Seventeen years ago this week, I published the following piece to my personal blog. There was nothing remarkable about this post, except that it drew a comment from one of my cousins, Dan Anderson. We had been very close as kids, we were the same age, but we diverged as young adults. Whereas Dan joined the military and went to Vietnam, I joined the Peace Corps and went to Afghanistan.

Like many such family ties, ours were strained by that war and the resulting cultural divide. We fell out of touch, rarely speaking for years. But sometime after I started blogging in 2006, Dan got back in touch. He said that it was my writing that brought us back together. 

Bigger Than Us

(photo credit: NASA)

Driving north from San Jose tonight, after a two-day visit to Santa Clara University, where the quality of ideas seem to be much more valued than the sound of money, I was treated to a rare visual treat.

Courtesy of NPR, I know that tonight's eastern sky held the third of three lunar eclipses in this past year, and that this also was the last one until late 2010, almost three years from now.

Our Bay Area skies were cloudy, so I had expected no chance to view this relatively rare event.

But as I crested I-280's last rise and merged eastward onto the 380 connector to Highway 101, there it was! A soft smudge in the eastern sky, nothing like a normal view.

In fact, as this odd image hovered over the broad, well-lighted expanse of SFO, I couldn't help but wonder whether those throughout human history who say they have sighted UFOs or those who claim to have witnessed guiding lights from the heavens may simply have been in the right place at the right astronomical time.

If so, that does not diminish their experience, in my view, but perhaps confirms it. Being there, witnessing that, validates our smallness, as humans, before the awful glory of forces so much grander than ourselves, that none of our conventional beliefs can explain.

Do you believe in magic? Do you believe in God? Can you reconcile the relentless logical beauty of science with the ambiguity of faith in a source not palpable, not reachable, not attainable in our status as mere humans?

To glimpse the awful beauty of something much greater than ourselves raises a conundrum for intellectuals. It rarely is a place we willingly go.

At times, I will be traveling these spiritual paths, and I hope, dear reader, you are willing to stick around for the ride.

1 Comment:

DanogramUSA said...

David,

That was an extraordinary sight from northwestern Ohio, too. As it happens, our sky was perfectly clear last night... enhancing the effect. Living in the country, away from city lights, allows one to see these events in a crystal clear atmosphere sometimes (though it doesn't necessarily give any more clarity to the mind of the limited human observer).

Great idea to explore “spiritual paths”. I'll be reading your reflections with interest.

You may recall that our family had a pet squirrel monkey named “Tommy” for about 3 years in the late 50s. Well, of the many entertaining characteristics that little guy displayed was an utter inability to grasp the concept of clear glass. If we held one of his favorite treats on one side of a glass door, he would sit for the longest time attempting to reach “through” the glass from the other side. It worked every time. Our inability to grasp some of which seems to exist has always teased the human spirit in this way. As Stephan Hawking has described “the very large and the very small” confound us.

Brian Greene has observed that no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to teach a dog calculus – their brains simply aren't “wired” for it. He goes on to make the point that, in a similar fashion, humans may simply not be wired to understand the workings behind what we think we observe and know. We will never know if we stop asking.

Dan

NOTE: Dan Anderson died in the winter of 2019. R.I.P.

This photo is from the 1950s. Dan is second from the left and I’m the cowboy. 

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