Blaise Pascal observed that there is an 'infinite abyss' within us that cannot be filled by finite things. Whether or not one agrees with all of Pascal's theology, he recognised something deeply human. We carry a longing that possessions, achievements and pleasures never quite satisfy.
We Went in Search of Darkness
A few winters ago, my wife and I travelled to the Galloway Forest for a reason that sounds rather odd when you first hear it. We went looking for darkness. How can you see darkness, but we did.
We found it.
I have lived all my life in towns and cities where darkness is never quite dark. Streetlights glow, houses spill light through curtains, and somewhere in the distance there is always the orange haze of civilisation. But Galloway was different. When night settled over the forest, it felt as though someone had extinguished the world.
It was the darkest darkness I have ever known.
Though, as I write that, I catch myself smiling. How can anyone see darkness? It is one of those curious semantic contradictions. Yet you know exactly what I mean. The darkness itself became almost visible because everything else had disappeared.
Then, slowly, our eyes adjusted.
Above us stretched more stars than I had ever imagined possible. The sky was crowded with them. They did not merely decorate the heavens; they overwhelmed them. Standing beneath that vast canopy, I felt wonderfully small.
That memory returned to me last night as my wife and I began reading Genesis together.
The opening verses have always fascinated me.
'The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.'
Try to imagine that. No sunrise. No moonlight. No stars. No horizon. No colours. Only darkness.
It is almost beyond imagination because none of us has ever experienced such a world. Even on the darkest night, starlight still reaches us across unimaginable distances. Genesis asks us to think beyond even that, to a time before there was any created light at all.
Then comes one of the most profound sentences ever written:
'Let there be light.'
Light is God's first gift to creation.
Before forests and oceans, before birds, before human beings, there is light. It is as though God first prepares a world in which life, beauty and relationship can flourish.
Later, God fashions the sun, the moon and the stars. They serve practical purposes, marking seasons and days, but throughout Scripture they become much more than celestial objects. Again and again, they awaken wonder.
No one expresses that better than David:
'When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place, what is man that You are mindful of him?'
What strikes me is where David begins. He does not begin by examining himself. He begins by looking upwards.
That movement fascinates me.
Much modern thinking begins with the self. Who am I? Why am I here? What gives my life meaning? David arrives at those questions differently. He contemplates the heavens until his own existence becomes a question before God.
The stars diminish his ego, but enlarge his soul.
I sometimes wonder whether that is one reason God filled the night sky with such extravagant beauty. Not because He needed somewhere to hang the stars, but because we need reminding of two truths that seem impossible to hold together. We are astonishingly small, yet deeply loved.
Without God, the night sky can leave us feeling insignificant. We are tiny creatures living on a tiny planet circling one ordinary star among billions.
With God, those same stars tell a different story. The One who called galaxies into being also knows our names.
That thought has followed humanity across the centuries. Shepherds watching their flocks, sailors navigating unknown seas, poets, astronomers and ordinary people standing in quiet places have all sensed that the night sky awakens something difficult to explain. Beauty seems to summon us beyond ourselves.
Blaise Pascal believed there is an infinite emptiness within us that finite things cannot satisfy. Whether or not one agrees with every aspect of his theology, he recognised something profoundly human. We carry a longing that success, possessions and pleasure never quite fill.
The stars seem to touch that longing.
C. S. Lewis wrote about sehnsucht, that deep, aching desire for something beyond this world. We cannot reach the stars, yet somehow, they awaken a homesickness for a place we have never seen.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning to them in my own writing.
They have become more than part of the landscape. They remind me what it means to be human. We stand somewhere between dust and infinity, creatures of earth who cannot stop looking upwards.
Genesis begins in darkness.
It ends its opening chapter with humanity made in the image of God beneath a sky filled with lights.
And the Bible closes with an even more astonishing promise: a world where night itself is no more because God's presence is its light.
The story begins in darkness, passes through starlight, and ends in a light that no longer needs the sun.
There is deep hope in that movement.
The stars are magnificent, but they are not our destination. They are signposts, quietly reminding us that our deepest longing is not for the heavens themselves, but for the One who hung them in place.
