God Was An Astronaut

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The boy decided God was an astronaut when he was eight years old.

It happened one August night when the heat had finally loosened its grip on the earth and the fireflies were blinking over the backyard. He lay in the grass beside his father, both of them looking up because there was nothing else worth looking at. The Milky Way stretched across the darkness like somebody had spilled flour over black glass. His father pointed out Mars and Jupiter and a satellite moving steadily between them. The boy watched until his eyes hurt. “Where does God live?” he asked. His father was quiet for a while. “Everywhere, I suppose.” The boy considered this. Everywhere was a very large place. Larger than Georgia. Larger than America. Larger even than the maps in his schoolroom that rolled down over the chalkboard. “Then God must be an astronaut,” he said. His father laughed softly, but the boy did not. He imagined God floating between galaxies in a white suit, visiting planets nobody had named yet, reaching down now and then to straighten the rings of Saturn or push a wandering comet gently back toward home.

Years passed, as they have a habit of doing. The boy became a man and learned that stars were enormous furnaces burning themselves to death. He learned about light-years and black holes and gravity and the terrible distances between things. He learned that astronauts did not simply float among the stars but rode machines built by nervous men, carrying oxygen on their backs because the universe, for all its beauty, would kill them without hesitation. He learned other things too. He learned that prayers were sometimes answered and sometimes seemed to disappear into the ceiling. He stood beside hospital beds. He walked behind coffins. He held newborn children and watched old people close their eyes for the last time. There were nights when he looked upward and wondered if anyone was really out there at all. The universe had grown larger since he was eight, but somehow God had grown quieter.

Then one evening, when the man had become old enough to understand how quickly everything goes, he went outside and lay in the grass again. The house behind him was quiet. Crickets worked the darkness. Somewhere beyond the trees a dog barked once and stopped. Above him the stars were exactly where they had always been, though some of their light had begun traveling toward him before he was born. He thought about his father and that August night and the little boy who believed heaven required a spacesuit. He smiled. Perhaps he had been wrong about the suit. But maybe not about the astronaut. Perhaps God was forever crossing the impossible distance between one lonely thing and another, not floating somewhere beyond the stars, but traveling through them, through time and memory and every dark place where someone looked up and wondered if they were alone. The old man watched a meteor scratch a brief silver line across the sky. “There you are,” he whispered. And for just a moment, the universe did not seem empty at all.

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