The Stars in the Sky Look Down where He Lay

There are certain phrases from old songs that keep coming back to our minds from time to time without our really knowing why. Sometimes these phrases are fragments of songs but sometimes they may be bits of prayers or even something someone has said to us.

It's always fun for me to try to make the connection between their arrival from my memory and whatever the current event is that brought them up.

The single such phrase that has popped up from my subconscious most often in the last tumultuous years is a line from an old Christmas carol that goes:

        "The stars in the sky look down where he lay...”

I think that the connection, the reason it comes up so often, is to remind me that God does not abandon us. The feeling that God has abandoned us is clearly an old theme of song and story. It seems to me, as I mentioned in an earlier post, that this feeling is probably a much more serious issue than is commonly understood as in the reference of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The Black Death of the mid 1300's brought about a great crisis of faith that seems comparable to me to our current loss of faith in almost all of our institutions and in each other. I recently read a work of Western European and North American history that was written in late 1890's, and the confidence of the author in the progress of mankind was so brazen and smug that it is nauseating even now to think of it. It was beyond laughable. It was pathetic. I feel the same way whenever I watch news presenters on television. It's like looking into the abyss.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to it in his masterful, thrilling, unforgettable “Knock at Midnight” speech, when he hears the voice say,“Lo I will be with you always even to the end of the world.”

That's what “The stars in the sky look down where he lay” tells me, with the same sort of "strange" overtones that King mentions.