c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) What really happened to us as the space shuttle Discovery came streaking home on Tuesday (Aug. 9)? Most Americans were so relieved that it landed safely that they did not pay much attention to their other feelings _ or even notice if they had any _ as the ship’s light descended in the California darkness.

So dominant was the anticipatory anxiety, according to The New York Times, that some Americans, having witnessed two shuttle disasters, planned to not let their children watch the event “to shield them from what could be a traumatic experience.” They thereby deprived them of a true mystical experience.

As relief recedes, perhaps we sense in a general way that we shared something greater than a dangerous adventure with a brave crew or a technological triumph with extraordinary scientists and engineers.

For this experience pulled us all into the story of creation in which we and the universe itself were born again. Measured by the finest of clocks and altimeters, the vessel’s voyage was less about mathematics than it was about mystery.

As its images bloomed on every television screen, this expedition was far more than the background noise to our daily existences. Beneath the roar of the blastoff and the caressing silence of space, it spoke not just to our eyes or to our intellects but to the deepest levels of our being.

Seldom have we shared an event that mixed our human condition with our human destiny. The crew members revealed that we all belong to the same family, that in a real sense we were making the journey with them. They also reminded us of what the late Nobel laureate Saul Bellow called “our universal eligibility to be noble.”

A flag of our humanity fluttered from this sleekest of modern machines as bits of cloth flapped from the door just as they do from ill-packed vans on family vacations. This was the pennant of our glorious fallibility as it outwitted impersonal technology. The human hand that finally made a correction looked like basic home repair _ “Let’s just see if tugging at this will work” _ revealing that a person as alive as us, rather than a robot as inert as a parking meter, was guiding the journey.

Discovery’s trajectory took the ship out of the hold of gravity and free of the grasp of time as we know it. Mythologically, its voyage was into the realm of the sun, the symbol of the eternal on which all the things of time depend for their light. The great drama took place at the border crossing between time and eternity.

We move back and forth across that border every time we forget to take care of somebody else, lose ourselves in our work or fall in love. This journey was an epic re-enactment of this mystery of how we humans live in both time and eternity every day. This journey let us feel the mystery of living in these two realms.

And as the vessel brooded over the void and then made its arc back from the eternal into the grip of time, its light shone in the darkness and the Earth came into being. We were present at the creation and looking on the world, we could see that it indeed was good. The space official said, “Welcome home” to the Discovery crew, but he was really talking to us.

MO/PH END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo of Kennedy.