Easter this year delivered some good news – or more accurately, some Good News.
On Easter Monday, April 6, as the Artemis II spacecraft crew prepared to lose communication with NASA’s mission control while passing behind the moon, astronaut Victor Glover delivered this message back to earth:
As we get close to the nearest point to the moon and farthest point from Earth, as we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on Earth, and that’s love.
Christ said, in response to what was the greatest commandment, that it was to love God with all you are. And he, also being a great teacher, said the second is equal to it, and that is to love your neighbor as yourself. And so, as we prepare to go out of radio communication, we’re still open to feel your love from Earth, and to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you from the moon…we will see you on the other side.
Glover and his wife Dionna attend a Churches of Christ congregation in a suburb of Houston, Texas, and are parents to four daughters.
As NASA lost communication with Artemis II, Public Affairs Officer Leah Cheshier Mustachio said, “This really beautiful view of a crescent moon and a crescent earth, . . . ‘How Great Thou Art.’”
Meanwhile, back on earth, the Easter season saw huge numbers of people, many of them in their late teens and twenties, coming to faith in Christ through baptisms and church attendance. From Pennsylvania, for instance, journalist Salena Zito reported on an April revival service held at the University of Pittsburgh’s Peterson Center, with over 5,000 young people, most of them students, in attendance. Several hundred of those young people were baptized at this event.
Zito also noted the surge in baptisms, confirmations, and attendance in Catholic churches in her area, adding that dioceses around the United States are seeing record numbers of converts joining the church. In many of these churches there’s standing room only for Sunday Mass.
Pastor Jason Howard, who helped organize the gathering at the Peterson Center, said of this rapid growth, “I think overall young people are really looking for something real, and I think that this generation has really gotten to the point where the world seems out of control, and the world seems to be so subjective.”
Howard’s brief summary hits the mark. Today’s philosophy of relativism – “Your truth is not my truth” – discards ultimate truth in favor of whim and personal desire. Individuals may cobble together an admirable moral code, but their belief system ultimately stands on sand. Gen Zers are looking for a rock and are finding it in scripture and in Christian doctrine and practice.
In addition, nearly all human beings look and long for a raison d’etre, an explanation for their existence and their place in the vast scheme of things. Scripture contains that wisdom. In 1992, for instance, when I was received into the Catholic church at the age of 40, for the first time in my adult life I finally possessed a worldview that made sense to me, that lined up squarely with the world around me. Millions of others, Protestant and Catholic, know and understand the strength that truth and God brings to the heart and the direction these bring to our lives.
Putting prayer and study into practice should help us become better human beings, never perfected but always aiming toward the perfection found in Christ. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Finally, the materialism that marks our age must surely factor into this renewed interest in a life of faith. In an age of plenty where so many people still want more and more, it’s little wonder that the young are looking for spiritual values and direction. As Christ said, “Man shall not live by bread alone.”
Those of us already engaged with a church should not only welcome these converts and reverts but should feel inspired by them. We can use their fervor to reinvigorate our own spiritual lives, renewing our passion for scripture, prayer, and fellowship and bringing the gifts they bestow into our daily lives.
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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image credit: Flickr-NASA HQ PHOTO’S CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
