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| Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth (+Moon), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Urnaus, Neptune |
Starting from the here and now, you might like to read a recent interview with our own Fr Seamus McEntee which appeared in the
Irish Catholic, 24 August 2017 (see it
here).
Then, maybe wondering further about the here and now and where we fit in and where we are going, you might like to watch a recently released Irish-made film that raises these vast questions.
The Farthest tells the story of the Voyager I and 2 spacecraft that were launched forty years ago in 1977 to find out more about the remote regions of the solar galaxy. Read about the making of the film
here and view a trailer (and watch it in full screen!)
here. This film is being broadcast tonight on RTE 1 (10.15 p.m to 12.30 a.m.). I suggest you record it if you can't view it.
The heavens declare the glory of God, says the Psalmist (Ps. 19.1). On the other hand, 'the silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me,' says Pascal. We today try to see how we may really say out those words of the psalmist in praise and with real conviction. Newman (
Apologia pro Vita Sua, Ch.3) says how he had, before his conversion to Catholicism, 'an habitual notion that my mind had not found its ultimate rest and that in some sense or other I was on [a] journey'. Is not mankind also on a journey towards its 'ultimate rest', a journey of discovery that takes the form of space exploration today, a continuation of those voyages of discovery of the 15th/16th centuries? It may be said that 'Voyager' refers to those who launched it as much as to the spacecraft itself. 'Fare forward, voyagers,' says T.S. Eliot (
Four Quartets) and adds later: 'We shall not case from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.' New statements and observations are being made today as mankind continues its efforts to know the purpose and truth about life on earth, the truth about itself as the inhabitant of the little blue ball in the photo above. Knowing that would indeed make us agree wholeheartedly with the psalmist and, looking around us and above us, 'declare [today too] the glory of God'.
