Contextual statement
As I scrolled through space telescope photographs of galaxies on the internet, their strange and awe-inspiring clusters of stars, coloured gases and matter, like other-worldly dreamscapes, I stumbled across an intriguing, beautiful image unlike anything I had seen. A mass of stars provided the backdrop, and at the centre was a striking, cathedral-like arrangement of cosmic stalagmites. The text accompanying it stated that it was taken by Hubble, and scientists could not figure out what it was, but they were calling it ‘Heaven’s Gate’.
It transpired that the image was a hoax, created by a clever graphic designer, but the image went viral, shared and re-shared. The writer of Ecclesiastes muses, ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.’
Recently I read of a man Arthur Stace, born in Sydney in 1885, who had alcoholic parents, grew up in poverty, resorting to stealing food to survive. He himself became an alcoholic as a teenager and ended up in prison. In his twenties he became a scout for his sister’s brothels, and later served in WWI.
In 1930 he had an encounter with the Divine, and “became enamoured of the notion of eternity”. He felt compelled to go out into the streets of Sydney early each morning and write the word ‘Eternity’ on the pavement wherever he went. Even though he was illiterate and could hardly write his own name legibly, he stated, "the word 'Eternity' came out smoothly, in a beautiful copperplate script. I couldn't understand it, and I still can't."
He continued this practice for 35 years, although his identity as ‘the man who writes eternity’ was only discovered after 25 years. It is estimated he wrote this word about 500,000 times. A cast replica of his writing is embedded in the footpath near a waterfall in the Sydney CBD, as a memorial. At the start of the 2000 Olympic Games and New Year’s Eve celebrations, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up with the word “Eternity”. There is also now an opera based on the life of Arthur Stace.
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