{"id":201,"date":"2009-04-15T19:53:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T19:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2009\/04\/15\/201\/"},"modified":"2011-08-06T16:46:39","modified_gmt":"2011-08-06T21:46:39","slug":"201","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=201","title":{"rendered":"Spirituality In Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two interesting quotes:<\/span> I just came across two interesting quotes regarding personal spirituality. The first one was in a NY Times article about physicist \/ astronaut John Grunsfeld<\/a>, who is going up on the Space Shuttle next month on the last repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope. Grunsfeld has been on four previous Shuttle flights to the Hubble Telescope, and he played a key role in reversing NASA’s previous decision not to go back to the Hubble. (That thing is what they call “high maintenance”, even though it has returned a lot of good scientific data.) This last mission will give it a few more good years, although it involves some danger given that two satellites crashed into each other a few months ago and the resulting space junk is whirling around in the vicinity of the Hubble. <\/p>\n

Obviously, Mr. Grunsfeld’s spirituality is centered heavily around science (and so is mine, to a certain degree). As with many other science people, the God-centered religions such as Christianity, Judiasm and Islam didn’t interest Grunsfeld; but Buddhism held some attraction. Earlier in his life, before pursuing his PhD, Grunsfeld got a job in Japan working with an X-ray researcher at the University of Tokyo. At the same time he lived in a Zen monastery, participating in the meditation life of the community. Wow, sounds great! But according to the article, Grunsfeld came home early one day and found the monks playing baseball. For him, the “spell was broken”; he left the Zen life and went back to the USA to earn his doctorate in physics and to fully immerse himself in science.<\/p>\n

Zen monks playing baseball — what was so wrong with that? For Grunsfeld, it was obviously like coming home early to find your husband or wife in bed with someone else. This guy obviously has high standards. Hopefully, the baseball monks prepared him for what he would later experience with NASA, which people used to see as a paradigm of science and technology. In reality, NASA is now just another swamp of federal politics and big business contracts. He obviously stuck with the Shuttle program, despite the two fatal failures it experienced when its managers were swayed from pure scientific thinking by political and financial concerns. He’s still willing to put his life on the line for NASA, despite the imperfections. He’s obviously older and wiser now. <\/p>\n

Zen masters are known to teach their young followers with brutal slaps in the face. The baseball game was the reality slap that they gave to Grunsfeld. He seems to have learned the lesson well, as he’s still doing good things with NASA in spite of all the corruption involved. I hope that Dr. Grunsfeld has a good mission and manages to keep the Hubble up there observing the heavens for a few more years.<\/p>\n

The second quote was in the April 2009 edition of “Friends of Silence”, a very nice letter that comes out every month or so, filled with thoughts and quotes centered around a spiritual theme. The April theme focused on Spring and Nature, not surprisingly. In the introduction paragraphs, publisher Nan Merrill<\/a> sings the praises of Nature’s beauty, but also ponders the fact that Nature isn’t always very kind with us. Quote: “She [Nature] weeps with those who bear the brunt of Her inevitable storms and droughts that are but terrible wake-up calls to every one of us”. <\/p>\n

I found that apologetic interpretation of nature’s brutality to be just a bit over-the-top. The next time I’m stuck out in the freezing cold and dark of winter, I don’t think it would help much to know that Mother Nature regrets my discomforts and inconvenience. And as to the real suffering, e.g. hurricanes that reek havoc as in New Orleans, tidal waves that kill thousands, cruel diseases that waste millions of lives — does it help the victims to imagine that Nature weeps because of this? And that it is somehow a “wake up call”, implying that disasters are all somehow the fault of humankind? <\/p>\n

Let’s keep it real here. I think Lord Tennyson had Nature’s number when he said, in his famous poem “In Memorium”:<\/p>\n

Man, her last work, who seemed so fair
Who trusted God was love indeed
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With raving, shriek’d against his creed<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The natural world is a lovely thing, and humankind needs to deeply consider its ways and its wisdoms. We all depend upon it for survival, and so a cooperative attitude is much better than the exploitive approaches that are used so often here in the industrialized western world (and increasingly in the eastern world too). But at some point, we humans need to depart from the “natural world”. At some point we need to question it, to challenge it, to seperate ourselves from it, to do better than it. As people such as John Grunsfeld have done. That’s the human legacy. <\/p>\n

Nonetheless, I still highly recommend “Friends of Silence”. A reasonable donation, say $10 or $15, will get you on their mailing list: FRIENDS OF SILENCE, 11 Cardiff Lane, Hannibal MO 63401.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two interesting quotes: I just came across two interesting quotes regarding personal spirituality. The first one was in a NY Times article about physicist \/ astronaut John Grunsfeld, who is going up on the Space Shuttle next month on the last repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope. Grunsfeld has been on four previous Shuttle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2251,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/2251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}