Faith and Wisdom on the Moon

Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 LM pilot, photographed on the Moon’s surface by Neil Armstrong, whose image is reflected, alongside a leg of their lunar lander, in Aldrin’s facemask.

I started this day, exactly 50 years ago, rather early in the morning. The 7 year old me, woken by my father at 1am on 21st July 1969, crept downstairs and sat cross-legged in front of our black and white TV to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take their, and humankind’s first steps on the Moon. The experience seeded and nurtured a passion for the universe that has inspired me ever since.

I have learned since that the astronauts had a rather more arduous and problematic final descent to the surface than was public at the time – loss of communication with Houston Mission Control, overshooting the planned landing site, repeated computer overload alarms, and Armstrong’s final desperate search for a boulder-free landing site while there remained less than a minute’s worth of fuel for the descent engine.

No wonder that Aldrin invited people around the world, soon after landing, to pause in a moment of silence and ‘give thanks in their own way.’ His own actions in that moment were pre-meditated, however. He had brought a tiny chalice and communion plate from his church at home, together with consecrated bread and wine, for a short and personal celebration of the great Christian Thanksgiving (Eucharist). This repeated meal commemorates the disciples’ last supper with Jesus before his crucifixion and resurrection, and constitutes and act that brings Christian people the world over and every day to an embodied encounter with the living Christ.

The tiny chalice used by astronaut Buzz Aldrin to take communion on the Moon during the Apollo 11 landing.

It’s a quiet act, not drawing much publicity. Even Jerry Coyne’s ‘Why Evolution is True’ (as if that needed explaining) blog merely reports on it, without the usual explicit scorn of that web-page on all things Christian.

Yet the record that some of the first words uttered by humans on the surface of another world echoed those of Christ’s last on this one, holds great significance. That moment in space and time acts as a focal point of the history of science: of the centuries-long dreams of voyages to the stars (see my Apollo 8 piece for TheConversation), of the theory of gravity and the dynamics of the solar system, of the chemistry of combustion, the physics and engineering of rocketry, of the physiology of respiration, nutrition and survival that permits humans to travel outside our atmosphere … And at that very point is celebrated the Christian wisdom that God took an incarnate form, assumed molecules and atoms, for a second time called the material creation ‘Good’. So good that God became it.

St. Paul, in his letter to the church at Colossi, identifies Christ, the second person of the Trinity, not only as the one incarnate in creation but also the agent of creation, before the world (Colossians chapter 1:15-20):

¹⁵ The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. ¹⁶ For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷ He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.¹⁹ For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, ²⁰ and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross

It is all too easy to imagine one of the great cathedral friezes of ‘Christ in Glory’ when reading this – a distant, enthroned and haloed King. But the last verse here indicates that Paul had another picture in mind. It is the bleeding and tortured man on the wood, the teacher of the power to grow of small things like a mustard seed, the healer – out of sight of the crowds – of the sightless, that created all things. Stepping out into the world, and onto other ones, with an attitude of care, of wonder, of servanthood, is the way we follow.

Advertisement

Privacy Settings

50 Years Ago Apollo 8 Fulfilled a 2000 Year-Old Dream

NASA

This blog was originally written for and published by TheConversationUK

Half a century of Christmases ago, the NASA space mission Apollo 8 became the first manned craft to leave low Earth orbit, atop the unprecedentedly powerful Saturn V rocket, and head out to circumnavigate another celestial body, making 11 orbits of the moon before its return. The mission is often cast in a supporting role – a sort of warm up for the first moon landing. Yet for me, the voyage of Borman, Lovell and Anders six months before Neil Armstrong’s “small step for a man” will always be the great leap for humankind.

Apollo 8 is the space mission for the humanities, if ever there was one: this was the moment that humanity realised a dream conceived in our cultural imagination over two millennia ago. And like that first imagined journey into space, Apollo 8 also changed our moral perspective on the world forever.

In the first century BC, Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero penned a fictional dream attributed to the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus. The soldier is taken up into the sphere of distant stars to gaze back towards the Earth from the furthest reaches of the cosmos:

And as I surveyed them from this point, all the other heavenly bodies appeared to be glorious and wonderful — now the stars were such as we have never seen from this earth; and such was the magnitude of them all as we have never dreamed; and the least of them all was that planet, which farthest from the heavenly sphere and nearest to our earth, was shining with borrowed light, but the spheres of the stars easily surpassed the earth in magnitude — already the earth itself appeared to me so small, that it grieved me to think of our empire, with which we cover but a point, as it were, of its surface.

Earth-centric

Even for those of us who are familiar with the ancient and medieval Earth-centred cosmology, with its concentric celestial spheres of sun, moon, planets and finally the stars wheeling around us in splendid eternal rotation, this comes as a shock. For the diagrams that illustrate pre-modern accounts of cosmology invariably show the Earth occupying a fair fraction of the entire universe.

The geocentric model. Bartolomeu Velho, 1568 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris). Wikimedia Commons

Cicero’s text informs us right away that these illustrations are merely schematic, bearing as much relation to the actual imagined scale of the universe as today’s London Tube map does to the real geography of its tunnels. And his Dream of Scipio was by no means an arcane musing lost to history – becoming a major part of the canon for succeeding centuries. The fourth century Roman provincial scholar Macrobius built one of the great and compendious “commentaries” of late antiquity around it, ensuring its place in learning throughout the first millennium AD.

Cicero, and Macrobius after him, make two intrinsically-linked deductions. Today we would say that the first belongs to science, the second to the humanities, but, for ancient writers, knowledge was not so artificially fragmented. In Cicero’s text, Scipio first observes that the Earth recedes from this distance to a small sphere hardly distinguishable from a point. Second, he reflects that what we please to call great power is, on the scale of the cosmos, insignificant. Scipio’s companion remarks:

I see, that you are even now regarding the abode and habitation of mankind. And if this appears to you as insignificant as it really is, you will always look up to these celestial things and you won’t worry about those of men. For what renown among men, or what glory worth the seeking, can you acquire?

The vision of the Earth, hanging small and lowly in the vastness of space, generated an inversion of values for Cicero; a human humility. This also occurred in the case of the three astronauts of Apollo 8.

A change in perspective

There is a vast difference between lunar and Earth orbit – the destination of all earlier space missions. “Space” is not far away. The international space station orbits, as most manned missions, a mere 250 miles above our heads. We could drive that distance in half a day. The Earth fills half the sky from there, as it does for us on the ground.

Apollo 8 crew-members: James Lovell Jr., William Anders, Frank Borman (L-R). NASA

But the moon is 250,000 miles distant. And so Apollo 8, in one firing of the S4B third stage engine to leave Earth orbit, increased the distance from Earth attained by a human being by not one order of magnitude, but three. From the moon, the Earth is a small glistening coin of blue, white and brown in the distant black sky.

So it was that, as their spacecraft emerged from the far side of its satellite, and they saw the Earth slowly rise over the bleak and barren horizon, the crew grabbed all cameras to hand and shot the now iconic “Earthrise” pictures that are arguably the great cultural legacy of the Apollo program. Intoning the first verses from the Book of Genesis as their Christmas message to Earth – “… and the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep…” – was their way of sharing the new questions that this perspective urges. As Lovell put it in an interview this year:

But suddenly, when you get out there and see the Earth as it really is, and when you realise that the Earth is only one of nine planets and it’s a mere speck in the Milky Way galaxy, and it’s lost to oblivion in the universe — I mean, we’re a nothing as far as the universe goes, or even our galaxy. So, you have to say, ‘Gee, how did I get here? Why am I here?’

The 20th century realisation of Scipio’s first century BC vision also energised the early stirrings of the environmental movement. When we have seen the fragility and unique compactness of our home in the universe, we know that we have one duty of care, and just one chance.

Space is the destiny of our imagination, and always has been, but Earth is our precious dwelling place. Cicero’s Dream, as well as its realisation in 1968, remind the world, fresh from the Poland climate talks, that what we do with our dreams today will affect generations to come.