Reflection / Sean Gallagher

Greatness of the cosmos leads an astronaut—and all of us—closer to God and his creation

“When I see the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars which you arranged, what is man that you keep him in mind, mortal man that you care for him?” (Ps 8:4-5).

This poetic description in Psalm 8 of the awe experienced by a person looking up at the heavens in the night sky was composed 2,500 years ago or more.

It expresses a reality at the heart of the human condition in all times and places. The experience expressed in these verses was described in a heartfelt way, if not in as poetic a manner as the psalms, during an April 16 press conference in Houston of the astronauts who took part in the Artemis II mission around the moon, which returned to Earth on April 10.

During the press conference, mission commander Reid Wiseman recalled a moment when he and his fellow astronauts were brought onto a U.S. Navy ship after their splashdown and taken to a room for a medical evaluation.

But before the physical check-up took place, Wiseman asked for spiritual care to help him come to terms with what he had experienced in his flight around the moon.

“I’m not really a religious person, but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything, so I just asked for the Navy chaplain to come visit us for a minute,” Wiseman said. “When that man walked in—I’d never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar, and I just broke down in tears.”

Why?

“It’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through,” he said.

Wiseman and his fellow astronauts were the first humans to see the moon up close in more than 50 years. And while they were on the far side of the moon, they witnessed the kind of solar eclipse that people across Indiana experienced on April 8, 2024. Except then, the eclipse, as wondrous as it was, was a small disc in the mid-afternoon sky.

For the Artemis astronauts, the moon would have taken up much of what they were seeing from their Orion spacecraft. The moon, from their perspective, was five times larger than the sun. And the eclipse for the astronauts lasted nearly an hour, while the one that took place two years ago lasted between three and four minutes.

Wiseman recalled at the press conference that he turned to Victor Glover, Artemis II’s pilot, during the eclipse that the astronauts witnessed and said, “I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we are looking at right now, because it was otherworldly and it was amazing.”

He and his fellow astronauts were given the opportunity to fly further away from Earth than anyone in human history has ever flown, to witness Earth and the heavens in a way that no one has ever experienced.

It’s only natural, then, to say that their experiences are beyond their understanding. So, then, it was also only natural—or perhaps supernatural—for Wiseman to seek out a chaplain upon returning to Earth.

After he had seen “the heavens” and “the moon and the stars” which God arranged, Wiseman effectively came to the same awe-filled question the psalmist had thousands of years ago: “What is man that you keep him in mind, mortal man that you care for him?”

In acknowledging the transcendence of his experience, this astronaut, a self-confessed “not really ... religious person,” truly was a wise man.

And with the help of God’s grace, all of us can be wise like him. Another psalm tells us that “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps 110:10). Recognizing one’s smallness in the face of the enormity of God’s creation like Wiseman did, let alone God himself, is certainly a kind of fear of God that is an expression of wisdom.

Thankfully, none of us has to travel to the far side of the moon to grow in wisdom by experiencing the stunning beauty of God’s creation.

Open your heart to his grace and your eyes to the wonders of nature here on Earth below and in the heavens above, and that gift will be open to you.
 

(Sean Gallagher is a reporter for The Criterion.) †