When I was about eight years old, I wrote my first essay in response to a sermon at church. The minister had spoken about what we wanted in the Kingdom of God, and thinking about the Kingdom of God as an opportunity to rule over areas, at least in part, I wrote a precocious effort that stated I wanted to rule over the planet Pluto, which I then sent on to the pastor, who was so pleased that a child was listening to and responding to his message that he read it out to the congregation the following week. In the intervening years since then, I have not ceased my tendency to listen actively to messages to the extent of writing responses to some aspect of them, but much to my chagrin, it appears that people are not as fond about reading my more mature efforts. All too commonly it is true with regards to public discourse what is true in the education of children: we spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it how to walk and talk, and for the rest of our lives we tell them to sit down and shut up. What attracted me as an eccentric, oddball kind of child to Pluto was what has attracted many such people, and that is the fact that Pluto is an eccentric and odd planet, the first of its kind to have a particularly odd orbit, which naturally drew the favor of those who similarly felt themselves somewhat out of step with others. Not much has made me less eccentric now than I was as a child, and so I still follow Pluto closely and enjoy the increase in knowledge we have about it as a result of the New Horizons probe that is currently conducting its close flyby of the planet before going off into even deeper parts of the Kuiper Belt.

The discovery of the future was a fortuitous mistake. A misguided quest for a mysterious Planet X that was supposed to be beyond Neptune led to the discovery of the vastly smaller Pluto in the part of space where Planet X was supposed to be. Pluto itself, though, was a sort of an oddball from the beginning, as its tilted and highly elliptical orbit were far different than the previous planets that had been discovered. The discovery of Pluto, though, led to the discovery of many other objects in its general neighborhood that were odd in their own ways, with strange orbital resonances with Neptune, or with unusual orbits in the way that Pluto is a binary planet because its moon Charon is nearly equal in size, and the proliferation of these new little planets led to the creation of several categories, like dwarf planet and Kuiper Belt Object and plutino, to describe these somewhat small planets in such a way that did not overwhelm the idea that like the cool kid table in high school, there were only so many seats, and Pluto was simply not cool enough to belong. This, of course, only made those people whose identification with Pluto was largely because of a shared experience of being an outsider, or being odd or unusual, identify even stronger with a planet that was similarly not cool enough to make an exclusive list of planets simply because there were other similar planets of reasonably similar size in the same general area in our solar system. Pluto may not be cool enough for some of the astronomers at the IAU, but it’s certainly cool enough for its passionate fans, of which I have long been one.

Last night I had a conversation with my mother and with a young friend of mine staying at the same house where we are all guests that lasted late into the night, until almost 11PM, before I had to leave, given that I get up a little after 4AM to go to work. A large part of our conversation dealt with a subject of intense common interest to all of us in the conversation, namely Jane Austen and her excellent novels. It struck me, as I was talking to the two ladies, that one of the recurring elements of Austen’s novels is that all of her heroes and heroines are noble men and women, and all of their courtships are conducted with a degree of mutual respect, if a lot of witty flirtation. Likewise, all of the disastrous marriages she writes about fail in large part because of an absence of respect and open communication, and where that breaks down, marriage becomes something to endure instead of something to enjoy. Without ever having been married herself, Jane Austen wrote in such a way that those who consider her to be a lady worthy of respect and consideration find much of deep and serious importance in her works about a wide variety of subjects, while her intelligence and wit sail over the heads of those who see in her elegant writing merely matters of superficial feminine interest. What one finds, in other words, depends largely on what one is looking for, and the respect and honor and openness one has to communicating with her texts.

So much of life depends on seeing the world around us accurately. Our knowledge and our experience of the universe within us and around us give us an idea of what is possible, and what we find ends up being constrained by the way in which we see the world. In a way, we are all like Kuhn’s scientists, with our observations constrained by our worldviews and paradigms. Because there is simply too much to take in, too much to assimilate, too much to even conceive, we see largely what we are looking for, and what we have already seen. It took the discovery of an oddball planet with an eccentric and tilted orbit for people to realize that the solar system was far more odd than we had believed, that there were whole families of unusual planets whose existence we had never fathomed because we were looking on the same plane of existence that we reside, and weren’t looking for what was tilted and skewed. Similarly, the way we tend to read a text tells us a lot about ourselves, far more than it tells us about the text we are reading, for we read a text based on who we are, and it is only as we change and grow that we can see something different in the text. In order for us to see new things, or see things in a different way, we must improve our mind’s eye, to refine our own understanding, so that we are better able to see what is there and less imprisoned by our misconceptions and limitations. It is a task that can take a lifetime to accomplish, and a task that many never undertake, yet is it not worthwhile to see the odd beauty in the world, and to reflect on what it means for us, that there are many rooms and many categories of existence in the Kingdom of Heaven, if we would only see what is around us with a kind and understanding eye, and be open to the fact that there is a place for all of us in the universe after all.