Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

When many of us were kids, our parents may have sung the nursery rhyme Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as a lullaby or bedtime prayer. Perhaps, our first delusion was born, and a powerful one, at that: a little personified star would check in and protect us overnight. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed a melody for the rhyme, and the popular tune is still with us today.

An image, the star, became a symbol of protection. Lest we forget, the printed symbol ‘star’ reminded us of protection, too. When introduced into our minds by lyrics, double doses of musical magic imprinted our imagination.

Signs and symbols control the world, not phrases and laws.
~ Confucius (b 551 BCE), Chinese thinker, social philosopher

Manipulations of human consciousness with myriad symbols is today’s whelming dilemma, and most Earthlings don’t get beyond symbols or the words that personify them. Even into physical maturity, education, proof, and common sense become secondary to the original perception of any symbol—we Earthlings don’t enjoy giving up our beloved images and symbols—whether tangible or intangible.

How I Wonder What You Are

The first star that really meant something to me in my preteens was the one that shone at Jesus’ birth. You’ll remember the star the three kings (or wise men or magi) saw in the Eastern sky? A star in the night sky leading men to a cradle was totally fascinating and seemed magical. I always marveled, ‘how I wonder what you are.’

As a too religiously committed youth, the word magic was barred from references to holy experiences and literal biblical interpretations, which had their own references in dogma, faithfully accepted. Nevertheless, hell and heaven, the devil and holy spirit were magical; I felt they must be very real yet invisible. The church and bible fit perfectly my boyhood curiosities and sensibilities, nay a fertile imagination prepared for more faith training by self-appointed moralists.

There was magic in being incessantly curious about an invisible deity; a deity that knew everything anybody did and said; a deity that logged all my ways, sinful or not, into a giant ledger. Salvation through grace by way of the deity’s son was the most magical of all, and quite a gamble. To insure salvation, I thought and spoke only goodness, behaving properly, too. How could I miss getting a golden crown as a reward in heaven for having been good on Earth?

The star, with all its metaphorical nuances, had become a symbol of both a grand magical protector and friend, and an invisible stalwart warden in a mythical, unachievable secure paradise. An innocent star’s rays of light had trickled down, tangled into intolerant ritual and song; the symbology had become unacceptable. No longer did I query ‘how I wonder what you are.’ I already knew the grim dogma the star represented. I grimaced, winced and winced, again.

Growing pains were occurring, and life was maturing. My friends and I discussed how scriptures’ interpretations were no longer matching our educations, sensibilities, or lifestyles. We had been trained to be sanctimonious; the psychological price for self-satisfaction, and the secrets pretense hid, were reckless.

The original star’s symbolism simply had to fade. The star had to return to what it was in the first place: an astronomical object like the Sun, without religious poetic spins put on the star’s performance.

Up Above the World So High

Some of us reared in time consuming, passionate evangelical churches have a tendency to be passionate in adulthood. Without intervention, we’d been trained by fundamentalists’ prerequisite salvation with its rapturous overtones of ‘up above the world so high.’ So, when there’s regard for revealing religious leaders’ bigotry and politics, some of us find paths to unconceal original truth by publishing ezines and blogs!

Unbeknownst to me and high school friends, and later to us college mates, a religious movement had already begun organizing in the 1950s and 60s. We had grown up in the Southern Baptist convention that would eventually show, in part, its rigorous movement into an extremist political right in the USA.

I saw how the dominant religions of nations were twisted and distorted by totalitarian movements, turned into civic religions where the goals of the movement or the state became the goals of the divine. The wars I covered were often fought in the name of one God or another. All in fact mocked the faiths they purported to defend.
~ Chris Hedges (b 1956), journalist, author, speaker, Presbyterian minister’s son; Masters Harvard Divinity School, Princeton Visiting Lecturer, Explanatory Reporting Pulitzer Prize 2002; 20-year foreign correspondent from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, the Balkans. Refer The Cambridge Forum; Google video.

If I hadn’t been a witling before age 33, I would’ve dashed away from ‘up above the world so high’ to the grounded Episcopalians before 1980!

Like a Diamond in the Sky

After a while of participating with Episcopalians and their performances of gorgeous music, I was invited to attend a service at a Unity church. There, I lived and breathed the next phase of social neutrality, and was introduced to cosmology (although I didn’t know it at the time), which became ‘like a diamond in the sky.’

I distinguished not all christians are evangelical; not all evangelicals are fundamentalists; not all fundamentalists are extremist or radical. Only the latter two obsess in bigotries and political power, thusly, might be identified as dominionists or reconstructionists. Christian Reconstructionism is a controversial religious and theological movement within Protestant forms of Christianity that seeks to enforce private and public (civil) enforcement and general normalization of moral commandments as interpreted from scripture into overall society. Refer Reference dot com.

To not know the bible is in some ways to be illiterate of the dominionists; it is naïve to look the other way as masculine energies, portrayed as divine, undermine cultures and societies at the expense of lives of women and children and men. To neglect the very roots that formed Western philosophies, art, literature, poetry and music is to fall into a myopic provincialism embraced by those who say everything in the bible is literally true, who dismiss any kind of intellectual inquiry, and who desire to rule as totalitarian saviors and vengeful masters of nations.

‘Like a diamond in the sky,’ the Sun, and its cyclic movements with constellations, were concentrated upon and cataloged over millennia by early literate and nonliterate humans. Their survival became meticulously heeded without notions of a nonexistent religion. Mythologies, or stories, reveal early humans personified and adored the Sun as God’s Sun—without which, where would they have lived?

… The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.
~ Thomas Berry (b 1914), Catholic priest of the Passionist order, cultural historian, cosmologist, ecotheologian, geologian.

Our constant curiosity is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead