Do You Still Look at the Stars?

The world is something to behold, not just use

Featuring L.M. Sacasas in the Other Ways of Being series.

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A FEW MONTHS BACK, I took advantage of some pleasant weather to sit outside with my lunch and a notebook to begin working through a few plans. I didn’t get far, and was soon distracted by a handful of sparrows gathered a few feet from me, taking their turns splashing in a puddle left over from the previous night’s rain. This was not exactly a rare sight. Where I live in north central Florida you can hardly find an outdoor dining area which is not also frequented by house sparrows. But there was something about how these particular birds were carrying on that captured my attention.

I have no particular training in the study of birds beyond some amateur birding, but it seemed to me that they were simply enjoying themselves. Perhaps their activity served a more utilitarian purpose, but my eyes and ears told me otherwise as I observed them merrily playing in the water. They were delighting in a manner that was appropriate to their nature, of course, but it was delight.

The more I considered it the more it revealed this profound truth: we are made to take delight, all creatures according to our kind. I have now come to believe that this delight is not only our highest purpose, a kind of play that bleeds into worship, but also an indispensable way of knowing the world.

In that moment, it seemed to me that I had passed, for a time, into a different way of being—rare and fragile. In this mode, I didn’t feel harried by a pressing schedule or pressured by the tyranny of the urgent. Nor did I feel guilty for failing to be productive. Here, in this moment, I sensed a different relation to the things of this world, one that was not predicated on the use I could make of them nor on determining their value.

The whole episode came upon me unbidden, and the truth is I didn’t set out to learn a lesson or to derive a moral parable. It was, for me, a rare case of being at leisure as it has been classically understood: a stillness that allowed me to receive what was there before me for what it was. At the end of it all, I had only an experience of useless delight and gratitude to show for it.

CONSIDER NOW not only the sparrows, but the stars. Most nights as a child, when I looked up at the sky from my suburban backyard, I could make out a few dozen stars at best. I remember being especially fascinated by the three stars that together formed Orion’s belt. I hadn’t yet come to recognize the constellation as a whole, but I marveled at how these three stars lined up uniformly.

When I was eight years old, my family and I hopped in our car after dark and drove from our home in Miami to one of the smaller Florida Keys. We were headed there to catch a glimpse of Halley’s Comet, which was making one of its periodic visits to the inner solar system. In our search for the comet, away from the blinding lights of the city, I was stunned to see hundreds, maybe thousands, of stars blanketing the sky above me. I couldn’t know then just how rare such a sight would be throughout the rest of my life.

Many years later, I can’t help but feel a tinge of melancholy when one of my daughters looks up at our suburban sky with its few dozen stars, and declares, “Look how many stars there are!” I’ve tried to encourage my children to look up. One of the first words my oldest daughter spoke was “moon.” But I know that what they are able to see pales in comparison with the sight that most human beings have enjoyed throughout human history.

The heavens may declare the glory of God, but only if you can see them.

My experience with the sparrows and the less idiosyncratic experience of the light-polluted sky illuminated for me how technology can act on our vision. We are habituated into a mode of life that doesn’t reward, and actively inhibits, our capacity to see what is there before us. Our gaze is monopolized by our devices, and the demands of efficiency and productivity steal from us the leisure that, as Josef Pieper wrote, is “a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality.”

We are increasingly existing within the confines of a human-built reality that seals us off from both the wisdom to be found in the immanent order of creation and the wonder elicited by creation’s transcendent qualities. It should come as no surprise that so many of us feel alienated, numb, and demoralized.

THIS CONDITION, while perhaps novel in its scale and scope, emerges from a spirit not altogether unique to modern societies. Something deeper and more mysterious is at play, something which might be better described not merely with the phenomenological language of “being in the world” but with something more thoroughly theological.

“Man's greatness and wretchedness are so evident,” Blaise Pascal argued in one of his pensées, “that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions.” Genesis 1-3 gives us just such an account.

After offering us a sweeping, hymnic account of creation in cosmic perspective, the narrative descends to the dust. In intimate detail, we are brought to a Garden prepared for a man whose name echoes the ground out of which he is fashioned and into which God breathed life. Within this garden, the man encounters both the tree of life and, forebodingly, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But there are other trees and plants and all of these, we are told by the narrator, were “pleasing to the eye and good for food.” What is striking about this bit of detail is that it immediately confirms what we already know: that the world which God has fashioned is indeed beautiful. The garden prepared as a sanctuary for the human creature was not only meant to provide for his material needs, but also for his aesthetic satisfaction and sheer delight.

This beauty, as all beauty must be, was entirely gratuitous. In God’s gracious economy, beauty leads the way. Before we learn to make good use of a thing, we must behold and delight in it. Perhaps it is only by first delighting in a thing that we can then discern how to put it, not just to effective use, but to a use that can truly be called good.

But then we come to the account of the fall and its consequences for humankind, where the beauty and utility of these trees is noted once again. In a tightly wrought sentence of enormous consequence, the narrator tells us that “when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.” I’ve read and taught this text many times over the years, but it is only recently that I have noticed a curious inversion.

The description of the trees from the second chapter is repeated here but with respect to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of which Adam and Eve had been forbidden to eat. Eve judges that this tree was also good for food and pleasing to the eye, but now the order is different.

Beauty no longer leads the way and the tree’s instrumental value takes precedence in Eve’s evaluation. Perhaps this is not a fact we ought to make much of, but Hebrew narratives are sparse and carefully crafted; every word counts. I’ve come to believe that this slight inversion matters a great deal.

Throughout this account, Adam and Eve lose their confidence in the goodness of God, and they begin to think that the only way of being in the world is by seizing rather than receiving. The knowledge they came to desire was not a knowledge rooted in delight, but a knowledge rooted in the will to power.

The instrumental value of things took precedence over the gratuity of beauty, and a new way of being in the world emerged. In this mode, the world ceased to be a gift to be received with delight, wonder, and gratitude. Instead, it became a world of scarcity, competition, shame, and exploitation.

WHILE THESE CHAPTERS give us an account of the tragedy of our situation, they also offer us hope, by reminding us that there is, in fact, another way to exist in the world. A way of seeing. “Man’s real work,” as Robert Capon Farrar put it, “is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are.” “That is, after all, what God does,” he adds, “and man was not made in God’s image for nothing.”

But our eyes are now trained to see first the use of such things. So, we must undergo a counter-formation that sanctifies our vision if we are to look at the things of this world and truly love them. We must learn again to first behold and delight, eliciting wonder and gratitude.

Beauty must once again lead the way, and we must become the sort of people who can see it and labor for a world that does not occlude it. In this, as in all things, we follow the One who urged us to consider the lilies and to mind the sparrows, the One who is Himself the bright Morning Star.

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📰 Read in print: Here’s the link to a quick tool for those who want to get their hands on this essay and read it analog style.

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L.M. Sacasas
Editor & Writer

L. M. Sacasas is the Executive Director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and the author of the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. He is also a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum and a Contributing Editor at Comment Magazine.

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📸 Photography by Elizabeth Sanders

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