We Are Stardust...

Credit:Hubble Space Telescope NASA/ESA.




In her TED presentation, Jill Tarter, said:"We are the products of a billion year lineage of wandering stardust." This is no small thing to have accomplished so far! I think that God Spark within us is seeking, as, Rilke puts it:

"God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going."

See, I think our value and gift to our world is to find our greatness and to be that to the best of our ability. This is why I have a problem with the underlying premise of the Girl effect, a video that the Nike Corporation, among other groups, trying to make a difference, is promoting. On the face of it, to improve a girl's life through education, I am all for that. But the conclusion, that then, a girl is valuable because her education will lead to a more productive contributor to the economy of her village and the world is where I have the problem. There is even a subtle anchoring of the idea that getting her a cow (cash-cow) to upgrade her worth, that to me, is even more disturbing.

Now, I belong to a community whose mission, in the 166 years we have been Catholic teaching sisters, has been to educate women. Our visionary foundress, Marie Rose Durocher, believe that if you educated women, you could change the world. She believed they had the most profound influence over men and children. We believe that the value of an educated woman is not to primarily shore up the economic system of the world but to use her confidence, intelligence, creativity, talent, passion, thirst for knowledge, love and faith to excel and to find new ways to improve her life, the life of her family, loved ones and community. She is of value because of the "Stardust Effect" that all humans have as we seek out ways to express that God Spark. We came here first and foremost to embody the Divine, not be a cog in some one's money machine.

At a time when so much focus is on economics and the money game and how corrupted it has become, it should become crystal clear to us that we have all become slaves to money. The reason, ultimately, that we have the huge problem with human trafficking and slavery in this world is that we have all become slaves to keeping the money game going. It just seems acceptable to our prevailing paradigm that we are here to keep the money game afloat. It is a common thing in the public educational system in the U.S. to cut "the soft classes" like art and music if we are short on money. These classes are the very way that humans continue to stay in touch with their Stardust Effect. It is the very food of our souls. Maybe we do not value the Stardust Effect at all because it is priceless, free, abundant and no one can make a buck on it, yet, it may be the very thing that saves us from our own extinction.

It seems like the changes that need to take place in our world, at the moment to solve the climate change crisis, end poverty and war, have adequate health care for all, end human trafficking and slavery, choose to see clean water, air, and earth as our sacred duty to insure, and thus to save and improve our world, our species is unwilling to make because of economics. We are slaves who have forgotten the Stardust Effect.

Actually, if the truth be known, the goodness in our species is there and the majority of us would move heaven and earth to bring this whole grand idea of life on planet earth back into balance, but we have to wake up to our power. We have to ask ourselves on a day to day basis, "how am I contributing to the illusion that money is the most important thing?" As a shop keeper, I refuse to commercialize Christmas. I put up Christmas Decorations December 1st. I don't follow the "marketing trends," instead I listen to my heart and create beauty and ideas that I love. They always speak to my customers.

Developing our creativity and wonder should be at the top of our curriculum list when we design schools to really bring the best out in our children. The world is falling apart before our very eyes in every major area: education, government, economy, medicine, religion, the list goes on, because it needs to. It's time we reclaimed our original blessing, and started remembering the words to that little song Joni Mitchell made famous in the 60's: "We are stardust, we are golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." It's time!