. The writer was looking for love and hope.

“It gave me comfort to see these love stories taking place outside of the dirty context of reality. May you never see the person you love with tubes running out of their body, I wished for them, these beautiful couples who were all years younger than me, though I considered myself young, and too young for what was happening…”

The story concluded, “I believed in the radical possibility of love, the radical stupidity of it, of letting myself fall. I believed, too, in the maelstrom of emotional energy that my screen had been transmitting nightly, restoring my faith, or something like it. To see that even under the most cynical of circumstances, love would find a way through adversity.” She never said what “faith” had been restored, and she never, in fact, mentioned God – for all we know she might be an atheist – but whether she would acknowledge it or not, I saw God’s fingerprints all over her story.

In The Washington Post, again on November 30, my eye was caught by an article entitled, “Astrophysicists Count all the Starlight in the Universe.”  I will never be an astrophysicist or even a physicist – I cannot get my head around what they do. But the article gave me goosebumps.

“The universe shines with the light of some billion trillion stars. A team of astrophysicists recently used a satellite to sum up all these stars’ light, measured in particles called photons. Let there be numbers: By their estimate, over the history of the universe, stars have emitted 4 times 10-to-the-84th-power photons into the visible universe (that’s a 4 followed by 84 zeros).”

Yes, the author really said, “Let there be numbers” – I didn’t put that there. But if his report does not evoke awe and wonder, try this: “The team used 739 blazars to survey starlight across history. The closest blazar was created 200 million years ago. The most distant blazar gave the scientists a view as long ago as 11.6 billion years. (The universe is about 13.8 billion years old.) The stars really began to bloom when the universe was just 2 billion years old. Star formation reached its peak a billion years later and then began a slow decline as it aged.”  God’s fingerprints again? Sometimes I wonder if even God is awe struck by the sheer extravagance of creation – a billion stars would have been amazing on their own, but there are a billion trillion stars out there – and we are the beneficiaries of their light.

All of this is to say that I think I will keep reading the papers, but I will also keep looking for the glimmers of good news that are buried there.

 

If anyone would like to read the articles, they can be found at:

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/11/30/world/europe/ap-eu-netherlands-church-asylum-seekers.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/style/modern-love-marooned-on-love-island.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/29/astrophysicists-count-all-starlight-universe/?utm_term=.d49b616b0910

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