When I finally saw the incredible Artemis photos — of the far side of the moon and the hour-long eclipse of the Earth setting beyond the moon — I thought of Fitzgerald’s quote about wonder from the end of “The Great Gatsby”:
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
Fitzgerald is one of my favorite writers, and the closing page of this perfect novel is among the best passages in American literature, but he was clearly wrong — in these photos, we once again come face to face with scenes equal to, or in excess of, our capacity for wonder.
I was late in coming to pay attention to Artemis II; I somehow missed the launch entirely. It’s the sort of thing that I would normally be very aware of, because rocket launches are awesome and long space journeys are mind-blowing. One of my earliest memories is of watching the Challenger disaster in my kindergarten classroom in New Hampshire (the schoolteacher on board, Christa McAuliffe, was from the Granite State, and so we had spent weeks discussing the launch). The explosion seared itself into my tiny brain — not the horrible loss of it all so much as the bravery and desire for exploration that it represented.
I went on to devour the stories of Ray Bradbury, which captured the wonder of space travel and the potential of encountering other worlds and civilizations amidst the stars. In time I came to accept the unfortunate reality that there definitely were not going to be aliens on Mars, and that there was little likelihood of encountering intelligent life out there somewhere in my lifetime.
Artemis helped me remember that I am also a believer in science for science’s sake. We should do things that are wonderful because we are capable of doing them.
But I was still disappointed when NASA scaled back the space program. Privatized low Earth orbit launches for the super-wealthy don’t inspire the same kind of joy that multi-country space exploration does. So when I first heard about the Artemis program, which was NASA’s project to send astronauts back to the moon, I was excited. But somehow the launch of this manned mission out beyond the moon was not on my radar at all. I say “somehow” but there is actually a very clear reason — in the lead up to the launch my wife’s 104-year-old grandmother, who lived with my in-laws, entered hospice care. Great Dora, as this matriarch of the family was called by her more than 20 great-grandchildren, passed away on April 1, which is the day that Artemis II launched. So my mind was certainly on other things on that day, and the days leading up to it.
But throughout the 10 days that the rocket was out there I kept hearing bits and pieces about the journey; friends and family would text and ask if I had seen the incredible pictures, which I mostly had not. I was off social media during Lent and rather disconnected from the major news stories. On the day of the funeral, which was two days after Easter and one day after the space shuttle had gone around the far side of the moon, I sat in the funeral home thinking about the 104 years of Great Dora’s life, and how much had changed during that time. She was five when Charles Lindbergh first flew a plane across the Atlantic; by the time she was in her mid 40s, people were landing on the moon. Sometimes the rate of human technological improvement is staggering. And sometimes we stop putting our energy and effort into certain areas; the last moon landing was more than 50 years ago. Great Dora was more or less my age when humans first landed on the moon, and she lived for almost 60 more years. Now we are back going out to the moon; where will we be in another 57 years? To be fully honest, I don’t particularly want to live long enough to find out, but just thinking about the question inspires a sense of wonder.
I felt that wonder and awe in looking at the photos the astronauts sent back. I did finally make time to look at them while watching the livestream of Integrity bobbing in the ocean off the coast of San Diego; it took almost an hour for the door to open and the astronauts to emerge (I just kept thinking of how antsy I get waiting on the tarmac after a “long” flight and wondering if the astronauts were feeling similarly restless).
I had tuned in in time to watch reentry, and immediately found myself holding my breath, waiting for the parachutes to deploy, and gasped with joy when they did; I found myself surprisingly moved as I watched the capsule float gently down and splash into the Pacific. The four people in that capsule had been farther away from Earth than any humans had ever been before. (Somehow the scale of how much farther away the moon is than, say, the International Space Station, had not really sunk in for me, until I watched a few explainers online.) They had literally seen things that no one else had ever seen. And now they were back. Humanity can do incredible things.
I know there are geopolitical reasons that we are interested in going back to the moon: that we want to beat China there and hope to one day use it as a launching point for commercial projects, like the mining of asteroids and planets. But it is possible to put all that to the side and just marvel at what we are capable of when we are working together. I’m a believer in “art for art’s sake,” meaning there does not need to be any use value in creating or experiencing art beyond the aesthetic pleasures that it can bring, and Artemis helped me remember that I am also a believer in science for science’s sake. We should do things that are wonderful because we are capable of doing them. One of the reasons we are here is to give glory to God through our actions, and using all of our abilities to take people farther away from our home than ever before, and bringing them safely back again, is a perfect example of this.
It is truly amazing and awe-inspiring to be able to look up in the night sky and see the moon, the size of a dime held at arm’s length, and to know that at that very moment, on the other side of it(!), there is a spaceship, holding four people. Just as it is amazing and awe-inspiring to see the photos taken of Earth from the far side of the moon and to know that every single human, all of us together, all who have ever lived, are contained in that one photo. It made me think of what astronomer and Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, the recently retired head of the Vatican Observatory, said: “A Jesuit’s eye on the sky means beholding it with both nostalgia and amazement, familiarity and mystery, awe and joy — in everything. That’s why they call it the Universe. It is the ‘all things’ where we find God.”
This idea was echoed directly by one of the Artemis astronauts; pilot Victor Glover was asked if he had any Easter message to share, and he responded:
“In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. I think, as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve gotta get through this together.”
Glover’s words were echoing in my head as I listened to the first reading at Mass on Divine Mercy Sunday, where one particular line from the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles jumped out to me: “Awe came upon everyone.” This kind of universal awe is rare, but I think that everyone who witnessed the Artemis mission, or who spends time looking at the pictures they sent back, will feel some sense of this.
For so much of our life, we are not fully awake — we go through the motions without paying real attention to what’s going on around or inside of us. But something like the Artemis mission is so outside of the normal bounds that we cannot help but be shaken into a renewed awareness of the wonders of existence. Truly, as the memorable refrain from Marty Haugen’s classic “Canticle of the Sun” says: “The heavens are telling the glory of God / and all creation is shouting for joy.” We do not have to go to the moon for signs and wonders; they are all around us if we take the time to pay attention. But, goodness, sometimes it is a relief to be presented with something so jaw dropping that we don’t need to go out of our way to see it — those moments when the beauty and the majesty simply overpower us, as long as we are willing to keep our eyes open.
