Stardust with Minds and Hearts?

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I was captivated by the 2008 movie, Slumdog Millionaire. But apart from the intriguing plot about a slum-dwelling boy who is about to win the grand prize on the Indian version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” the beautifully filmed movie was a challenge to my faith.


The problem came from viewing scenes of the enormous slums where millions of people live in unimaginable poverty. It wasn’t the problem that many see, the one prompting the question, “How can a loving God allow this?” Poverty is our problem, seems to me. God depends on us to solve it, to properly care for our brothers and sisters, and we’re not doing a bang-up job.

No, the thought struck me that Christian theology teaches that God knows and loves each of those people, each one waiting in the long lines to use the communal latrines, each one looking for a way to eke out a living. This idea of God is pretty basic to Christianity at least.

Matthew’s gospel describes a pep talk Jesus gives to his disciples in which he tells them that God knows us intimately, that “even the hairs of your head are all numbered.” And the first letter of John says: “See what kind of love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God; and so we are.”

Since the questions surrounding Slumdog, I’ve asked myself similar questions at baseball games and events where large numbers gather. How can God know, and love, all these thousands of people, many of whom, presumably, never give God a thought? It’s much easier to imagine God’s love for people who know and love God, for people we know and love, and for people we see as “significant.” But the “unwashed millions?”

I like the popular idea heard often today that we are “stardust,” that everything that exists came from the heart of a massive star, eventually evolving into humans. It reminds us of our origins and that we are all made of the same stuff, us and the millions in the world’s slums and all the world’s prisons, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, John Boehner and Barak Obama, my new, next-door neighbors and even the teens who go by my house blasting their ear-splitting music. 

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The idea of humans as stardust is more poetic than scientific, however, and an example of what I call “religious substitution.” Religion has become spectacularly unattractive to many contemporary people, so ideas like humans-as-stardust is appealing as a substitute. (A program on a cable TV channel recently reported on “Sunday gatherings” of people who are atheist or agnostic. They like the idea of getting together on Sundays to sing and be together, but not as an expression of religion.)
 

But does the “stardust” idea really do it for us? It’s nice that we’re all made of the same stuff, but what real difference does it make? If that’s all there is, we’re still left in a cold, impersonal world where we live seven or eight decades, then pass to eternal oblivion. Contrast that with the idea presented in the gospels that we are children of a loving parent, who is ultimately responsible for the universe and all that it contains and that to God, no one is “dead.” To me, that difference makes the search for God worth it.

The other, obvious part of this Christian view is that if God is our parent, we are brothers and sisters. Instead of a vague philosophical idea about our common cosmic origin, Christianity gives us a real reason to view others in that way. Jesus came to show us how to be human, including recognizing God as father/mother, giving real meaning to the idea of the “human family.”

In a speech last year, Pope Francis said the economic crisis was really a human crisis, and told a rabbinic story about the building of the biblical Tower of Babel.

“It is said that when they were building the Tower of Babel, each brick, which took a large amount of time and resources to make, became extremely important, a national treasure. When a brick fell and broke, it was a national tragedy and the workman was punished. Yet, if a workman fell, that was not an issue. Today, it is the same – when the stock market falls, it is a national tragedy, but when a homeless person dies in the cold, it does not make the news. We have lost sight of the fact that the greatest treasure on this earth is each individual human person.”

In an encounter, or renewed encounter, with God’s love, Pope Francis said, we are “liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption. We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.”

Understanding that we’re stardust is nice, but it doesn’t motivate me to contribute to the well-being of others, including those in the world’s slums. Understanding that we all have God as our father/mother and are, therefore, brothers and sisters does. And it’s basic to a search for God.