Aim Higher

Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, 

"You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, 

and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me." 

When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

-Mark 10: 21-22

The other night we watched the launch of an Antares rocket from Wallops Island in Virginia.  From our vantage point here in Southern Maryland the rocket was a smallish orange ball of fire rising into the night sky.  We had the video feed from the launch site playing on my phone, the video showed the control room, and the launch pad, it had the voice communications of all the control crew, reporting the status of various systems.  "Such and such a complicated sounding system is Nominal," "another complicated thing is green."  Caitlyn, in her un-self-conscious eleven year old wisdom, said, "Those are a bunch of smart people," referring to the people in the control room and the voices on the comm.

"Yes, they are," I said, and for some reason I had this sort of sad feeling that's taken me about a day and half to sort out.

Don't get me wrong, sad feelings are pretty normal for me, I'm sort of wired that way, but the thing is this was out of place, it was a nice night and we were doing a neat thing with the kids.  The kids were not in the state of tween ennui that has become pretty standard in our house these days.  They were stoked, hanging on the count down, pointing at the admittedly un-spectacular orange blob in the sky.  They had a sense of the rather remarkable feat of human endeavor that is our space program.

I think the sadness came from the reality that even the imagination sparking adventure of space exploration has been hamstrung by dollar signs. We launch un-manned satellites and rockets mostly these days.  The space shuttles are museum pieces, we haven't been back to the moon in nearly 50 years, the occasional probe launch to the side, most of what we do is dull and pragmatic, even if it is still technologically impressive.

That rocket NASA launched on Monday night, was a supply capsule for the space station.  On the interesting side: we have a space station, but every few years someone has to decide whether that is even worth the bills that it runs up, and that is sort of what's disappointing on an existential level.  If space stuff can make us a buck, it will happen faster than you can say Apollo, if it's just about the drive to get "out there," well, it's proving to take a bit longer.

In the Star Trek imagination, one of the prerequisites for true space exploration was the motivation to move beyond money.  In the movie First Contact, that fundamental change is precipitated by contact with the Vulcan people, finally proving to a troubled human race that we are not alone in the universe.  In one of the episodes of The Next Generation, there is a conversation between Counselor Troi and a time traveling Mark Twain.  Troi explains to Mr. Clemens that humanity has moved beyond the need for money, and he just can't get a handle on how anything would get done.

That's a problem that I think most of us have: even imagining that there might be an alternative to money.  If you didn't get paid, would you still do your job?  If you didn't need to get paid, if all of your needs and most of your wants were provided for what would you do?  The optimistic vision of Star Trek, is that it would free you up to do what you are really called to do.  An oddly more realistic vision may actually be what happens in the movie Wall-E where humanity adapts to having all of their work done by robots by essentially losing the ability to do anything for themselves, evolving into morbidly obese slugs that float around an enormous intergalactic carnival cruise liner in hover pods.

It occurs to me that the difference between the two visions is simply one of purpose.  In Star Trek, people were given a different option: "explore of strange new worlds, seeking out new life, new civilizations, boldly going where no one has gone before."  In Wall-E, they were not, they were just essentially allowed to atrophy, having all their needs and wants met by machines.  The question before all of us, if we are ever going to move beyond money, is what vision are we pursuing?

When Jesus asks the rich young man to sell everything he owns, he is advocating more than just a sacrifice for the sake of charity to the poor.  He is offering the young man a choice of coming with him on an adventure of discipleship, or staying put in his comfortable relationship with Mammon.  The sadness comes because the young man is not able to choose the path of discipleship.  He wants to follow Jesus, but he is too enmeshed in his relationship to money.

I'll be honest with you, I want us to aim higher, I want to aim higher than just money, but I also come to these moments where I grieve because I have many possessions.

Bill Clinton's famous line "It's the economy stupid," makes me involuntarily grind my teeth, because it is so inescapably true.  It is statement of our idolatry, proof of the master we serve.

Thankfully we're still shooting these little pods of stuff off of the face of earth, we're still sending our robot surrogates to Mars and Pluto and beyond. I guess I'm just longing for a little more discovery and little less accounting.