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By Sheila Orysiek
 SAN DIEGO—When you are four years old and bedtime is at 8:30 it means that in the summer time you never get to see the moon after dark. Thus, many years ago when my young son pointed to a smudge in the bright afternoon sky and said “there’s the moon,” I thought it was quite clever of him to connect that smudge to the celestial body he had seen brilliantly lit some months before. Well, mothers think that way.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin walked on the moon. Circling above, Michael Collins remained in the command module and in that electric moment in time recited words from Genesis: “In the beginning G-D created……..”
Of all the books of the Earth, of all the books the people of the Earth venerate, of all the creation stories people tell, it was this story and these words that were spoken on that momentous occasion. I remember the spiritual thrill when I heard Collins’ voice intoning the eternal story of creation as told in the Hebrew Bible. While the moon loomed large through the window of his space craft the words of a tiny group of people wandering in a desert 3000 years earlier fitted the occasion like a hand fits a glove. It was a moment in human history that had never happened before and will never be repeated in quite the same way.
Forty years after that day in July one might ask what was gained? There are lists of scientific and technological advances which came out of the space program but perhaps the one least mentioned and most needed is – perspective.
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As the camera’s eye looked back we could see the beautiful blue sphere upon which all of humanity lives and has lived from the beginning of our time. It seems large as we scurry around its surface, or delve a few feet into its depths, or soar through the clouds, but in fact it is so very small; a tiny blue dot in a black cold sea of space. And we, smaller still. If we could but hold onto that perspective of our true size perhaps our history would be a happier one.
How many times have we gotten caught up in the moment – engulfed in the overwhelming conceit of our self-enhanced importance? How many people have died in wars which seemed so all important at the time and yet are long since forgotten, except by the bones of those who perished? In our own time when we look back at the Vietnam War – is it really possible we sent so many to die for an unnecessary cause? It seemed so compelling at the time. Maybe because we are so small we can only “see” what is happening with the perspective of time – or from the moon.
In the midst of that national catastrophe – America sent men to walk on the moon. It is so totally part of our human makeup to want to walk on a beach where no one has walked before. Or sail across an ocean to find the other beaches upon which it spends itself. Or climb a mountain to see the other side – and to look down to see from whence we came.
However, even when we have the advantage of perspective – it only lasts for a short while. All too quickly after descending from the mountain or returning from the moon, we are once again snared by the magnified minutia of the moment.
That was what was so thrilling as we watched Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon – through him we each walked on the moon. The ordinary-ness of the day became an extra-ordinary day. We were given a view of ourselves and our Earth home no living creature had had before and for an instant we saw our true size.
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