Superman was a super hero in my childhood days of yore. He could leap tall buildings with a single bound and travel places faster than a speeding bullet, unless someone hit him in the head with kryptonite. When Aunt Liba bought Superman capes for Ben, Jr. and me, we failed in our attempted flight from the roof of the garage. We did fly, but did not prepare for so quick a landing. Mama’s exclamatory disclaimer for such a venture: “you had no more business doing that than a man on the moon.”
Little did she realize at that moment that her middle child would set his sight on that moon in more ways than one. Even though it was close to the geographic center of the sovereign state of Mississippi in the 1950’s, Canton, Mississippi, was not necessarily the center of the universe when I was growing up there. Nor would it ever become so, contrary to some of its most prominent citizens. However, our back yard had enough night sky to make it seem like an observatory if not a planetarium, even to the naked eye searching for the naked truth. A neighbor stationed in Korea for the conflict sent me a celestial telescope, and I built a mount in the middle of that back yard. And that is where I could see the Soviet Union’s Sputnik circling our American heavens in the October sky of 1957.
In 1960, I headed to college to become an astronomy major, not only because it was my passionate hobby, but because of the inspiring words of the young President who was elected in November of that year. While John F. Kennedy did not know where Canton might have been, there was one kid from there who became enamored with national politics because of him. And like a distant shepherd, he would lead me through the next three tumultuous years from his place in time and space.
And so, my fellow Americans: he said,ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man…knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.
Speaking to the packed stadium at Rice University in Houston on September 12, 1962, the eloquent orator gave us a vision of a world beyond this one: There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too…. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
And fifty years ago, we – in the finest meaning of that word – landed on that moon, and all of us could see ourselves and our spaceship Earth from space! The mission was accomplished and those early astronauts would take not only one but many steps and leaps for us all. To celebrate such an achievement, our oldest daughter landed on earth, July 19, 1969.
On November 22, 1963 two other college friends and I had driven up to Vanderbilt to look at attending their seminary. After a brilliant theologian thoroughly shocked and explained to us southern preacher wannabes how much thrust it would have taken for Jesus to leave the earth’s gravitational field, we adjourned to the dining hall where the word came to us over the PA system: President Kennedy has been shot. Hunger left us completely as a funeral pall spread over the country and the world. The three of us simply and quietly got back in our car and drove the Natchez Trace to Jackson trying to find any am radio station for “further developments”.
Listening back into that transforming moment, you can still hear faint radio signals, as if broadcasting from the moon itself: “Houston, Tranquility Bay here… the Eagle has landed.” And when we reflect on what good has happened in those fifty years because of the high and holy hopes planted in the backyards of our existence, it can still take your breath away. We have been given the courage to fly with the same amount of reason as that of a man on the moon.
https://youtu.be/uHXtKRCqZCY
One giant leap for blogkind..always trust your cape.
Sulerb and provocative. Well done neighbor!