To Touch the Face of God by Kendrick Oliver

Author:Kendrick Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2011-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Spaceflight and Secondary Religious Experience

To the extent that spaceflight was a spiritual errand, undertaken by the astronauts on behalf of mankind, its returns were rather mixed. Some toured around the heavens but found nothing of spiritual interest there. Some, in their encounters with the earth, the moon, or the stars, registered a strange deepening of mood, but then the moment passed, never to be recovered or evoked with much success in writing or speech. A few did experience such moods as a source of new conviction, but the messages conceived in a splendid Apollonian isolation were required on return to compete in a highly complex spiritual marketplace, profuse with rival cosmologies. The astronauts may have traveled into space in the name of all mankind, but whatever insights they had accumulated there were unlikely to entirely transcend earthly religious particularism. Edgar Mitchell scrutinized quantum theory for clues to the divine. But for Jim Irwin, “there are things that God does not intend man to understand, things that man is to take on faith.”147 To the evangelical imagination, Mitchell’s notion of divinity was esoteric and recessive; it was too implicit in the substance of nature to do the work of saving souls. Dotty Duke, wife of Charlie, observed: “It’s not the same God.”148 This was the fate of spiritual lessons conceived in the open cosmos: back on Earth they seemed to resonate most clearly in the context of closed structures, within church walls.

Still, the capacity of the space age to occasion religious experience was not confined to the corps of astronauts and those transformed by their testimonies; and not every affective response registered on the ground was obviously reducible to some preexisting sectarian perspective. To the astronauts sitting high up in the nose of the Saturn V rocket, the moment of lift-off was signaled by modest vibration and a rumbling noise far below.149 From the viewing stands at Cape Canaveral, in contrast, the raw power of the rocket was manifest in a fierce spectacle of flame and bone-shaking waves of sound, as if an impassioned deity were at work. The astronauts, of course, were also absent in space for whatever earthly rituals, vigils, and impressions of collective experience attended their missions. Quarantined upon return, the crew of Apollo 11 viewed videotapes of the television broadcasts that had tracked their progress to the moon, including images from around the world of crowds gazing intently at screens as Armstrong stepped off the ladder onto the lunar surface. “Neil,” Buzz Aldrin commented, “we missed the whole thing.”150 And what of the writers and poets who had observed the same scenes? Would they use their craft to transfigure the technical achievement of Apollo into something sublime or expressive of the sacred? Could they fashion a common sense of it, as the astronauts could not?

Seventy years earlier, at the Paris Exposition, Henry Adams had entered the hall of dynamos and wondered at their power. He thought of the cathedrals at Chartres and Amiens, built by faith in the Virgin.

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