“Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and value.”).1
Thomas Berry’s challenge (first published in 1988), is one I have long struggled to understand and incorporate into my framing of the world. It has therefore been a great joy and comfort for me to hear an echo of Berry’s words in the reflections of the four Artemis II astronauts, who have just returned from their brave-brief-intense voyage into outer space. These three men and one woman, spent roughly 10 days traveling hundreds of thousands of miles, and returning safely to Earth on Friday April 10. As Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said just before lift-off, it was a voyage they were making “in the name of all humanity”.
With so many other earthlings, I have been caught up in the voyage of these four astronauts. For me, what has been extraordinary about their foray around the moon, is not primarily their professional competencies as considerable as those skills are. Rather, it is the shining depths of their humanity, their clear and transparently loving interpersonal relationships, their sense that humans can do great and complex things when we collaborate with one another, and the sense that their courageous travels, are undertaken on behalf of all life on earth.
Now safely back on this small blue planet hanging in the darkness of space, the crew has tried to put words on their experience. Spaceship pilot Victor Glover acknowledged that before the crew went into space …, he wanted to thank God in public. Now that the expedition is completed, he wanted
“to thank God again. The gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did, and being with who I was with — it’s too big to just be in one body.”2
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen described the Artemis crew as “a group of people who loved contributing and extracting joy out of that (contribution).” Then from his place on the stage he added:
“When you look up here, you’re not looking at us, …We are a mirror reflecting you.”3
For me, it was such a consolation in today’s fractured and fractious world to have a man, a human being, recognize and claim the good to which we are all called, of which we are all capable and for which we are all responsible.
Returning to Berry’s landmark work, Berry provides
“a new intellectual-ethical framework for the human community by positing planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity.”
The astronauts of Artemis II show us how challenging projects done collaboratively manifest that well-being and radiant grace.
1 Thomas Berry, “The Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth, 42. Available at: https://thomasberry.org/quote/the-dream-of-the-earth/
2 Victor Glover. As quoted in Mike Hanson ‘We are bonded forever’: Artemis II heroes welcomed home after historic journey around moon”. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/52cdzzze
3 Jeremy Hansen. Ibid.
Veronica Dunne is a Sister of our Lady of the Missions (RNDM), who has primarily worked as an educator and counsellor in institutional and community based settings in Canada. She has also served with the RNDMs outside of Canada in Senegal, Peru, and Aotearoa New Zealand.
A 2002 Doctor of Ministry graduate from the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto School of Theology at the University of Toronto, she subsequently served as director of the Doctor of Ministry program at St. Stephen’s College at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Her current research interests are in eco-theology and cosmology, and their intersections with indigenous cosmologies and spiritualties.
She presently serves on the RNDM leadership team in Canada.
Thanks, Veronica, for the powerful linking of the post voyage interviews with the words spoken so long ago by Berry. As I listened to them against the background of all the horrible rhetoric and news of war filling our screens, I found myself pondering on the attempt in Genesis to explain good and evil… and the understanding of what it is to be human. Against the background of a loss of the ability of nations to work together the experience of this voyage awakens again a hope of what can be achieved if we can use our knowledge and skills to cooperate and waken again the sense of awe and wonder at the gift of creation.