The Star Thrower

Thoughts from Parker J. Palmer in "The Promise of Paradox"....

"But the cross symbolizes that beyond naive hope and beyond meaningless despair lies a structure of dynamic contradictions in which our lives are caught...Its arms reach left and right, up and down, signifying the way life pulls us between the conflicting claims of person against person, the conflicting claims of the human and the divine. And yet the arms of the cross converge at the center, symbolizing the way in which God can act in our lives to overcome conflict, to unify the opposition, to contradict the contradictions. The cross calls us to recognize that reality has a cruciform shape.

Loren Eisley tells a story that helps me feel the power of recognizing and embracing life's contradictions. The great naturalist once spent time in a seaside town called Costabel. Plagued by his lifelong insomnia, Eiseley spent the early morning hours walking the beach. And every day at sunrise, he found townspeople combing the sand for starfish that had washed ashore during the night to kill them for commercial purposes. For Eiseley, it was a sign, however small, of the ways the world says no to life.

One morning, Eiseley went out unusually early and discovered a solitary figure on the beach. This man, too, was gathering starfish, but each time he found one alive, he would pick it up and throw it as far as he could out beyond the breaking surf, back to the ocean from which it came. Eiseley found this man on his mission of mercy every morning, day after day, no matter the weather. Eiseley named this man 'the star thrower'. In a moving meditation, he writes of how this man and his predawn work contradicted everything Eiseley had been taught about evolution and the survival of the fittest. Here on the beach at Costabel, the strong reached down to save, not crush, the weak. And, Eiseley wonders, is there a star thrower at work in the universe, a God who contradicts death, whose nature (to quote the words of Thomas Merton) is 'mercy within mercy within mercy'?

That story is rich in meaning for me. It offers an image of a God who threw the stars and throws them still. It speaks of how ordinary men and women can participate in God's enveloping mercy. And it suggests a vocation that each of us could undertake on our inward way of the cross: to recognize, identify, and lift up those moments, those acts, those people, those stories that contradict the ways in which the world says no to life."