The slim volume of Rebecca Elson's poetry, Responsibility to Awe, sits on my desk at College. Elson was a gifted astronomer, combining intellectual curiosity with creative cognitive insight and these focused on the vast complex questions of existence. Around the time when Hubble was sending back images of our universe that are at once beautiful and terrifying, expanding beyond previous imagination the exploding, extending immensity of what we call space, the totality of what exists. Her scientific work 'focused on globular clusters, teasing out the history of stellar birth, life and death'. She was fascinated by dark matter, "hidden mass which can be inferred only from its influence on observable objects".
It's no surprise she is a poet. Precise observation, imaginative reflection, contemplative gaze, the instinct not only for fact, and its significance, but also for its hiddenness, mystery and capacity to provoke questions rather than provide answers. I've often thought the fusion of intellectual penetration and empirical observation, with contemplative wonder and patient humility before what can't be exhaustively explained or dequately described, could produce a rare form of poetry - and for that matter theology!
This collection of poems and extracts from her notebooks was written when she knew she was terminally ill, and its contents are by turns poignant and playful, questioning and serene, drawn from recalled memory or pushed towards anticipated realities. The result is a book that invites the reader into an intimate conversation not only about dark matter, but about what matters, and why.
The title, A Responsibility to Awe, describes the disposition of the true scientist - and though she wouldn't naturally draw the inference, it describes also the proper disposition of the true theologian, and indeed the true worshipper of the Triune God of love made known in Jesus Christ.
Telescopes
Those few brave pilgrims
standing white robed
At the edge
of earth and sky
On their dark mountain
in the thin dry air,
for all their altitude
no nearer, really, to the stars.
But hopeful
and so patient,
high above the traffic
of the lowlands, tracking
the minutiae of the Universe
attentive to a different light.
Now read Psalm 8.
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