The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
—Psalm 19:1-3 (KJV)
PROLOGUE
This old guy has been ignoring the news, so I didn’t know about Artemis II until my son asked what I thought about the astronauts’ spiritual experiences. Then I had a Proustian moment. Eighty-one years ago an agnostic Jewish teenager visited the Griffith Planetarium, traveled through time and space, visited the solar system and distant galaxies, and awed by the vastness, concluded there must have been an intelligence that made this splendor and decided to become a scientist.
ABOUT PSALM 19
More than fifty years later, I became a Catholic and learned that my ancient forbears had expressed in the Old Testament the same awe of creation, most powerfully in Psalm 19.
Although some translations break the psalm into two parts, the King James Version retains the original: verses 1-6, what creation says without words, a divine proclamation by act—“the heavens declare,” “the firmament sheweth,” “there is no speech nor language;” verses 7-14, what God’s verbal revelation in The Law says, “more precious than gold.”
And I remembered what St. Augustine said about the beauty of creation:
“Each single created thing is good, and taken as a whole they are very good, because together they constitute a universe of admirable beauty.”
THE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES OF THE ARTEMIS II ASTRONAUTS
I find that the spiritual experiences of the Artemis II astronauts are mirrored in this psalm. When Koch said
“Something just drew me in suddenly to the lunar landscape, and it became real. The moon really is its own body in the universe. It’s not just a poster in the sky.”
she was hearing what Creation had to say, made more intelligible by being in space—the distraction of earthly things absent. And then comes the word, Glover’s Easter Sunday reflection on Earth as a created “oasis.” Perhaps the most moving and powerful part was witnessing God’s grace, when Wiseman—“not really a religious person”— sought the Navy chaplain after splashdown and broke into tears at the sight of the cross. What the heavens had declared had led him to the Word.
CREATION KEEPS DECLARING
The trip to enlightenment that the agnostic Jewish boy took was longer—he did not know that his vision of a beautiful universe had been painted 3000 years earlier by his ancestors. And that vision is there now, not only in the glories of the heavens, but in the miraculous mechanisms of the chemistry of life. Creation has not stopped declaring.
