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Good morning. Scientists announced this week that there could be 36 advanced civilisations in the universe capable of communicating with us. This is not just a random guess. It is a statistical prediction based on the number of stars being formed and the fact that it takes about 5 billion years for life to evolve after a star has come into existence. If some kind of communication ever did take place it would not surprise or shock religious believers, for they have never thought that God’s creativity was limited to this earth. On a Biblical view human beings take their place with angels, archangels and the whole company of heaven. Moreover theologians have sometimes speculated about how God would relate to another kind of world, perhaps one where things had gone better than ours? Whatever surprises there might be in discovering another advanced civilisation however, this is nothing, I think, before the sheer astonishment that there is rational life at all, whether on this earth or any other. I sometimes think that the big divide is not between believers and atheists but between those who remain amazed by the fact of being alive, able to think and choose and love, and those who take life for granted, as though it is somehow normal, and who are not brought up short before the wonder and mystery of existence. In fact during this lockdown, in which many people have slowed down and had more chance to enjoy nature I think there has been a general heightening of this sense. People have taken time just to look and listen, to experience the unique “thisness” of things, whether it is a leaf or bird song. Like many others I think there has also been a much deeper sense of how we belong together as human beings, - symbolised by the singing of Vera Lynn’s song “We’ll meet again”. Walt Whitman the American poet captures this sense well in his poem on miracles when he writes • To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same • What stranger miracles are there? If we ever did communicate with another advanced civilisation it would be fascinating-but meanwhile, as Whitman says about our own life, here and now, on this earth-what stranger miracles are there?