The Stuff of Stars

by Chris Koellhoffer, IHM     August 10, 2024

As a person who’s often on the road for eight or more days of retreat ministry, I usually return home to a space that has gathered dust in my absence. To some, dust is a nuisance, the stuff that accumulates on our windowsills and surfaces and makes its presence known when afternoon sun puts a spotlight on a TV or table and announces the need for serious cleaning.

I suppose I’m the odd person who actually enjoys cleaning, and there are two reasons for this. One is that most of my ministry is spent in working with the human condition, which is always in process and unfinished and without immediate results. With cleaning, by contrast, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, at least temporarily. The second reason is that dust can also be viewed as stardust, a graced reminder that we are the stuff of stars, that every atom in our bodies was created inside a star before Earth was born. As Carl Sagan notes, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.”

But here’s what upended my attitude toward dust even more: At the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I was living on the tenth floor of a high rise in Jersey City, NJ. From my corner apartment, I had an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline, including the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. For days after their disappearing, I could both see and smell the smoke rising from that empty crater across the Hudson River.

During those first few weeks of unimaginable loss, I witnessed what was for me an unsettling development. City living always means more dust being kicked up by traffic and construction, so with my windows open on balmy days, I was never without evidence that I lived on Manila Avenue. Soon after September 11, however, I began to notice an unusually large amount of dust settling on my windowsills. I began to wonder: could this be something more than commonplace, everyday, household dust?

I was rather unnerved by the wondering, so in those early post-9/11 days, I dusted my apartment with a tenderness that had been missing from my previous cleaning efforts. I shook my dustcloth not down the trash chute but instead into a box that I added to my ritual center. Each morning when I sat in silent prayer, and each day after I glimpsed the scar across the river, I sat with that sacred dust, grieving vibrant lives lost and the survivors who mourned them. To this day, I cannot pick up a dustcloth without remembering the sacredness of the tiniest particles of our lives and proceeding with reverence. 

My intuition has been supported by NASA, which notes that it is actually dust, stardust, that connects us all. NASA writes that, “though the billions of people on Earth may come from different areas, we share a common heritage: we are all made of stardust…nearly all of the elements in our bodies were forged in the fiery hearts and death throes of stars.” Ah, we have so much in common, don’t we? Could it be we are more alike than we ever realize?

How would our lives be different if we imagined each neighbor as a sacred body, as a living, breathing container of the heavens itself? If we cultivated wonder and awe when greeting a stranger, the same wonder and awe we feel when gazing at a night sky alive with stars? May the deep knowing of our shared stardust infuse our everyday lives with reverence and tenderness for our kin everywhere in the heavens and the earth. Yes, may it be so!  

Takeaway
Sit in stillness with the Holy One.
You may want to enter into this practice by going outside and taking a long look at a night sky OR sitting quietly and gazing at your own body in wonder and in delight.
What do you see? hear? feel?
What moves you?
What fills your soul with gratitude?
Savor the wonder within and around you.

Featured Image:   Rad Pozniakor, Unsplash

NOTE:
August 18-25:
Please hold in your prayer all who will be part of a directed retreat at Mercy by the Sea in Madison, CT. I will be one of the guest directors for this retreat.

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