Columbia
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday February 2nd, 2003
***
This was supposed to be an easy week for me....
I have been known, on occasion, to suffer teasing from my colleagues in the Unitarian Universalist ministry for a rather unusual idiosyncrasy of mine. It's my tendency, late at night during minister's retreats, when we begin to speak softly of things theological, to sometimes lapse into the language of Science Fiction in order to express my meaning; while when I speak of Science Fiction, I become almost mystical in my discourse. There's a perfectly natural explanation for all this. I am, after all, a child of the Space Age; lying on my back on a warm summer evening, staring up at the heavens, I habitually think, not of the God of Creation and his angelic hosts, but of the Starship Enterprise and the vastness of the Universe: a billion, trillion stars arrayed before me, stretching out into infinity, and myself so tiny in comparison.
The term theology means, literally, "a word about God;" and it is not an activity for the timid. It is the attempt to say something sensible about a mystery which is, in its essence and by definition, ultimately unspeakable. It is a daring act of creative imagination to practice theology; and the night sky has long been an inspiration for those of us who dare to do so. Lying on your back, looking up at the stars, one realizes that you are not only staring out into space, but also back into time: that the light which strikes your eyes has traveled hundreds, thousands, even millions of years to reach the earth; that from any given place, the size of the visible Universe is exactly equal to its age, and beyond that there is no knowing. One marvels at the Unity of it all: that the very elements which form the molecules which make up our bodies, the Carbon, the Nitrogen, the Oxygen and Hydrogen, were formed in the centers of stars, that we are the Universe becoming conscious of itself, and, through our imaginations, daring to make meaning of it all. And perhaps not just here on earth, but on other planets circling other stars -- perhaps there too, the Universe comes to life, and begins to speculate on its origins.
And then, if you're really feeling daring, you might pause to consider that you're not actually looking up at the sky -- you're actually sitting in a very high place and looking a long, long, long, long, long way down: down into the center of the galaxy, back to the beginning of time, out at all that is or was or yet shall be. A tiny, little word like "God" just doesn't seem enough to do justice to it all. It seems to me like you'd need a lot of words, big fancy words, to really cover the subject; and even then you probably wouldn't get it quite right. But still we keep on trying, because ultimately that's what we're here for, isn't it? -- to use the power of our imaginations to create the ideas which help us to discover the meaning of it all, to gaze out upon the Universe, and find there meaning for our lives.
Several thousand years ago, the Greeks told a story about a fellow named Prometheus, who climbed up to the heavens and stole fire from the Gods, so that humankind might make a light of its own to shine beneath the evening sky. And ever since, it seems, there’ve been some who've been itching to go back: to ride that fire into the sky just for the experience of looking around. And now finally, in my lifetime, they've actually done it; and the view, I'm told, is out of this world. They've even brought back pictures for the rest of us to look at: amazing pictures of our tiny planet, which seems so stable beneath our feet, adrift in a vast emptiness -- a tiny oasis of light and life in the midst of a great darkness. It's a different kind of theological perspective. Having gazed for eons upon the heavens, we have now, in our lifetimes, gained the opportunity to gaze back upon ourselves.
And what do we see? We see a garden of green and brown and blue, with soft clouds swirling around it; a world without boundaries -- no nations, no "enemies" or "allies" -- but instead a single unity, complex and interdependent. We see ourselves as heaven sees us, and behold: it is good. Better even perhaps than we deserve; it's a wonder we're not more grateful. But the masters of fire are also a proud species, arrogant in our ability to soar among the angels.
Playing with fire has always been a dangerous pass-time. Last Tuesday at 11:39 AM, just four days before his own spacecraft would break apart during its re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, Columbia shuttle commander Rick Husband led his crew and the ground support staff at Mission Control in observing a moment of silence to commemorate ten other NASA astronauts who have lost their lives in the service of America’s exploration of space. On January 27th, 1967 the three-person crew of Apollo 1 were killed in a catastrophic fire aboard their spacecraft as it sat on its launch pad in Florida. And then, exactly 19 years and a single day after that accident, on January 28, 1986 the Space shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after it was launched, killing seven astronauts, and creating an indelible image in the memories and imaginations of those who witnessed it, memories which were once again evoked, with surprising intensity yesterday, as I watched on television the remnants of the Columbia streak across the Texas sky.
As it so happened, I was at a minister's retreat in Athens, Texas on the day the Challenger exploded. Athens is a tiny little east Texas town, roughly in the center of the 100 square mile “debris field” where NASA is now beginning to search for the surviving wreckage of the Columbia. We'd learned the news about the Challenger at supper time; and for those of us who had come to take spaceflight for granted, the tragedy reached well beyond the loss of life. Several of our number served churches in the Houston area, whose congregations included individuals associated with NASA; and all of us worried about the children. The Challenger disaster was especially poignant because of who had been watching, and who had been on board. Interest in the space program had been flagging, so in an effort to drum up public attention, NASA had included a schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, among the crew of the Challenger -- a gimmick in what was otherwise considered a routine flight. Then the Challenger exploded and the routine was over; we were no longer masters of the heavens; there was no longer any need for "gimmicks."
The destruction of the Columbia evokes a somewhat different set of emotions. Distracted by wars, and rumors of wars, by images of jet airliners crashing into skyscrapers, and memories of cruise missiles and “smart” munitions defeating, with seeming effortlessness, a foe who refuses to accept defeat, the sight of one of the crowning artifacts of our nation’s technological genius tumbling fatally from the sky should give us pause. Government officials have been quick to rule out any possibility of terrorist involvement in the destruction of the Columbia, and how could they do otherwise? -- can you imagine how vulnerable we would feel, if we truly believed, that terrorists were capable of penetrating the elaborate security precautions surrounding Cape Canaveral in order to strike at the heart of our space program? It kind of makes searching for shoe bombs at Logan Airport seem trivial.
Whenever we choose to put people in harm’s way, we run the risk that they will actually be harmed, yet usually our casualties remain anonymous to all but their friends and families. And I’m not just talking about putting “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan or Iraq. 40,000 Americans are killed each year, and another 3 million injured, by traffic accidents on our nation’s highways. Yet we accept this carnage as a cost of doing “business as usual;” just as we seem willing, as a society, to accept several thousand handgun deaths each year as the price of preserving our second amendment right to bear arms. 17 deaths in four decades of American space exploration may seem a mere drop in the bucket compared to the other potential sources of mortality our society appears willing to take for granted. Yet because of their public visibility, they take on an emotional significance which transcends the statistical weight of their number.
The author Joseph Campbell has often written of the power of myth as a function of the power of metaphor: not "truth" in the way that we habitually think of truth -- the truth of "facts" and statistics and "equations" -- but rather the truth of images and symbols: patterns of meaning and relationship which point to an understanding beyond themselves, an understanding perhaps not easily expressed in words, but which can be captured through story: a fable, a fairy tale -- stories which speak to the depths of our unconsciousness minds. The image of the Columbia disintegrating over Texas, like that of the Challenger exploding over the South Atlantic, represents much more than merely an unanticipated failure of our routinely stellar technology, a scientific problem to be studied and corrected. They are also symbols which point to a higher tension in our being: our struggle, on the one hand, to transcend the limitations of our spirit, and the swift fury on the other with which the Gods of Heaven can strike down those who grow lazy or careless.
The history of humanity’s exploration of space is no doubt much more triumph than tragedy. From the early days of Sputnik and the Cold War race to land on the moon, through the safe return of Apollo 13, and the agony of the Challenger disaster, to the development of the international space station, and its vision of a future for human kind beyond this planet based on multi-national cooperation rather than potentially deadly competition...the dream that humanity can somehow resolve its conflicts, put aside its differences, and journey beyond the earth together is so much more reassuring than thoughts of vast arsenals of inter-continental ballistic missiles waiting to launch at a moments notice, or fantasies of space-based lasers and particle beams orbiting above our heads in a vain and futile gesture to keep our nation safe from attack. It's a daring vision worthy of our consideration, this notion that by learning to collaborate in little things, we might learn to work together toward larger goals as well: a bold leap of imagination which draws us beyond what we now take for granted, and offers us the possibility of a larger meaning for our lives.
When my son Jacob was still a youngster, one of his great ambitions for his life was to live in outer space. And I have to admit, he came by it honestly; because I used to feel this way myself, although I confess that over the years I've pretty much decided that it's really not that important to me, that I like it just fine here on earth. I'd just as soon read about life on other planets, about starships flying faster than light throughout the galaxy, and the astounding things which may await them there. For my own part, I have discovered that the truly important journeys begin within the mind: that through our capacity to dream, to fantasize, to imagine the unimaginable, we can truly be transported beyond ourselves; we can become, like Thoreau, widely traveled in Concord, and need not journey round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. To the imagination, nothing is impossible; things are only more or less likely, according to the evidence of our reasoning.
But even though few of us may physically make the journey, it is the experiences of those who do which pave the way for the rest of us to someday follow in our minds. And likewise, it is the result of our capacity to dream which points the direction that the travelers will follow. And thus we leapfrog towards our destiny: dreaming and becoming, dreaming and becoming, gradually discovering that broader perspective which reveals to us to a higher vision. It's the stuff of which Science Fiction's made of. And also theology -- the queen of the sciences -- which leads us to a knowledge of our higher selves, and in time perhaps the wisdom to live together in peace, as children of that creative power which gives us life, and gives life meaning.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday February 2nd, 2003
***
This was supposed to be an easy week for me....
I have been known, on occasion, to suffer teasing from my colleagues in the Unitarian Universalist ministry for a rather unusual idiosyncrasy of mine. It's my tendency, late at night during minister's retreats, when we begin to speak softly of things theological, to sometimes lapse into the language of Science Fiction in order to express my meaning; while when I speak of Science Fiction, I become almost mystical in my discourse. There's a perfectly natural explanation for all this. I am, after all, a child of the Space Age; lying on my back on a warm summer evening, staring up at the heavens, I habitually think, not of the God of Creation and his angelic hosts, but of the Starship Enterprise and the vastness of the Universe: a billion, trillion stars arrayed before me, stretching out into infinity, and myself so tiny in comparison.
The term theology means, literally, "a word about God;" and it is not an activity for the timid. It is the attempt to say something sensible about a mystery which is, in its essence and by definition, ultimately unspeakable. It is a daring act of creative imagination to practice theology; and the night sky has long been an inspiration for those of us who dare to do so. Lying on your back, looking up at the stars, one realizes that you are not only staring out into space, but also back into time: that the light which strikes your eyes has traveled hundreds, thousands, even millions of years to reach the earth; that from any given place, the size of the visible Universe is exactly equal to its age, and beyond that there is no knowing. One marvels at the Unity of it all: that the very elements which form the molecules which make up our bodies, the Carbon, the Nitrogen, the Oxygen and Hydrogen, were formed in the centers of stars, that we are the Universe becoming conscious of itself, and, through our imaginations, daring to make meaning of it all. And perhaps not just here on earth, but on other planets circling other stars -- perhaps there too, the Universe comes to life, and begins to speculate on its origins.
And then, if you're really feeling daring, you might pause to consider that you're not actually looking up at the sky -- you're actually sitting in a very high place and looking a long, long, long, long, long way down: down into the center of the galaxy, back to the beginning of time, out at all that is or was or yet shall be. A tiny, little word like "God" just doesn't seem enough to do justice to it all. It seems to me like you'd need a lot of words, big fancy words, to really cover the subject; and even then you probably wouldn't get it quite right. But still we keep on trying, because ultimately that's what we're here for, isn't it? -- to use the power of our imaginations to create the ideas which help us to discover the meaning of it all, to gaze out upon the Universe, and find there meaning for our lives.
Several thousand years ago, the Greeks told a story about a fellow named Prometheus, who climbed up to the heavens and stole fire from the Gods, so that humankind might make a light of its own to shine beneath the evening sky. And ever since, it seems, there’ve been some who've been itching to go back: to ride that fire into the sky just for the experience of looking around. And now finally, in my lifetime, they've actually done it; and the view, I'm told, is out of this world. They've even brought back pictures for the rest of us to look at: amazing pictures of our tiny planet, which seems so stable beneath our feet, adrift in a vast emptiness -- a tiny oasis of light and life in the midst of a great darkness. It's a different kind of theological perspective. Having gazed for eons upon the heavens, we have now, in our lifetimes, gained the opportunity to gaze back upon ourselves.
And what do we see? We see a garden of green and brown and blue, with soft clouds swirling around it; a world without boundaries -- no nations, no "enemies" or "allies" -- but instead a single unity, complex and interdependent. We see ourselves as heaven sees us, and behold: it is good. Better even perhaps than we deserve; it's a wonder we're not more grateful. But the masters of fire are also a proud species, arrogant in our ability to soar among the angels.
Playing with fire has always been a dangerous pass-time. Last Tuesday at 11:39 AM, just four days before his own spacecraft would break apart during its re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, Columbia shuttle commander Rick Husband led his crew and the ground support staff at Mission Control in observing a moment of silence to commemorate ten other NASA astronauts who have lost their lives in the service of America’s exploration of space. On January 27th, 1967 the three-person crew of Apollo 1 were killed in a catastrophic fire aboard their spacecraft as it sat on its launch pad in Florida. And then, exactly 19 years and a single day after that accident, on January 28, 1986 the Space shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after it was launched, killing seven astronauts, and creating an indelible image in the memories and imaginations of those who witnessed it, memories which were once again evoked, with surprising intensity yesterday, as I watched on television the remnants of the Columbia streak across the Texas sky.
As it so happened, I was at a minister's retreat in Athens, Texas on the day the Challenger exploded. Athens is a tiny little east Texas town, roughly in the center of the 100 square mile “debris field” where NASA is now beginning to search for the surviving wreckage of the Columbia. We'd learned the news about the Challenger at supper time; and for those of us who had come to take spaceflight for granted, the tragedy reached well beyond the loss of life. Several of our number served churches in the Houston area, whose congregations included individuals associated with NASA; and all of us worried about the children. The Challenger disaster was especially poignant because of who had been watching, and who had been on board. Interest in the space program had been flagging, so in an effort to drum up public attention, NASA had included a schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, among the crew of the Challenger -- a gimmick in what was otherwise considered a routine flight. Then the Challenger exploded and the routine was over; we were no longer masters of the heavens; there was no longer any need for "gimmicks."
The destruction of the Columbia evokes a somewhat different set of emotions. Distracted by wars, and rumors of wars, by images of jet airliners crashing into skyscrapers, and memories of cruise missiles and “smart” munitions defeating, with seeming effortlessness, a foe who refuses to accept defeat, the sight of one of the crowning artifacts of our nation’s technological genius tumbling fatally from the sky should give us pause. Government officials have been quick to rule out any possibility of terrorist involvement in the destruction of the Columbia, and how could they do otherwise? -- can you imagine how vulnerable we would feel, if we truly believed, that terrorists were capable of penetrating the elaborate security precautions surrounding Cape Canaveral in order to strike at the heart of our space program? It kind of makes searching for shoe bombs at Logan Airport seem trivial.
Whenever we choose to put people in harm’s way, we run the risk that they will actually be harmed, yet usually our casualties remain anonymous to all but their friends and families. And I’m not just talking about putting “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan or Iraq. 40,000 Americans are killed each year, and another 3 million injured, by traffic accidents on our nation’s highways. Yet we accept this carnage as a cost of doing “business as usual;” just as we seem willing, as a society, to accept several thousand handgun deaths each year as the price of preserving our second amendment right to bear arms. 17 deaths in four decades of American space exploration may seem a mere drop in the bucket compared to the other potential sources of mortality our society appears willing to take for granted. Yet because of their public visibility, they take on an emotional significance which transcends the statistical weight of their number.
The author Joseph Campbell has often written of the power of myth as a function of the power of metaphor: not "truth" in the way that we habitually think of truth -- the truth of "facts" and statistics and "equations" -- but rather the truth of images and symbols: patterns of meaning and relationship which point to an understanding beyond themselves, an understanding perhaps not easily expressed in words, but which can be captured through story: a fable, a fairy tale -- stories which speak to the depths of our unconsciousness minds. The image of the Columbia disintegrating over Texas, like that of the Challenger exploding over the South Atlantic, represents much more than merely an unanticipated failure of our routinely stellar technology, a scientific problem to be studied and corrected. They are also symbols which point to a higher tension in our being: our struggle, on the one hand, to transcend the limitations of our spirit, and the swift fury on the other with which the Gods of Heaven can strike down those who grow lazy or careless.
The history of humanity’s exploration of space is no doubt much more triumph than tragedy. From the early days of Sputnik and the Cold War race to land on the moon, through the safe return of Apollo 13, and the agony of the Challenger disaster, to the development of the international space station, and its vision of a future for human kind beyond this planet based on multi-national cooperation rather than potentially deadly competition...the dream that humanity can somehow resolve its conflicts, put aside its differences, and journey beyond the earth together is so much more reassuring than thoughts of vast arsenals of inter-continental ballistic missiles waiting to launch at a moments notice, or fantasies of space-based lasers and particle beams orbiting above our heads in a vain and futile gesture to keep our nation safe from attack. It's a daring vision worthy of our consideration, this notion that by learning to collaborate in little things, we might learn to work together toward larger goals as well: a bold leap of imagination which draws us beyond what we now take for granted, and offers us the possibility of a larger meaning for our lives.
When my son Jacob was still a youngster, one of his great ambitions for his life was to live in outer space. And I have to admit, he came by it honestly; because I used to feel this way myself, although I confess that over the years I've pretty much decided that it's really not that important to me, that I like it just fine here on earth. I'd just as soon read about life on other planets, about starships flying faster than light throughout the galaxy, and the astounding things which may await them there. For my own part, I have discovered that the truly important journeys begin within the mind: that through our capacity to dream, to fantasize, to imagine the unimaginable, we can truly be transported beyond ourselves; we can become, like Thoreau, widely traveled in Concord, and need not journey round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. To the imagination, nothing is impossible; things are only more or less likely, according to the evidence of our reasoning.
But even though few of us may physically make the journey, it is the experiences of those who do which pave the way for the rest of us to someday follow in our minds. And likewise, it is the result of our capacity to dream which points the direction that the travelers will follow. And thus we leapfrog towards our destiny: dreaming and becoming, dreaming and becoming, gradually discovering that broader perspective which reveals to us to a higher vision. It's the stuff of which Science Fiction's made of. And also theology -- the queen of the sciences -- which leads us to a knowledge of our higher selves, and in time perhaps the wisdom to live together in peace, as children of that creative power which gives us life, and gives life meaning.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 4:44 PM
