The Thinking Reed

“I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” — Psalm 139:14 (KJV)

Look up at the night sky on a clear night, away from street lights, and you can feel very small. Pascal felt that too. One of his most famous lines is just a single sentence:

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

He describes how tiny a person is in the whole of nature. The earth is a point next to the path of the sun, and that is a fine point compared with the stars. And then he turns the other way, into the very small, and finds endless worlds there too. We are caught in the middle. He asks:

“For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.”

So are we just specks of dust? Pascal says no, and gives one of the most beautiful pictures in the whole book:

“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.”

Think about that. A reed is a thin plant by a river that bends in every wind. That is how fragile we are. A virus, an accident or a fall can kill us. But the universe, with all its stars and galaxies, cannot think. It does not know it exists. You do. You can wonder, love, pray, ask questions, and know that you will die. That makes you greater than all the stars.

Pascal concludes: “All our dignity consists, then, in thought.” And then he adds a simple instruction: “Let us endeavour, then, to think well.”

The Bible says something similar, but goes further. In Psalm 8 David looks at the moon and stars and asks what man is, that God should care about him. And Psalm 139 says we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Our greatness is not only that we can think. It is that the God who made the stars made us to know him.

So when you feel small, you are right: you are. But you are not unimportant. A thinking reed, made in the image of God, matters more to him than every galaxy.

One thing to do this week: go outside one evening this week and look at the sky. Say Psalm 8:3–4 to God: “When I consider thy heavens… what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Then thank him that he made you able to think about him.