Thursday 26 September: Starry, Starry Night

Wow – the best was pretty much saved to last. We were graced with an inspiring contribution to the conference in the morning, and with an awesome evening at the Observatory in the evening.

The lecture in the morning was without doubt one of the highlights of this Congress. The context, of course, made the topic (‘Calvin against slavery’) particularly loaded: for many years the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa (a Calvinist church) was one of the mainstays of the apartheid regime, and provided theological justification for the oppression. Our lecturer left little doubt that Calvin himself regarded slavery as an appalling evil – why? Simply because all human beings are created in the image of God. ‘You and your fellow human being are the same’, he wrote. ‘Treat them like a beast and you become a beast yourself, because you renounce the image of God which is imprinted in us all’. It’s really for insights like this that I have grown to love Calvin’s theology and writings. Especially if you allow for the fact that he lived 500 years ago, these sentiments are extraordinarily adventurous and spring directly from his grasp of the nature of God as love and grace. ‘In some lands’, he says in one sermon, ‘such as the countries of the East, Greece and North Africa, this type of servitude still exists. However it is for the best that its usage be altogether abolished, as it has been among us’. Equally moving was the applause with which this paper was received, by a thoroughly international and multi-cultural audience, including of course black and white South Africans. Wonderful.

There were other good contributions to enjoy during the day, but many of us were reaching that point in the week where you just feel as if your brain is full to capacity. The periods of discussion after various presentations (including one in the late afternoon which I was privileged to chair) were getting shorter and less creative, and there was a general sense of tiredness around the place.

But we perked up at the Boyden Observatory, that’s for sure. It’s about a half hour’s drive out of Bloemfontein, which is far enough to leave behind the light pollution of the city. It’s also set high up on a hill, and we arrived in the late afternoon, in time to enjoy panoramic views over a river valley, bathed in a pink sunlight, with the plains apparently extending endlessly in the direction away from Bloemfontein. Within a short time we were blessed with a dramatic sunset, as we tucked into a picnic meal, with copious amounts of South African wine provided by our hosts. As you can imagine, the atmosphere became very relaxed indeed. Not that Calvin would have disapproved. One of my favourite of his sayings comes in his commentary on Psalm 104: ‘It is lawful to use wine not only in cases of necessity, but also in order to make us merry’. It was pretty merry, by the time we were called to order by a Professor from the University Physics Department, who gave us a lecture on the progress of the search, in which he is involved, to find planets in the universe whose conditions might most approximate to those on earth. He was humorous and judged the occasion well. He reminded us that our galaxy is a tiny part of a Local Group of galaxies, which is a small part of a Local Supergroup of galaxies, which is an infinitesimally small part of the universe. He quoted a famous astronomer (I didn’t catch the name) who said, ‘The universe is a big place… perhaps the biggest there is’. And then we were divided into three groups, and each group in turn was taken first for a brief ‘live’ introduction to the night-sky in the southern hemisphere, then to see the observatory’s 1.5m telescope (the third biggest on the continent) and then to look through a slightly smaller telescope at what appeared to the naked eye to be a star-less stretch of sky, but which proved to be filled with thousands of stars. The operator of the larger telescope described it as a digital camera which an unusual large lens on the front.

The professor used a lazer to point out the stars in the sky. I don’t ever remember seeing Mars or Saturn before. We saw the Southern Cross and its two out-lying pointer stars, as well as Alpha Centauri, the Scorpion, a red dwarf (I think!) and lots of other features (including our nearest star, which is still, I think…, four light years away). I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of the specifics -- except that there was also an iridium flare from a satellite… and then, wonderfully, a meteor shot past as if scripted. We almost burst into applause, as if it was a firework display!

‘Awe-some’ is an overused word these days, but this really was.

That was yesterday. Today the congress has finished, and I’m about to head off for the airport, to fly to Johannesburg, and then (I hope by car) to our (I mean Lichfield’s) partner Diocese of Matlosane, where I should be by tonight. I’m not at all sure what the internet facilities will be like though, when I’m there… so there may not be further blog postings until Tuesday of next week. Silence in the next few days will just mean I’m out of web-reach. Probably just as well, given England's current cricket score (68-5; ugh).