A million alien Gospels

But in the eternities
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O be prepared my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

The final two verses of an elegant little poem entitled Christ in the Universe. It was written by Alice Meynell, a British writer, suffragist and convert to Catholicism. She lived from 1847 to 1922.

I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's longer poem Christus Apollo, which includes the lines:

Christ wanders in the Universe
A flesh of stars,
He takes on creature shapes
To suit the mildest elements,
He dresses him in flesh beyond our ken.
There He walks, glides, flies, shambling of strangeness.
Here He walks Men.
Among the ten trillion beams
A billion Bible scrolls are scored
In hieroglyphs among God’s amplitudes of worlds;
In alphabet multitudinous
Tongues which are not quite tongues
Sigh, sibilate, wonder, cry:
As Christ comes manifest from a thunder-crimsoned sky.
He walks upon the molecules of seas
All boiling stews of beast
All maddened broth and brew and rising up of yeast.
There Christ by many names is known.

PS: This is news to me, but apparently Christus Apollo was set to music in 1969 by the prolific film score composer Jerry Goldsmith.