“If you soar like an eagle, even if you make a nest in the space between the stars I can bring you down, says the Holy One” (Obadiah 1.4).
I don’t mean to worry anyone but, we can’t stay here. And by here, I mean this planet. It is doomed to be destroyed either in the fire of the sun’s expansion or the ice of its dying light. We have to leave, to head out into the depths of the universe. At least, we do sometime in the next five-billion years.
Obadiah couldn’t have imagined what would happen when the sun begins to die. And the idea of making a home in the space between the stars would have seemed inconceivable. But, yet, here is this image of a people in flight, soaring miles above the Earth. Soaring so high, in fact, that they might live among the stars.
It would almost be easy to use a passage such as this to discourage humanity’s exploration of the darkness that surrounds our little world. Daring to cross the gulf of the Heavens Above is a mark of hubris, of believing that we are not bound to the ground beneath our feet but able to walk in the great gulf where only God should sojourn. And while I don’t agree at all with this sentiment, there’s something to which we should take heed in Obadiah’s words.
Someday our sun will die. In its death throes it will likely bake the earth into a lifeless cinder and leave the worlds beyond ours irreparably changed. There is a high probability that within this galaxy or others there are places enough like this one where humanity can continue to grow and learn and love. And when we find those places, one of the things we will need to leave on the shores of this world is our pride—our belief that somehow all that we have discovered is ours to use and change as we see fit. Because, just like this one, those worlds will hold life of flora and fauna, sea and sky who have as much claim to the soil of those worlds as the trees and animals of our world do to the Earth.
Obadiah’s words, then, are not a warning against venturing beyond our own atmosphere but how we should act and think when we do. We can fly not only as high but higher than eagles, and in the ISS we’ve built a little nest in space. But that doesn’t mean any of these spaces are somehow beyond the love of God. And where that love is, we find what God treasures.
But the prophet’s words aren’t just applicable to our exploration of other worlds. This one here, on which we live, is loved and cherished by God as is every living thing upon it—animate and inanimate. And we would do well to remember that while we can leap great distances and even change the landscape around us, this world is not ours alone. The care we must take to new worlds is the same we must use now.
Or, else, we might not be around to worry about our dying star.
Holy One, you have declared all of Creation is yours—formed and loved by you. Teach us to love this world and the life upon it as you do so that, when the day comes, we might know how to care for the worlds beyond this one.