Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Tell Me Who Your Makers Are
by Laura Chin' ‘23
CW: implication of religious homophobia
As a child, I often imagined how stars would feel, glittering and rolling in my little cupped hands. On winter nights, when clouds of dragons’ breath floated before my eyes, I would lie on my back in the driveway and gaze up at the hazy California sky, imagining that, if I just reached out a little further, I could know.
I grew up on an interesting cocktail of religions. Every Sunday morning, my family would pack into our little blue car and drive to the San Marino Presbyterian Church. There, my two sisters and I attended Sunday school and eventually learned to sit quietly in the pews and listen to the sermon, no matter how warm and stuffy the sanctuary became or how slowly Pastor O’Grady drawled. At night, the three of us would gather around my mother for bedtime stories from D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, jostling each other for glimpses of the illustrated monsters, men, and gods. At an annual family gathering in some glitteringly golden-red Chinese restaurant, I remember squinting at the jolly statue in the lobby, lost in quiet contemplation until my aunt noticed my staring. She told me it was the Buddha. And, many miles across the sea, brushed with salt and a gentle island breeze, I listened, wide-eyed, to my grandmother’s tales of a whole new pantheon of gods: powerful commanders of the earth, wind, sea, and sky, beings as old as time and chaos and darkness themselves.
As the years passed, my connection to divinity became further convoluted. In fifth grade, I kissed a girl named Sara. In sixth grade, I learned about Catholicism and a fun new definition for the word “hell.” In eighth grade, my grandmother sold her house in Honolulu and, with it, three generations of our family’s connection to the islands and their gods. In ninth grade, I was confirmed as a member of the Presbyterian Church. In eleventh grade, I came out as bisexual.
Since then, I’ve found both resolution and further complication. Last semester, I stumbled upon the foundation of a new religion at the top of Observatory Hill. Its creation myth claimed that the universe was formed not through the piercing of light into darkness, nor over the course of six long days, but rather in a series of cosmic spins and dips, the arbitrary product of very large objects crashing into each other or not, and then somehow we, glorified dust bunnies, came into this tenuous state of creation and eventual consciousness. In this religion, divinity lay in numbers, charts, computer models, and great, whirring telescopes and domes. In this religion, the Greek myths of my childhood were a system of measurement, a man-made method for conceptualizing the broad and sweeping sky. In this religion, there were no rules for love. For all we knew, the stars could be, and probably were, dead, and their light no more than final and fading breaths.
I still haven’t found a religion to claim as my own, a church or synagogue in which to take refuge from my own mortality. I haven’t decided whether I believe that god(s) live in volcanoes or the heavens, atop snowy mountains or hills or under branching trees. I know only that the universe is incomprehensibly old and, in her eyes, we are here for mere fractions of a second. I’ve learned that life as we know it could be nothing more than cosmic fluke—and, in that case, we may truly be alone amongst these barren and drifting planets. With life so precious and time a vast, horizonless ocean, and our beautiful blue-green marble of a world sick and likely dying, I am ever tempted to turn to the stars and ask, Where is your god? Tell me who I must pray to, what I must sacrifice to buy back our evanescing slivers of time. But the monsters, men, and gods lie silent we are left to put the pieces back together.
How to reconcile it all? If time is so precious, what have my rambles done with yours? I ask not that you choose one god or another, nor sway me in my decision, but that you examine the role of divinity in your life. To me, religion is an exercise in belief, and I choose to believe that my various convictions may peacefully coexist with each other. Perhaps your religion lies in following rules and studying texts, in listening to the whispers of trees and summer winds, in gazing into the future and finding peace in that silent, rolling darkness. Whether you believe in Something or Nothing or whatever lies in between, I ask that you let it fill you with courage, with the power to act with kindness and understanding. I ask that you pray to your god or gods to save our little planet, and then carry that resolve into the doings of your own days and nights. Life is far too precious and brief to interpret the will of the gods as warlike—choose peace, choose empathy, choose love. And, if you stand at a crossroads like I do, be unafraid to forge your own path through the undergrowth. And so, when I look up at the stars at night, I choose not to see corpses, but gods.
Laura Chin ‘23 (lc2) cannot wait to go outside and be reunited with the stars. From the Pandemic 2020 issue.
Featured photo courtesy of Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash.