Are you sure?
This bookmark will be removed from all folders and any saved notes will be permanently removed.
Eye on the World: exploring "the final frontier"
While many people’s attention was focused on the Olympics Sunday night, another drama was unfolding on an interplanetary scale. The robotic explorer Curiosity -- at $2.5 billion, the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever constructed -- touched down inside a wide crater on the surface of Mars, ready to learn more about whether the Martian environment ever supported microscopic life or could ever support human explorers. NASA director Charles Bolden said, “The wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars.”
Christian Science encourages each of us to discover more of the real nature of God’s spiritual universe. Christian Scientists can certainly support the desire to “reach for the stars” through scientific exploration and through prayer.
“Space exploration -- an infinite frontier” lays the groundwork for inspired exploration into the real, spiritual universe. The author, a former engineering manager working on the Hubble Space Telescope, writes about how the perspective and lessons learned from manned and unmanned space exploration free us from an “earthbound” perception of things -- just as the Bible frees us from a limiting picture of ourselves and others! As our thought is spiritualized, we’ll see a corresponding increase in evidence of humanity’s infinite, God-given capacity to innovate and explore.
“Reaching for the stars” continues this line of reasoning. The author explains how, just as hours of exposure allow cameras to capture “the immense vibrant beauty of deep-space objects like the Horsehead Nebula or the Cat’s Eye Nebula,” our practice of opening our heart to God allows us to understand more of the nature of Spirit, the uplifting power of Love. In a similar vein, the author of “Let’s be luminous” tells of an experience in which a full lunar eclipse revealed countless stars just around the moon’s outline, shining more brightly than she’d ever seen them. She concludes, “Spiritual motives are the fire that stokes unselfish thoughts and acts. They honor God, their source, and sparkle like those stars in the darkness.”
“A truer perception” discusses how glimpsing the infinite, loving viewpoint of God transforms our understanding not only of our own experience but of the whole universe. The author writes, “Astronomy does not reverse the movement of the solar system but only the human perception of it . . . [W]e can see all this in a more accurate context. Now Christian Science has come to show us that the only real cosmos is spiritual, not material, thus further changing not the reality of things but our perception of it.”
Enjoy 1 free Sentinel article or audio program each month, including content from 1898 to today.
