Outer space may be the FINAL frontier. But can we make inner space the NEXT frontier?
“Space: The final frontier.” These words open every episode of the original StartTrek series. As a person who loves dreaming about what could happen next the science fiction style has always apealed to me. Granted I tend more StarWars than StarTrek but each of them points us out to the stars.
We have held FRONTIER as a goal for many generations. Always seeking out the new and the different. Sometimes to meet it, sometimes to study it, often destroying it. Always misunderstanding it in some way first.
We are slowly running out of physical frontiers on this planet. The seas, some caves, beckon to be explored. But the satellites are mapping every inch of the planet in ever more detail. For physical frontiers we are having to look off this planet and out into the black of space.
What though makes us think that the vastness of space will calm our tendency of violence and misunderstanding the realms we explore.
We need a plan for exploring not just the physical frontiers but also to explore the inner spaces of our lives. In that exploration we will find the connections between each other on this planet.
In that exploration of inner space we will find the ways to care for each other and quit sabotaging and disregarding the excellent work around us because in exploring the full inner-space with each other we discover people to meet, to study, to misunderstand, perhaps to destroy.
We must make peace with the grand variety to be found not just in the frontiers of this planets’ physical form. Not just with the dedication needed to take us out to explore that final frontier of space. But also the infinite variety of the people here and each individual’s inner-space.
Amen! I hunger for a church that wants to engage the Creation stories of Genesis as a way into understanding what it is to be human if climate change makes the "natural" world uninhabitable for human beings; what it is to be the seed of Eve if you are born on a space station, or on a different planet.
ReplyDeleteI am attached to a machine 24/7 without which I would not be alive. I hunger for a church that wants to start asking questions about what it is to be God's good creation when you are part human and part machine-not just because those are the questions raised by William Gibson, Phillip K. Dick, Peter F. Hamilton, and Vonda McIntyre, but because these are real human experiences happening in our midst.
I am tired of walking the same old pathways through my Christian heritage. I would like to take my Christian heritage into these new spaces.
P.S. For an interesting read that uses science fiction to explore an inner sacred space, I suggest Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow
I read "The Sparrow" in college at the recommendation of one of my fav professors.
DeleteFor the changing relationship with tech also see an earlier article. http://wellequippedlife.blogspot.com/2011/01/evolution-semantics-and-gripes.html