“And God made the great expanse, divided it, and carving a place between the water beneath the great expanse and the water below. God called the great expanse the heavens. And there was evening, and there was morning. Second day” (Genesis 1:7-8).
When did God create the stars? Think about it, in the poem that begins the story of the Divine and humanity, when were the great, bright spheres of light and heat formed and set to burning? Was it at the moment light was created or later, at the division of earth and sky?
Our current understanding of the universe is that stars are a good bit younger than the universe. It’s thought that the first stars did not take shape until about one-hundred million years after the “Big Bang.” In the epochs of universal time that’s not as big a span as it seems to us, but it’s still quite a long time before hydrogen began to coalesce with its brother and sister atoms and create enough energy to ignite.
As we understand it, those stars were different than the ones we know today. They burned hotter and used up their fuel faster than ones like our sun. And they were big. Really big, even for stars.
It’s these early stars that have helped us understand how connected we are to the universe that surrounds us. In the hot, turbulent, early universe only the simplest elements—hydrogen, helium—could survive. But inside the hearts of the earliest stars, elements combined and combined again creating heavier and heavier elements. Along with the next few generations of stars that each lived a little longer and burned a little cooler, elements such as oxygen, carbon, and iron were forged and then, during the star’s violent death, blown out into the universe.
Those elements are what coalesced into the ground beneath our feet, the air in our lungs, and the bodies in which we live. Parts of us have been, I guess you could say, carved out of the universe—the great expanse that surrounds our little planet—in order to give our world and everything in it a shape and form.
It’s this that makes me think stars first began to shine in the darkness when those waters above and below were divided. Sure, they are sources of light, but I think we are being led to contemplate how they once were and now still are part of us. Once all was one. And God chose not to create something else but to sculpt creation out of what was there. And while it ever after would be distinct in shape and form, forever holding parts within it of what lies around it: the Earth contains parts that the formed the sun, the seas pieces of what made the Earth, and within us, bits of it all.
Oh all of us are different, just like the stars in the expanse above. But down to our atoms, we are more alike than we realize. Each one of us contain the iron and carbon formed light-years away, millions of years ago. The vastness of the heavens above us is somehow a part of who each of us is.
And through one another, we touch that great expanse.
Creator of the stars of night, in love you formed the lights of day and night, the flowers, trees, birds, and us. As we begin our year beneath the winter sky, help us to see the bright shining stuff of stars in one another just as we see your hand in the vastness above us. Remind us that all of it, every bit of creation, was formed from the same love and shares in that love.