Believing in entanglement

Star murmurs: Advent day five

‘Awe is a kind of salvation.’

Welcome to Star Murmurs, a poetry Advent Calendar from The Green Chapel. If you’ve missed any of the days so far, you can find them all on The Green Chapel homepage.

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Harmony

The psalmist declared
that if we were silent
the rocks themselves would cry out.
But they're not waiting for us,
he just wasn't listening.

Listen.
Clearly I am not the sum of my prayers,
that is unless Christ looks nothing like
what we have been taught.

Believe me, Christ
looks nothing like
what we have been taught.

Earlier in life
I had the habit of going out each night
to look at the stars. You cannot stand
beneath the chasm of the sky
and not fall out of yourself.

Are we not listening?
The original sin was believing
we could be separate from everything else.

Many people, after being hurt,
close themselves off.
Why risk another loss?
I, on the other hand, attempt to fill my brokenness
by dragging intimacy into me.
None of this works.

The word diabolical means 
to throw apart.
The word disaster means to become disconnected
from the stars.

Listen.
Awe is a kind of salvation.

I really don't deserve all this—
to be able to show my daughter Jupiter's moons
through the same lens I first saw them.

We don't deserve it: this, all of this,
but here it is.
Doesn't that say something?
What are the stones trying to tell us?

Love is the leap of faith
that shows the chasm was never really there.
If only we believed in entanglement,
instead we are sold self-care.

Alone, we are godless.
So of course we're all miserable,
told over and over
that the individual is absolute.

The devil bathes in the first person.

We spend more time looking into screens than eyes.
Slowly we are reversing the incarnation.
Slowly we are loosening our threads of connection.

Listen. You belong here—
under the moon-song, the tree-song,
the rising-sun song.
Listen—
it's all the same song,

and if we pay attention,
we might find the harmony.

©Gideon Heugh, Naming God

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I wrote this poem around three years ago, on the night I took the picture above. I’ve had that telescope since I was ten, and I still vividly remember the wave of awe and wonder that hit me when I looked through it and saw Jupiter’s four largest moons, and Saturn’s rings, and the silver-gold smudge of the Andromeda galaxy.

There is a seeming paradox to awe, in that it both shrinks and expands us. It beautifully diminishes our ego, reminding us of how small we are amid the vastness of the universe, yet also allowing us to transcend that ego. When we get our of our selves, we can see that we are part of something else—something good and enormous and goddish.

Awe, then, is like love. For love, real love, is a transcendence. It is an expansion beyond the bounds of our selves, a letting go of the smallness of ego in order to enter into something far greater.

Awe, wonder and love disintegrate us in order that we might integrate into a larger web of belonging and meaning. This connection is everything, and is a theme I return to again and again in my poems.

Keep believing in entanglement, friends. Keep making that leap of faith out of your self.

Gideon x

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NB: the poem isn’t formatted the same way here as it is in print. Substack is great in many ways, but it’s not so good when it comes to changing text alignment. This picture shows you the original formatting (and slightly different wording. The temptation to keep tinkering with poems is strong!) GH

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