To look at the Sun again...

"In the old days, people looked at the Sun, and they saw a mechanism. The centuries turned, even the millenia, and they would look up to see a furnace of fire and fusion, a triumph of the power of matter and energy over the emptiness of space. A magical light in the dark, made real by forces they barely understood. They thought that they had achieved a true understanding of it, of the ball of fire so far away in the sky. It was arrogant, and complacent.

The irony is, that they held that belief of the Sun as nothing but a glowing sphere in space, despite the stories of old. Centuries before the turn of the second millenium, the Sun was another beast entirely. It was a god. Not only that, but the king of all other gods, long before anyone thought of making just a single God the image of their faith. By many names, the Sun ruled over all and gave light and life, warmth and harvests. It was the enemy of night and winter, chasing away the cold. What greater love could a god show for his faithful, than to bring upon them the warm light of day.

Today, centuries later, and four millenia after the height of those who worshipped this impossible engine of vast cosmic fire, it is harder to look at it as just another machine, and easier to think once again in terms of the divine. I was a child when the first traces of this celestial mystery began to unfold, lines across the face of the Sun. Like a spider's web, black streaks to block the glow. The last true footprints of the gods, made matter in a close orbit of our star. The homes of the ancient ones, circling the Sun. Before that, people said that they understood the Sun. Now, they say that they believe in it. Faith rekindled, at the dawn of the last half of our fourth millenium, a millenium itself based on someone believing a man to be God.

Men are not gods. I have an easier time looking at the immense size of this, our own star, and think of it as a god. A celestial being means something that lives in the heavens, and is there anything more defining of that than the Sun itself? We might listen to mortal men and women, we might follow them into war or pledge our lives to do the work they deem good. But how can anything strike as much awe into a human soul as living fire, a force so endless that even looking at it makes sight seem feeble and incomplete? No, gods do not walk among us. They are from beyond our realm of understanding. They belong with the Sun.

So that is my gift to you, my message to all the world. We must not listen to the words of mortals, we must not put our faith, or our lives, in the hands of politicians and architects, bound by flesh and blood and money. We are more than the spawn of apes, we are more than the idle creations of an anthropomorphic god, any god, that would walk on legs and talk through lips. We are children of the stars, the mortal, pathetic, insignificant, beautiful products of a loving hellfire beyond our skies. We belong to the Sun, and it is calling us home."

- Secretly recorded sermon of Father Sholneu, anno 3539, 800 hours before the attack on Solar Orbital 19.