Now Voyager! Travelling the Solar System

What's been the most moving TV programme I have seen for a long time?  It may surprise you that it was a BBC4 documentary on the journeys of Voyager 1 and 2 through the Solar System. 

They two Voyagers were launched in 1977 to study the outer planets of the Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.  A blog can hardly do justice to the quantity and quality of the information beamed back to us across the void.  The turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter with its storm-system known as the Great Red Spot, the rings of Saturn and the shadows on them caused by its magnetic field, Uranus (which largely kept its secrets from Voyager) and Neptune the ethereal blue planet that is the sentinel of the Solar System: all these and many of their diverse and fascinating moons have been disclosed as never before. 

The two Voyagers are receding from us (in different directions) by several thousand km/hour.  Yet their 1970s technology, so clunky by current standards, is still working and is capable of transmitting information across billions of miles, and for as long as they can continue to be powered.  It’s an eerie thought that these humanly-made objects are now crossing the threshold between the sun’s influence, passing out of the environment that is earth’s home, and entering deep space. This is as far as anything made by humankind has ever travelled.  

Why did I find all this powerfully moving?

For two reasons.  The first is the tribute the Voyagers’ journeys are still paying to what human beings are capable of.  But this isn’t simply the technology that launched them on this odyssey.  The spacecraft are carrying discs that are a greeting from Planet Earth to any ET who may chance to come across them.  They contain a record of what the world was like in the 1970s: landscapes, townscapes, human language, beliefs, buildings, writings and culture.  Among this testimony to homo sapiens sent into space was the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps because there would be some consensus (which I’d endorse) that he was the greatest composer of the western world.  

Of course the chance that any extra-terrestial will ever see pictures of children across the world and listen to their greetings is practically zero. But the real point was not to inform ET.  It was to inform us, and by an act of the imagination, underline the infinite preciousness of planet earth and the miracle of life that has evolved on its surface. To think of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues hurtling through inter-stellar space for aeons to come should make us realise how marvellous a thing it is that we are here at all, so privileged, so gifted and yet so precariously placed in the face of the threats that are posed not by outside forces but from our very selves and our capacity for self-destruction.  We hear the echoes of our own life from a far-off place, and that makes us hear ourselves in new ways.

There is a real agenda for theology here, because the Voyager journeys not only put questions about the cosmos and its meaning but also put the psalmist’s question (apologies for the non-inclusive language): ‘what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you visit him?’ That question of Psalm 8 is asked because the psalmist has looked up into the sky and been awed by its tracts unknown.  If the Voyager programme has helped instil a greater sense of awe so that we begin to know our place in the universe, it will have been worth it.  I wish I could believe that the past 35 years have seen the human family take that question seriously, become more aware, more responsible, wiser.  But we must not lose heart.

My second reason for being touched was more personal.  The Voyagers were launched in 1977.  That was also the year that our first child was born and launched on the adventure of being alive. She too has been travelling for all that time.  Like them, she is an explorer.  She is bound to be because she is a human being, and it’s the vocation and destiny of every human being to discover worlds undreamed of and try to make sense of life’s mystery. 

This is where cosmology and religion belong together.  It's one of those places where faith seeks understanding to the enrichment and delight of the human mind and heart. 

Moved and Mystified

I’ve been reading an intriguing book this week: The Antidote: Happiness for People who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman.  I haven’t finished it yet, so I won’t say more about the argument now, though I feel a blog coming on.  (If the title sounds a trifle racy, let me assure you that it’s a serious book.  It looks at the ‘can-do’ success culture that is endemic in the organisational and business world of today, and asks whether it makes sense to live and work this way.  More soon.)

Early on, Burkeman talks about a meeting he had with a self-confessed Stoic (yes, I didn’t know either that people still followed Stoicism as a rigorous philosophical life path inspired by the apostles Seneca and Marcus Aurelius). ‘Keith’ describes how he looks back to a defining incident when he was walking in the park one day.  It was, he says, ‘a shift in perspective – the kind of jolting insight that often gets described as a “spiritual experience”.  “It was quite a short thing…. just a minute or two.  But suddenly I was…directly aware of how everything was connected together in space and time…like travelling out into space, perceiving the universe as a whole, and seeing everything connected together in exactly the way it was meant to be.  As something finished and complete.’  

When I read that I asked myself: what are the unforgettable spiritual high points of my own life?  There are many: being baptised as a teenager, getting married, being ordained, holding my first child as she emerged from the womb, my grandmother’s funeral, and other times. What these have in common is that they are rites of passage.  At liminal times like these, we are in a state of mind that the social anthropologists call communitas.  We feel alive in a different way, even in grief.  Our emotions are heightened, our sensitivities more acute.  We feel closer to other people crossing the same threshold, and we often feel closer to God.

But I had to work harder to recall experiences quite like Keith’s.  I think I have only ever had two.  One was as a schoolboy when I sang the top line of Bach’s St John Passion. I blogged about this a few months ago.  I look back on it as a profoundly religious experience of ‘the Other’ that opened the doors of my perception in a wholly new way. In my evangelical past, I spoke about it as realising, through the music of the passion, that Jesus died ‘for me’.  That is still at the heart of my story and the cross is at the heart of my spirituality.  But I now see how much bigger and wider was the spiritual world into which this heightened awareness was leading me, what the psalms call ‘a large place’.  It was if existence began to be charged with a new and wonderful meaning. 

The other happened about 12 years ago.  I was out walking on my own among the fells of the Dark Peak around Kinder Scout.  In that part of England you are never far from dense population centres: Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds.  Yet the hills are as bleak as any in the Pennines.  It is the nearest England gets to desert.  The wind and rain can howl across the watershed and then you could think yourself at the end of the world.  But on this day it was sunny and warm, calm and peaceful.  Yet for no reason that I could think of, the landscape suddenly began to glow with a hot luminescence that was ominous and threatening.  It was if everything was metamorphosed into a parched, lifeless wilderness.  I felt unutterably alone, forlorn, abandoned.  I must have stood still in this state for a minute or two.  And then I noticed that there was a steady movement in the corner of my eye.  It was traffic on the main road snaking over the fells in the far distance.  Cars and lorries: how reassuring they seemed!  Gradually, my mind cleared and my vision returned to normal. The grass faded to green, the sky to blue.  Grouse were chattering happily.  A curlew swung across the sky.  The warm peat underfoot radiated earthy scents. All was well.

For a few years I tried to ‘make sense’ of this disturbing experience.  I linked it with the Bach moment, and used the time-honoured language of consolation and desolation to try to speak about it.  But the words ran out.  I had to learn Wittgenstein’s dictum that if we can’t speak about something, we should be silent.  And maybe the test of any experience we think of as ‘mystical’ is perhaps that we should struggle to put it into words at all. 

But there is one thing I can confidently say about these two events. In Keith’s language, I became in a new way directly aware of how everything was connected together in space and time.  With Bach that brought the promise of salvation, peace and goodness.  On the Peak I was lonely, afraid, struggling not to be overwhelmed by the presence of the Mysterium tremens et fascinans.  Both times I felt that for a few moments I was at one with this great Presence that infuses and energises the cosmos, one with reality, one with God. It was a profound sense both of connection and of simplicity.

I don’t want to claim too much.  I don't think I am a ‘mystic’.  If these were mystical experiences, two are enough for a life-time.  ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’  When Semele pestered her lover Zeus to show himself as he really was, it killed her.  Ordinariness is good, the slow, steady rhythms of prayer, discipleship, relationships, Christian service.  Enough, while we wait for the vision of God, to practise what living faith requires of us: to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with the Lord our God. And know that all of life is gift.