August 29, 2006
Wanderers
Before the editors rush to the next edition and while there’s yet time, I checked in my Webster’s New Collegiate for the entry on planets. I was surprised to find that planet or no, Pluto’s not the smallest. It’s got 400 more equatorial miles than Mercury, and I haven’t heard anything about excising Mercury. Maybe that’s because it’s the closest, and Pluto is safely 100 times farther away.
I also found that the word “planet” actually means “wanderer.” Ironically, wandering in a wobbly orbit is apparently one of the behaviors that got Pluto excommunicated.
Wandering’s not an all that foreign a notion for some of us churchers. Some of us have been accused ourselves and even threatened with excommunication for wandering, although, might I say, by the somewhat more anglophilic-sounding term “walking apart.” Mayhaps that’s rather like sauntering, another interesting term once coined to describe those on their way to the Holy Land (cf Saint Terre, get it?) which, metaphorically, at least, is where we’d all probably like to be walking if we could just find one yet intact.
God surely knows what’s a planet, whether we do or not, and which ones with occupants who have enough smarts to name things, eg, like we were commissioned to in Genesis. And God also is fully aware, we can presume, of those among God’s creatures — churchers et al — who take at least as much care for their environment and its purpose as they do for its labels. Talk about walking apart.