The Horror and Wonder of Outer Space Travel

Usually we live in the world of the given. Our world can be known by the immediacy of our senses or that which is known and accessible to us in our immediate experience. We also have insights. These are theories or thoughts that we want to believe are true about the universe. Our beliefs come from a particular point of view and operate within the limits of presuppositions that we have about how the world operates. When we are confronted with wonder or horror, however, the world changes. We are forced to make judgments based outside what is normally known to us. Our thoughts are forming and "in the making" and are driven toward meaning because they are animated by awe, not by what we normally see and practice in everydayness.

Jerome Miller tells us in his book "In the Throe of Wonder" that for the philosopher Heidegger, the possibility of losing one's world in horror reawakens the world of being. Lonergan in his philosophy of God on the other hand believed that if one were caught in the throes of wonder, it would beckon one toward understanding being, perhaps in a whole new way. Rather than remain in the comfort of a universe of our own meaning, we may face horror and wonder, which help us love our ordinary way of understanding everything, so that true being beyond that which is normally known can become accessible to our minds. Miller believed that for "old men," it would mean being "as childlike as explorers." They would lose their ordinary world and move toward the awesome. By moving toward the wonder, they would find real being in their existence.

John Glenn, the astronaut of the space shuttle Discovery is the embodiment of childlike wonder. At 77 years old, he looked forward to each new day in zero gravity aboard the spacecraft. NASA's mission control awakened him each morning at 8:30 a.m. with Louis Armstrong's jazz rendition of "It's A Wonderful Life." The sun rises and sets every 90 minutes and so the body's natural clock is off. The captain had to stop them from peering out the window every evening to remind them it was time for bed. When Glenn ate his oatmeal, a speck of food escaped. In fascination and terror, he realized what this meant within the confines of his spacecraft. The oatmeal was not going to do what it was supposed to do when spilled - in zero gravity, it floated within the cabin. Glenn told NASA that when it got away from him, it got on everybody.

Glenn's judgment about the spilled oatmeal did not come from prior experience or self-evident knowledge. It arose from what he knew to be true about the unusually unique new environment in which he now lived. His entire way of being in relation to eating oatmeal onboard the spacecraft of weightlessness had changed from what he had experienced on earth. To his horror and wonder, unlike anything he might have experienced before, or could possibly have anticipated, given what he previously knew about the way the world usually operates as we know it, that speck of oatmeal had the potential to do what it would never do on earth. Newton's law of gravity did not apply onboard the Discovery. The importance of the spill took on new meaning for John Glenn and his whole way of being.

Gravity does not apply to fluids in the body of the astronauts either. Fluids in the inner ear that monitor direction and motion are now displaced. What John Glenn thought was the ceiling of the spacecraft was really the floor. He would have liked to know for sure, but his sense of direction and certainty of senses betrayed him. Bernard Lonergan tells us in his book "Insight" that wishing to know "does not settle whether you know or what you know or whether your wish will be fulfilled" (Tyrrell, pg 101). John Glenn was an astronaut "being" and his oatmeal was "zero gravity" cereal. He was experiencing exploration of the unknown in horror and wonder which caused his consciousness to hold a new and different perspective beyond what was previously known in reality. This should be a lesson to any scientist who presumes to demand concrete answers to life's unexplained metaphysical nature and way of being, particularly with regard to trying to understand the things of God.

TEXTS CITED

Borenstein, Seth, "Space and Swell Feeling," Spokesman-Review, October 31, 1998, pp A1 and A8.

Miller, Jerome, "In the Throe of Wonder," Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992

Tyrell, Bernard S., "Bernard Lonergan's Philosophy of God," Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame Press, 1974