Walking on the Moon - 50 years on

Earlier this week there was a full moon. I was alerted to this as I travelled home by train from Newcastle up the Tyne Valley. I noticed how high the river was that afternoon. It was not that it had rained, simply that the tide was unusually high. Then I remembered that there was due to be a partial eclipse of the moon that night. The full moon explained the spring tide. Soon the train passed Wylam which marks the river’s tidal limit. At once the flow reverted to its languid summer self beyond the reach of salt water.   

We’re all thinking about the moon in this week of the 50th anniversary of the day a human being first set foot on it. “That’s one small step for a man” - surely you can just hear that endlessly-discussed indefinite article in those immortal words, a mere breathing but it makes all the difference to the sense - “one giant leap for mankind.” If you were alive fifty years ago, you will never forget what seemed like the most momentous event of our lifetimes.

The Church Times invited me to contribute a piece for a feature celebrating the landing. Here it is.  

I was nineteen in July 1969 when the first men walked on the moon. As I look back, I remember it as if we stood at the threshold of a new era in history. I echoed Wordsworth: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” 

But my clearest memory is not the day of the moon walk itself. We didn’t have a TV so I followed it on the radio and in the papers. (Which made it an oddly aural and literary experience while it was the video footage everyone else was talking about.) What I recall as if it were yesterday is walking along a north London street one evening. The full moon hung in the darkening sky. My companion nudged me and pointed to it. “Isn’t it amazing that we have walked there?” he said. I distinctly remember the pronoun. We, not other people. This was about us. 

I gazed up with a kind of religious awe, experiencing a youthful version of what Freud calls “that vast oceanic feeling”. I echoed the psalmist’s ecstasy at the sight of the starry skies above: “O Lord our Sovereign how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8.1). 

Memory plays tricks. Until writing this I assumed I’d remembered the night of the moon-walk itself but I can’t have been. My 1969 diary tells me that the moon was only in its first quarter. It must have been the following week. Does it matter? 

What did matter was this mystic sense of wonder that took me by surprise. As a student reading maths, I was bound to be moonstruck by equations that laid the foundations for this dazzling achievement of science and technology. But it was more than that. I was gazing at the most familiar object in the night sky, but it looked different. I was connected to it in a new way because we had walked there. That made me a citizen of the cosmos. 

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them?” asks the psalm. As a recently baptised Christian I was pondering what my life should be for. Among the lights shed on the path I would follow was moonlight. A few months afterwards the age of majority was lowered from 21 to 18 and I became an adult. The moon-walk felt part of growing up, an unforgettable moment in a key rite of passage.

Since 1969, our horizons have been hugely enlarged. I’ve blogged at times (here, here and here) about some of the most inspiring events in astronomy in recent years. In all of them, I’m aware of a theological and spiritual response that echoes what I felt about the moon landing. It’s a cliche to talk about the “wonder” or “beauty” of creation, but that’s what it comes down to, and it’s not restricted to people of faith. If you’ve watched Brian Cox’s TV documentaries (the recent marvellous series on the solar system for example) you’ll recognise the same poetic and mystical response to the cosmos that you find in the creation narratives and the psalms. And he is, I think, a self-confessed atheist. 

What’s so beautiful about the cosmos? Why should the study of astronomy and cosmology not only stimulate our imagination but make us feel we are treading on holy ground?

It’s more than an aesthetic response. Yes, the moon looks beautiful in all its phases, or when it is half hidden by cloud, or eclipsed by the earth’s (ie our own) shadow, or when we admire those famous images of the lunar landscape with blue planet earth hanging serenely in the black sky above. How could we not be moved by the sheer artistry of what lies beyond us and which, fifty years ago, we touched for that brief moment in our story?

But I hinted in the piece I’ve quoted that there’s an intellectual dimension to it too. As a former mathematician, I’ve forgotten most of what I ever learned as an undergraduate. But not the elegance of the deep structures of mathematics, the equations that lie at the heart of how the universe is (and how other universes might be). I remember a charismatic maths teacher at school proving a theorem to us A-level students (I wish I could remember which theorem it was), writing QED with a flourish on the blackboard, stepping back to brush the chalk dust off his gown and acclaiming triumphantly, “That, my dear friends, is poetry in its highest and purest form”. Who’s to say he wasn’t right?

Immanuel Kant wrote about the two things that fill the mind with awe and admiration: “the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me”. The wisdom writers of the Hebrew Bible never tired of pointing out that one of the best incentives to live well is to emulate the pattern and order of the created world. Contemporary physics and cosmology have shown us that the universe is infinitely more mysterious than we could have imagined. Which suggests that “the moral law within” should be informed by a mystical attitude that recognises that the good life, holiness, is as much about what we don’t know as what we do, and the “awe and admiration” that comes from both knowing and unknowing. 

The moon landing fifty years ago was, for me, a gateway to glimpsing this, and finding in these new perceptions what I can only call joy. I like to think that I was taking “one small step” for a young man who wanted then, and still wants late in life, to find his place as a creature of God and a citizen of the cosmos, and learn how to inhabit it wisely.