Your collective heart

If you were around in the 90s, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the movie October Sky. It’s set in 1957 West Virginia. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a coal miner’s son desperate to send a rocket into space after seeing the Soviet Union launch Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite. For those of us in school at the time, the movie was required viewing in a lot of our classes. We watched it in social studies because of the focus on the post-war golden age; science, because rockets; and English because the film is based on the true story of Homer Hickham, written in his memoir, “Rocket Boys.” Fun fact: October Sky is actually an anagram of Rocket Boys (if you rearrange the letters of Rockets Boys you get October Sky). Apparently Universal Studios thought women over the age of 30 wouldn’t go see a movie called Rocket Boys, so they changed the name. Women over the age of 30 have a lot of power, eh? Note to self.

October Sky came out in 1999. I’m ashamed to say it, but I haven’t really paid attention to ‘space’ since. That was until the launch of Artemis II last month. In case you missed it, Artemis II was “the first crewed mission to the Moon since the Apollo missions over 50 years ago.” The crew was able to test all of the Orion spacecraft’s life-support and navigation systems “to make sure everything work[ed] properly in preparation for future missions.” They made it to the far side of the moon and captured some of the most detailed  photos of the moon’s surface ever taken. Victor Glover became the first person of colour to travel around the moon, Christina Koch, the first woman, Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian and non-US citizen, and Reid Wiseman, the oldest person to make the trip. 

Now, if you watched the YouTube coverage of the mission, you would know that it wasn’t exactly cutting-edge drama. Most of the footage was just technical notes and astronaut-talk. There were some memorable interviews—Prime Minister Mark Carney asked the crew to confirm that they did indeed prefer maple syrup over nutella on their pancakes. But the bulk of the mission really should have been pretty mundane to the average person tuning in from earth. So, why were so many of us glued to our screens watching this thing unfold?

I think, for me, it was the idea that having humans out there in space meant that there was this collective ‘us’ here on earth, that every time the astronauts went to address “everyone back home” they were, like, literally looking out at the whole earth. Out there, planet earth wasn’t as we experience it down here: a world divided into continents, countries split into factions, war over here, wealth over there. From the perspective of the astronauts, “heaven and earth were held together in a single peace” as the old Anglican prayer goes. 

Getting to see the earth from that vantage point must have been incredible. Reid Wiseman, the commander of Artemis II, talked about it recently. He said when the crew returned to earth, they were put through a bunch of tests to make sure they were okay physically, and to make sure they were okay mentally. But there was this ‘something else’ that the crew had experienced on the mission and he just couldn’t make sense of it, and none of the physical or psychological tests seemed to cover it. So, after splashing down and boarding the Navy’s recovery ship, Wiseman, a self-proclaimed “non religious person”, asked to speak to the ship’s chaplain. As the chaplain walked in, Wiseman says he saw the cross on the chaplain’s collar and broke down crying. That after seeing earth from deep space, “there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything.” 

What do we make of that? This “non-religious” person struggling to put words to an other-worldly experience, breaking down when they saw the cross on this chaplain’s collar? We could do what Christians have often done and say, “See! This proves that Christianity is the only way!” I wonder if we would say the same about Islam if it happened to be the Muslim chaplain on board that day? We could do what Christians also often do and say, “He was just exhausted; there’s a perfectly rational explanation for this.” 

Or, maybe we could look at it the way the commander looked at his encounter with the chaplain: with humility and awe. And, perhaps we could say just a little prayer of thanks that at a time when Christian nationalism looms large, and despots portraying themselves as Jesus dominate our social media feeds, that this commander saw a symbol of Christianity and felt strangely drawn rather than repulsed?

One final thought: if we consider our gospel reading today, I wonder what it would look like to imagine that Jesus looks at his disciples, who are this sliver, this archetype of humanity, and sees them as an astronaut would looking out at the earth from space? That Jesus, that God, looks at humanity, at creation with just this overwhelming sense of the wholeness of it all. Jesus says to his disciples in today’s gospel, “Do not let your heart be troubled.” In the original Greek, it really is Do not let your (plural) heart (singular) be troubled. Do not let your collective heart be troubled. That the whole of humanity is held together in a single peace. That what troubles my neighbour’s heart ought to trouble mine. This is a much needed message for our time. Yes? Amen. 


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