Book Club - or where I talk about books that have affected me

Rachel Held Evans was a writer and blogger who recently passed away.  I suppose she was a Christian writer but her thoughts were different than most people who are labeled the same.  I remember the first time I read one of her books.  I was simply meandering through shelves in the Huntsville library. I had climbed the stairs to the non-fiction floor, and started walking around reading titles.  One book title caught my eye, “Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions”.   I picked the book up and read a few pages, and instantly I knew I had to read it.  Rachel had grown up in a very evangelical church, in a family that sounded just like many the families I knew from our home school activities.

I didn’t grow up like her, but in many ways my husband did and we had raised our children in the same way. I found her book at the perfect time in my life, as I was feeling disillusioned with the fundamental faith I had chosen while missing and yearning for the closeness and family aspect of that same faith.  

Rachel writes about her childhood, a happy one in a good faithful family that lived in the same small town where the Scopes Monkey Trial took place.  This was of course the trial of the science teacher that dared to introduce the Theory of Evolution to his high school biology class in the public high school.

When I was in high school I was shocked to find out some of my friends didn’t “believe in evolution.”  I studied biology in college, but I also fell in love with a man who didn’t accept the theory that my entire degree was based on.  I wavered back and forth most of my adult life between Christian apologetics and evolutionary articles.  I taught my children that nature and science reflected the beauty and mind of God and that it was possible to accept both, but deep inside I only hoped it was a truth. 

I taught biology in a private Christian School.  I tried hard to make sure my students knew what evolution really entailed.  I tried to combat statements I would hear from students, such as “Human evolution isn’t real because there are still monkeys around.” At the same time I taught Christian evidences.  I enjoyed showing strengths and weaknesses of different ideas and I never expected my students to accept anything, just to learn and to think.  I am very thankful I didn’t try to push anti evolution on anyone, but at the same time I allowed people to think I didn’t accept the theory. I fear I was straddling a fence I didn’t need to be on.  I remember co-teaching a class on Christian Evidences with another mom in one of our homeschool groups.  I covered science and had fun dissecting pig eyes, and she taught philosophy and morality.  I made sure to teach what Darwin actually wrote and not what people claimed he said. Many Christian Evidence books misrepresent Darwin’s writings.  The other mom bought a copy of “The Origin of the Species.”  She laughed and told me she felt guilty placing it on her bookshelf with her other good books.

Rachel Herd Evans had questions.  Her questions mirrored the ones I had and suppressed, then worried about, suppressed again then finally led to where I am now, wherever that is. It was such a comfort to see her thinking and questioning the same ideas I questioned and had so much trouble with in my faith.  There is no lonelier feeling than when I am sitting in a church building surrounded by my brothers and sisters in faith and yet to feel alone and isolated, to see them rejoicing and singing praises while I sit, sad and empty.  

I struggle with basic Christian ideas, the type of thoughts a person who has put years into her faith should have dealt with by now.  I don’t understand the concept of Hell or even Heaven for that matter.  I can’t understand forcing the multitude of people into small boxes of behaviors and expectations in order to be correct.  To me love, patience and humility are the important values, not what we would call the moral issues.  

Back to Rachel Herd Evens. She was an excellent writer, a deep thinker and an extremely compassionate person, as far as I can tell from her books.  She worried about the same things I worry about.  Unhappy with her faith she still tried to live a Christ like life, and she still took her kids to church.  She had found a way to live with all the conflicts that are threatening to tear me apart.  I wanted to have what she had.  And in reading her thoughts I felt hope that I might come to some understanding, some day. I am sad she won’t be able to finish the journey she started.  I am sad for her family and her children, her many readers, and for me.  I wanted to keep reading as she kept trying to find her way.

The last book of hers I read was titled “Searching for Sunday.”  In this book she wrote, “I have seen the first few ribbons of dawn’s light seep through my bedroom window and there is a dim, hopeful glow kissing the horizon. Even when I don’t believe in church, I believe in resurrection.  I believe in the hope of Sunday Morning.”  She also wrote another thought that felt equally important to me.

“But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith.  You’re on your own for that.”

I am on my own, and yet I am not.  

Space Euphoria

How does one prepare mentally for a space walk, for the disorienting feeling of being out in space 200 or so miles above the earth and orbiting, or falling, 17,500 miles an hour? All astronauts go through hours and hours of training.  They already have a degree in some field such as engineering or physics; some are pilots and have military experience, or even education degrees.  They are trained in physical skills, language skills, experiments and safety.  These men and women are some of the best trained and all around talented people on the planet, and they are hoping to use those skills off of this planet.  To prepare for living in micro gravity they spend hours in a giant pool learning to perform various activities. Those chosen to perform EVA’s, or extra vehicular activities or spacewalks train even longer in the underwater environment.  Simply floating in a pool isn’t exactly the same as the micro gravity experience, but with weights added the astronaut becomes neutrally buoyant.  They neither float up nor down.  In this manner they learn to perform the tasks and they have the opportunity to experience some of the difficulties before being in the exposed and deadly environment of space.

Even with all the training and teaching the very real experience of hanging in space, of seeing our home planet Earth in the sky above while being surrounded by stars and darkness has to be overwhelming.  How can a person mentally prepare for this?  So many astronauts have felt a deep sense of euphoria or joy, and others have struggled with fear and awe.  There have been enough strong feelings and the reactions shown by different people on EVA’s that NASA has come up with a name for the feeling, the Overview Effect.  In a book I recently read, the author wrote that one way to have just a tiny experience of what the feeling might be like is to climb a telephone pole, wearing a safety harness, stand on top of the pole as it wiggles, and then jump off.  The person on top of that pole is secure with the harness and yet feels vulnerable.  Now imagine the same activity but with no ground beneath you, just empty space, and no ground above you, just a round blue planet over your shoulder.

This overview effect is more than just the fear of falling.  I imagine the fear of heights, the fear of having no ground or anything solid to really grab, and the feeling of vulnerability is only one small part of the multitude of emotions that invade the mind.  Just thinking about how large and incomprehensible the size of the Universe is can be unsettling, but imagine thinking about that while hanging outside of your spacecraft home, surrounded by the immensity of space, the deepness of the darkness and the number of stars going on and on.

One astronaut said that standing on the platform of the Canada Arm, stuck out in the empty darkness of space and seeing the earth below him was so overwhelming he had to close his eyes for a moment and calm down.  Another astronaut wrote about struggling to perform some task, then looking away for a moment at the view and almost forgetting what he was supposed to be doing.  It took a strong discipline to get back to work, even knowing his time was limited due to air and other safety issues.  Others have been so taken with the beauty and the wonderful feeling they didn’t want to come back inside.  Almost everyone who has gone out into space or who has had the ability to look out at the earth from space found himself or herself changed by the experience.

The Russian Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov performed the first spacewalk in 1965.  He said, “My feeling was that I was a grain of sand.”  He felt small and insignificant, but others feel larger and part of something huge.

Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14 spoke of a “Profound sense of connectedness, with a feeling of bliss and timelessness.  He spoke about becoming profoundly aware that each and every atom in the Universe was connected in some way and on seeing the Earth from space he had an understanding that all the humans, animals and systems were part of the same thing, a synergistic whole.” He has said that his experience in space changed his life. 

Seeing our small part in such a large vast universe, and seeing the earth from a distance puts all the troubles and angers, the borders and the wars, the petty fights and ideologies into perspective.  Another quote from Mitchell, written after a moonwalk, reflects this.  He said, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.  From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty.  You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you S. O. B.”

Ed White made a space walk during the Apollo program, and mission control had a hard time convincing him to return to the capsule.  He said when he finally returned, “It was the saddest day of my life.”

Gene Cerman, while looking at the earth from space was inspired to look for a deeper meaning.  He wrote, “It was too beautiful to happen by accident…There has to be a creator of the universe who stands above the religions that we ourselves create.”

The best quote is from the first man to walk on the moon.  He had similar sentiments to the first man to perform the space walk.  Neil Armstrong wrote, “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth.  I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the plant Earth.  I didn’t feel like a giant.  I felt very, very small.”

No one can prepare for these feelings and experiences, but we all can learn from them.  From space the Earth has no borders. The Earth is a huge blue marble that holds all we love, all we need and all we must care for within its atmosphere.  Let us protect and love that giant ball while we continue to push our limits and explore farther away from home.  Moving away from Earth helps us to respect it, to hate anything that might try to harm it, and to hopefully grow as a species into the connected beings made of atoms and stardust that work to care for each other and our home as best as we can.