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Good morning.  I’ve been re-reading Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far from the Madding Crowd.  A new film version came out at the beginning of this month and reminded me that I hadn’t read the book since school.  So I went looking, and found a dog-eared copy on my bookshelf.  Actually, it turns out to be my sister’s: her name is neatly written on the inside page, in ink, and occasional pencil comments in the margin.

The interesting thing is that there are also pencil notes in my handwriting.  I remember now:  Far from the Madding Crowd was another hand-me-down. Having two older sisters meant that many of my schoolbooks, and a lot of my clothes, came to me after they’d used them. So the book has bits of my sister, and bits of me in it. 

I’d marked one passage about the shepherd, Gabriel Oak, sitting on a hillside on the shortest night of the year, looking up at the stars wheeling round in space. Hardy writes that, after watching the heavens, ‘it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.’

I wonder if, when I first read these words 40-odd years ago, they gave me the same jolt as they do now. How the vastness of the universe is inside us, as well as outside. Surging around in our hearts and heads. That’s why it moves us. No matter that we’ve touched the Moon, and looked down on the blue drop of the earth; or that astronauts are wheeling miles above us in the Space Station at this moment.  It doesn’t make the miracle of the universe any less incomprehensible. 

For the beauty of the earth, and the wonder of the heavens this day, we thank you, God.  Amen.