By Labin Duke, Executive Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Nashotah House

In reference to a pale blue dot visible from the Voyager I spacecraft, Carl Sagan wrote:

That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves

Alongside the wall of St. Mary's Chapel you will find a stained glass window of Michael Ramsey, 100th Archbishop of Canterbury. He's holding up a book on which is written: “The Glory of God is the living Man.”

The saying calls to mind the words of Irenaeus: 

For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God. For if the manifestation of God which is made by means of the creation, affords life to all living in the earth, much more does that revelation of the Father which comes through the Word, give life to those who see God.

Graduates at Nashotah House face a harsh world—an untamed and unyielding wilderness. And we are sending them out to face that wilderness. They will be tried by that wilderness. And they will be tempted. Ever so gently will the whisper come to their ears, "No help will come to save you." 

But that is a lie.

Carl Sagan might have been right about part of what he said. We are, from a certain point of view, just wisps of carbon molecules on a small, sad little planet enveloped in unending darkness. But he spoke with the forked tongue of the great serpent when he went further to say that no help will come to save us from ourselves. 

Do not believe it. 

Help has come. And our life is to behold Him. The Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, is He who can give life to those who see God.

So then, the next time you are faced with the perils and the dangers of the spiritual wilderness of this world, when you are beset by doubts and by fears, when you are at your rope's end, and you start to hear the serpent's whisper in your ear, "No help will come,” remember the big bushy eyebrows of Michael Ramsey. Remember his somewhat odd, quizzical expression, and remember what is written on the book he is holding: "The Glory of God is the living man." And know that your Savior lives, and He has saved you.

The preceding homily was recently preached at Nashotah House by Mr. Labin Duke. Since 2019, Mr. Duke has served as the Executive Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Nashotah House. He comes to Nashotah House from the development department of Baylor University, where he served as the Director of Donor Relations since 2016.