...As It Is In Heaven

Reading Mark Musa's translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, in which Dante uses imagery of the perfection of the planetary motions as images of Heaven, it occurred to me that heavenly perfection was what Jesus meant when teaching his disciples to pray. This is what the understanding would have been, and indeed th.e heavens were considered perfect until fairly recently. So the prayer is that "May Your will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven", really means "May we be perfect, as the heavens are perfect".

We may now, in our hubris, rejoice in the now known imperfections of space, what with meteors, gamma ray bursts, rogue comets, the chaos of the Sun's surface, etc., and think that we don't need to be so damn perfect. A closer examination, though, will short circuit that thought. The ancients observed perfect gravitational reactions -- they didn't know gravity was what it was, but that's what they observed. All the other stuff that we now know is in outer space is still perfect though, just more complex than the ancients thought. Each particle of dust reacts to gravity perfectly.

Of course, one can say that quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle may give us the randomness that will excuse our imperfections. But even quantum reactions are perfect. Of course, scientists depend on that perfection, and new theories hang on minute deviations from the expected reactions.

So no more excuses: pray to be perfect.