BBC television presenter, James Burke, was filming for his series, Connections, in Cape Canaveral, Florida on August 20, 1977. In the clip, we find him speaking to a camera in front of a Titan 3E/Centaur rocket, blurred by distance.
“…if hydrogen and oxygen are both released in a confined space, mixed and then set light to them…” he turns, facing away from us, saying “you get that.” to the Titan3E/Centaur rocket leaping into the sky on a pillar of fire, taking the Voyager 2 space probe with it. He had one try, to do it live, on camera—no greenscreen or back projection. It either happened or it didn’t. It pops up every few years to impress yet another generation.
Burke said in a recent interview discussing the shot, “The great thing about NASA is that 99 percent of the time they do what they say they are going to do.” Relying on their reliability, he figured out he needed 13 seconds. “I wrote ten seconds of words. It’s one second to walk in, one second to point, one second to pull focus on the rocket.” He could hear the countdown through the loudspeakers, “so at thirteen seconds to go, I stepped in and did my bit.”
Shows like Connections, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and David Attenborough’s generations worth of nature series, all pointed me, since childhood, to look with awe at God’s creation. I didn’t have to strain at being amazed, it was a natural reaction. I believed then, like I do now, in a God who made everything, without any arbitrary sacred/secular divvying up. That clip from a 70s era history series on the nature and interconnectedness of discovery captures a bit of the awe I felt watching those shows. From the intense creativity of problem solving involved with James’ setup, to what’s happening in the background, the culmination of all those branches of science working together for decades (millennia) to figure out how to get things and people into space. That’s a lot of mental energy expended. The mathematics, physics, the engineering of propulsion systems imagined and manufactured, all done by created beings, points away from me. It makes me even more impressed with God, the creature says with a breezy sort of clueless tinge to their condescension. Good job, God!
In his book, A Certain World, W. H. Auden puts a finer point on this idea of our creativity in relation to our creatureliness. “Though every work of art is a secondary world, such a world cannot be constructed ex nihilo, but is a selection and recombination of encounters of the primary world …”
We are created creatures being creative with previously created elements. It’s built in. We have to create. Focused, organized problem solving, within boundaries not established by us, can inspire awe when we brush up against the Uncaused Cause of all that is. Wendell Berry gets at this in 1988 essay, Economy and Pleasure.
“ ‘This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.’ Henry David Thoreau said that to his graduating class at Harvard in 1837. We may assume that to most of them it sounded odd, as to most of the Harvard graduating class of 1987 it undoubtedly still would. But perhaps we will be encouraged to take him seriously, if we recognize that this idea is not something he made up out of thin air. When Thoreau uttered it, he may very well have been remembering Revelation 4:11: ‘Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.’ That God created ‘all things’ is in itself an uncomfortable thought, for in our workaday world we can hardly avoid preferring some things above others, and this makes it hard to imagine not doing so. That God created all things for His pleasure, and that they continue to exist because they please Him, is formidable doctrine indeed, as far as possible both from the ‘anthropocentric’ utilitarianism that some environmentalist critics claim to find in the Bible and from the grouchy spirituality of many Christians.”
Berry points away from us, towards the God who made all things. What pleases God is displayed in what the Almighty has made. God is also—rather famously—pleased with His son, Jesus Christ, announcing the fact in rather dramatic fashion. There was a dove, a voice from heaven—it was a whole thing. Here’s the thing that will really make you speechless: we’re in Christ, who just happened to defeat sin and death on the cross. Besides being pleased with us, it also means God removed any potential interruptions that would keep us away from Him, forever. Nothing, nothing, can separate us from the love of God, ever. That’s a fact more sure than the reality of gravity, guaranteed by the Maker of reality … and gravity! Seems like there might be some Good News in there somewhere!
