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Good Morning, The novel The Fault In Our Stars is fast becoming a literary phenomenon, attracting millions of readers around the world. John Green’s love story about two teenagers with cancer who meet at a support group walks a witty, sometimes brutally frank, line between the potentially sappy and cynical and delivers a profound meditation on the big questions of life. Its title is a conscious inversion of a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where Cassius says to Brutus: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, in not in our stars, but in ourselves’ In this face-off between fatalism and self-determinism Cassius exhorts Brutus to challenge Caesar, insinuating the idea that it’s not fate that dooms men, it’s their own agency. Green’s title hints at a different world-view. Some things (like cancer) clearly have little to do with a failure of personal responsibility. As a former chaplain in a children’s hospital, Green would have encountered this reality first hand everyday. So affecting were his experiences with the terminally ill they convinced him to become a writer instead of a priest. He clearly sees that the world is not a wish-granting factory but a profoundly unjust place where suffering is unfairly distributed and there are severe limitations on our efforts to do anything about it. His novel exposes the sentimental clichés that surround death: ‘they’ve gone to a better place;’ ‘they’ve will live forever in our hearts.’ And yet it isn’t a council of despair. His protagonists still live, still love, despite knowing what is coming. What is coming, of course, is coming for all of us. Which maybe explains why the story hits so deeply for so many. It raises one of the important questions: how do we live honestly and hopefully in the face of the universe’s seeming indifference to our suffering and ultimate death? That killer of false dreams – the author of Ecclesiastes – puts it like this: death is the destiny of all men, whether, wise or foolish, healthy or sick. So what is the point? There is a moment in Stars where a character has the feeling that ‘the universe wants to be noticed.’ Later another character – terrified at the prospect of oblivion – hopes that the universe will notice them. This terror of cosmic abandonment and indifference is directly addressed by Jesus not long before his own death, when he points out that not even a bird falls to the ground without his loving Father knowing it. The weight of scripture suggests there are no accidents in the universe. And it has no time for fatalism or self-determinism. The Psalmist discounts putting trust in the cosmos and knowingly points to the fate of those who (like Cassius) trust only in themselves. It isn’t about re-aligning with the distant stars; it’s about being re-aligned by the presence of their creator.