Two weeks ago, my husband and I went to see Project Hail Mary. Usually movies about space, worlds “out there”, and other life forms would be filed under “thanks, but no thanks” and, unlike the other sci-fi buffs on our team, I had not only not read the book but knew nothing about it.
Reader, I’m here to tell you it was extraordinary.
The production team and cast managed to tell a completely far-out there story in a way that was full of empathy, perspective, long-sufferingness, and loyalty. It made me feel small in the very best way as I thought about what it means to die to self, what it might feel like to be receiving end of such sacrifice (Jesus! The cross!), and all of the ways my thinking is just too darn small.
Of course, just after I saw the movie, the country was captivated by Artemis II’s lunar flyby, a journey that the New York Times notes opened up profound spiritual questions for both the astronauts and Americans at large.
The Times story quotes Psalm 8 — “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are humans that you are mindful of them?” — and notes the paradox that scientists, philosophers, and poets have been trying to capture for centuries: that looking out into the vastness, through a movie or the news, doesn’t diminish us, but somehow reveals us. As one Oxford theologian put it, “We are a kind of being that can have that whole universe inside us, in our thoughts.”
This tension — of feeling small and deeply seen; of feeling insignificant within such an extraordinary cosmos that was created by such an extraordinary Creator — might be at the heart of what it means to feel awe and I think that’s what got me in the theater watching Hail Mary and what got so many of us on our couches tracking Artemis.
It wasn’t just a collective wonder about what’s out there but also a curiosity about what’s in here and a desire to draw closer to the One who made it all.
