When you read Ezekiel’s visionary experience of the “four living creatures” appearing out of the tumultuous, flashing sky and the “wheels within wheels” that rise and move with them (chapter 1, vv. 4-21), you could be forgiven for wondering what he had been smoking because that vision bears the hallmarks of an hallucinogenic experience. But some have seen it differently. They have seen in these “wheels within wheels”, with eyes in their rims, evidence of alien spacecraft – flying saucers – visiting the earth in remote antiquity. I’m not saying that I agree with this! Maybe Ezekiel was on some hallucinogenic substance, maybe he just had a very vivid imagination, or maybe he really did have a vision! Who knows? But the ‘flying saucer’ theory raises an issue that has long fascinated many people, namely, are we alone in the universe? In all its infinity of space and time, in all the countless billions of planets, stars and galaxies, is our tiny “blue dot” the only place where life has appeared, the only place where life has evolved to the point where sentient, self-conscious beings like us look up at the night sky and ask if they are alone?

When we do this it can lead to a sense of cosmic loneliness or to a longing to pass beyond Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “green borders of the peopled earth” and “launch into the trackless deeps of space”, there to search among the planets and stars of the “final frontier” and maybe encounter evidence of beings with whom we can communicate, with whom we can find fellowship and kinship, with whom we can compare our ideas of what it all means. As Anna Laetitia Barbauld asks, “is there not / A tongue in every star that talks with man, / And wooes him to be wise?”

And meaning is perhaps the object of this quest, the Holy Grail for which we search like latter-day Knights of the Round Table, itself a symbol of infinity and of our equality before it. To contemplate the unimaginable vastness of space, to realise how utterly insignificant we seem in relation to it, to be aware of how microscopically small we are in the midst of it, how brief and transitory are not only our own lives but also those of our civilization, our species, even our planet - to contemplate these things can be crushing. How can the momentary blips that are human lives mean anything in this universe of infinities upon infinities?

But maybe this is the wrong way to look at things. However insignificant our lives may seem we cannot deny the remarkable fact that they exist, that something quite extraordinary has happened on this planet, something that makes it more special than we can imagine. Not only did life appear – we don’t know how – which is remarkable and near-miraculous in itself, but life evolved into a variety of beings that even now we cannot number or understand – even as, in our folly, we seem intent on exterminating them.

And among all the species that evolved there was at least one which looked up at the night sky and wondered what it was all about. Of course, we can’t say that our species is the only one that has ever done this. There have, for example, been other human species on this planet that are now gone, leaving only their bones and a few artefacts to show that they ever existed. Did they look up at the night sky and wonder what it all meant? Probably they did. And are there other species on other worlds who look up at their night skies and wonder what it all means? Personally, I think there probably are.

However vast the odds against it may seem, there are so many billions of worlds out there that there must be some where something akin to what happened here has happened too. Of course, we may be so distant from even the nearest – in time as well as space – that they might as well not exist, but they are probably there all the same and their inhabitants may ask much the same questions as we do about existence and its meaning. Like us they may live on island-worlds amidst the apparently lifeless wastes, worlds that are blue-green oases among the sterile rocks and gaseous giants that most planets probably are, too hot or too cold for the miracle of life to happen.

But does any of this mean anything? Traditional religion found meaning, but it did so largely on the basis of outmoded and hopelessly inadequate understandings of the universe. To read theology is so often to read the thoughts of people who couldn’t see beyond this planet, whose concepts of God were as limited as their knowledge of the cosmos; who thought it credible that the fate of the universe hinged on a few events that took place on this tiny planet a few short centuries ago. The arguments and obsessions of so many theologians – past and present – pale into utter irrelevance when seen in the context of worlds and galaxies without number spread across fourteen billion years of space- time.

But does that make us all mere meaningless fragments? No, it doesn’t, because we know that our lives have meaning – meaning for us. And as mystics and poets have always known, meaning doesn’t depend on size. The universe is infinitely small as well as infinitely vast. As Mother Julian of Norwich wrote in her ‘Revelations of Divine Love’:

“And he showed me…a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it…and wondered, ‘What is this?’ And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.”

And similarly, William Blake wrote:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour”

(from ‘Auguries of Innocence’)

The scale of the universe isn’t what matters. What matters is how we treat each other in whatever time we’ve got. It matters that we are mostly caring and that we aspire to be kind. It matters that we can experience beauty, treasure it and appreciate it. It matters that we value truth and knowledge. It matters, as we are now realising, that we undo the harm we have done – and are still doing – to our environment, and so save it and ourselves from our own folly. All these things mean something here and now, and so give meaning to our existence. And they matter regardless of the second law of thermodynamics and the ultimate fate of the universe.

And when we look up at the night sky and see those countless stars, so distant in space and time, that means something too. By the very contemplation of infinity, or of the bizarre insights of quantum physics, we not so much see meaning as give meaning. We are the givers of meaning, the makers of meaning. Without us – and those beings like us who probably exist somewhere out there – there is no meaning, only a whole lot of rocks and gas, black holes and dark matter, without a thought, idea or feeling between them. Some would have said – maybe still say – that God gives the universe meaning but that can’t be understood as it was by the theologians of the past. Rather we may say that God is the cosmic process itself, the creative force that has driven everything since the beginning, since the Big Bang. But if we do say that, then how can this universal process perceive meaning or give meaning? It can do so because we, and creatures like us, who are part of it and products of it, can perceive meaning, create meaning and give meaning. We are the universe awake and conscious of itself. We are not only the hands of God and the eyes of God, we are each of us fragments of the mind of God.

We are the potential inherent in the universe made manifest, we are incarnations of the power – the spirit – that has been there all the time, awaiting the opportunity to become flesh, to become the meaning of everything else. And that is so even if it has happened only rarely in this unimaginable universe, even if it has happened only once. When we look out into the vastnesses of space and wonder what it all means, we should remember that we who look out are what it means, that our looking out is what it means. It is what happens in our inner space that gives meaning to all that outer space.

We are not meaningless accumulations of atoms. We are accumulations of atoms which have woken up to live lives rich in meaning; lives that can embody love and compassion and all that we know as vital, good and noble - all that we call divine. And in waking up we have awakened the universe of which we are part, and that means something.