30th Sunday Ordinary Time and the Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy…

I’m fascinated by this video because of the way it talks about the unknown and unseen: “At the heart of our Milky Way… lies a trap door to eternity – a supermassive black hole. Or, at least astronomers think it’s there… ‘the dark monster’… ‘the black hole’s bottomless gullet’… ‘doomed gasses swirling inward’… ‘the tombstone for matter and space-time’…” Black holes not only destroy stars but they give birth to stars!

Here’s a quote from the article that accompanies the video: The work goes a long way toward demonstrating what astronomers have long believed, but are still at pains to prove rigorously: that a supermassive black hole lurks in the heart not only of the Milky Way, but of many observable galaxies. The hub of the stellar carousel is a place where space and time end, and into which stars can disappear forever.

I see how this could be a powerful image of that chasm that ‘lurks’ within us, around which everything orbits. I certainly have reacted to my own inner abyss as a ‘monster with a bottomless gullet’. “Get me the H away from it! Run away! Run away!”

Might it be that flight from that ‘beast’, that ‘monster’ at our innermost world so occupies and directs our ideas, emotions, and attitudes that we constantly flee its impact – in a way that makes us blind to Jesus and his teachings about selling all we have and giving it to the poor, becoming the servant of all, and his journey to Jerusalem?

At the same time, what if encountering Christ in that very place provides the very “chemical reaction” that gives birth to new life?

What’s your experience?