Stars don’t form constellations. Stars just are. We look up at the night sky and see the chaotic array of stars, and our brains want to group them into patterns. We form constellations. We don’t discover patterns the stars made on their own.

Constellations are useful. A random chaotic array of stars is less useful. Our ancestors grouped stars into recognizable patterns so they could orient themselves using the night sky. And different cultures grouped stars differently, because they needed the patterns to be meaningful.

So, different people looked at the same stars and made different patterns out of them. The stars were the same. The people were different. And constellations may have helped people orient their lives in different ways. Maybe some people needed constellations to aid them in traveling from one place to another. Maybe other people needed the positions of constellations to mark agricultural activities.

There’s a lovely little imaginative game called Expansive Skies. The rules fit on one half of one side of a postcard. You roll a couple of dice to determine how many stars are in your constellation. Then you draw a card to determine a general category for your constellation’s image, like “a person” or “a musical instrument” or “a dance.” Then, you create a constellation and tell a story about it.

The game misses something, though. People didn’t arrange the stars into shapes based on what they needed. The stars were already there. People just imposed shapes onto something that already existed. They made the stars useful. They made sense out of the chaos of the night sky. They created a way to orient themselves.

Maybe it’s the same with spiritual values. They orient us and help us make sense out of the chaos around us. We might not all see the same shapes. We might not all need the same things. But we might still look at the same spiritual values and find meaning. If we want to.

When we explore big, deep topics like “Liberating Love,” it might be tempting to want someone to define it in a way that we can get our arms around. (Or define it in a way that we can resist maybe.) We want someone to point up and say, “Those bright stars right there form the flame, and that curving line of stars is the bowl of the chalice.” Then we can look at it and say, “I see it!” Or we can say, “I don’t think that looks like a chalice at all.”

What we might do instead is look up at the night sky and trust that the stars can be useful, that they can help us orient ourselves in a meaningful way. And from that space of trust, we can ask, “What is it that I need most deeply? How can I connect to these lights in a meaningful way?”

And when we tense up at the thought that we might need something, we can breathe and trust that the stars will wait for us. And they won’t judge us for needing something. We can ignore them, but we’ll be missing out on something useful for orienting ourselves.

Same with our spiritual values. We can ignore them. We can make patterns out of them that are less than helpful or easy to dismiss. Or we can use them to orient our lives in meaningful ways. We’ll know we have the right constellations for us when they help us navigate toward greater wholeness and authentic connection with other people, whatever we name the divine, and within ourselves.