Listening to the Stars

I read an article recently about Laurens van der Post, who wrote twenty-three books about growing up in South Africa. Particularly interesting to me were the accounts of his experiences with the Bushmen tribes that live around the Kalahari Desert. One story featured Van der Post sitting around a campfire with Bushmen under the starry expanse of the heavens.

The Bushmen asked him if he could hear the stars singing. Van der Post replied that he did not know what they were talking about. The Bushmen expressed great sorrow that this Afrikaner was deaf to the song of the stars. It seems like an apt metaphor for the situation that people find themselves in today.

It brings to mind the words of God at the end of the Book of Job. After thirty-six chapters of Job whining, God finally speaks to him out of a whirlwind. God begins by scolding Job: “Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” Then God speaks about the creation of the universe “when the morning stars sang together and all the children of God shouted for joy.”

The words of the psalmist also came to mind:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament shows His handiwork.
Day unto day utters speech,
And night unto night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor language
Where their voice is not heard.
Their sound has gone out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.

The Kalahari Bushmen are vibrantly aware of what these scriptures speak about. Theologians call it natural revelation. For the Bushmen this is not a religious doctrine. This is experiential Reality. This is not entirely foreign to us. That is why so many people prefer a walk in the woods to sitting in a pew. Even if we have not heard the stars singing, we have heard them whisper. We hear the mountains, lakes and rivers hum the divine melody.

Most of us know the magic of laying in a summer field watching shooting stars and losing ourselves in the heavens. The silent expanse consumes us. We recognize our heavenly home, even though we may not be able to verbalize it. Indigenous peoples who live outdoors are deeply aware of this Divine Reality. We indoor cavemen spend too much time looking down to notice what is above our heads.

This Song of the stars is the foundation of all true spirituality. This is what many Christians have forgotten. Christians tend to get stuck in the secondhand knowledge of scripture, tradition, sermons and books. For all the pious talk of having a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” most evangelicals are stuck in the quicksand of hand-me-down religion.

Most Christians – as well as Jews and Muslims and other “peoples of the Book” - tend to focus on what ancient prophets said about God long ago rather than accessing the living Word of God that is here and now. We fight over interpretations of ancient texts and neglect the Voice of God speaking in our heart and through the natural world.

We excommunicate each other, condemning each other to everlasting hell, because “they” do not understand God the way that “we” understand God; they do not experience God the way we experience God, and do not describe God with the words that we use. We “darken counsel by words without knowledge.” We fall into the sin of believing that only our religious tribe and our religious founder have the true gospel.

Yet I also see in people a desire for more. Through my podcasts and videos I have heard from Christians and ex-Christians around the world, who are frustrated with the cultural Christianity of today. They desire more than doctrinal and judgmental religion. They desire experiential spirituality. They want to hear the stars sing.

So I am simply suggesting that we take time to listen to the Song that is all around us, which formed the universe, and infuses the universe. When we listen carefully, then we notice what our species has always known, and which the Kalahari Bushmen have not forgotten. We recognize the heavenly tune, and recognize it as the voice of God. Then as children of God we can shout for joy and join the stars in the everlasting song.