Happy Christmas!

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters, cp

Sunday, December 21st, 2014

Apollo 8 was the first mission to take humans to the moon and orbit it many times. It was at Christmas time in 1968. The astronauts were Borman, Lovell and Anders. As they orbited the moon they suddenly saw the Earth rising over it just as we see the moon rising over the earth.

Borman, full of awe, said, “O my God! Look at that picture over there. Here’s the earth coming up. Wow isn’t that pretty?” Anders said, “Hey, don’t take that. It’s not scheduled.” Borman laughed and said, “Have you got colour film Jim?” Andres forgot his scruples and said, “Hand me that roll of colour quick, will you? And all Lovell said was “O man that’s great!” And the resulting pictures really were iconic. Every blessed thing is called ‘iconic’ nowadays but these photos really were and are.

The Apollo 8 mission was a spectacular, almost unbelievable engineering triumph but what is most remembered are two things not scheduled at all. One was that photo of the earth rising over the moon. Earth Rise it was called. The other was the famous, moving broadcast that the distant explorers read: “For all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send to you,”  Anders began, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.” And Borman concluded with a sentence clearly spoken by a lonely man 400,000 kilometers from home: “and from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with goodnight, good luck, a merry Christmas – and God bless you all, all of you on the good earth.” It was the most watched TV event in history at that time.

Another photo of planet earth was taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers. From that distance, it was just a dot, a pale blue dot, a single pixel. This is something of what Carl Sagan wrote about it: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.

Do we all need to be shipped out into space before we will come to love and appreciate the ‘good earth’ and learn to live in harmony with all peoples and all living creatures that share the planet with us? This Christmas may God bless all of us on this Good Earth!