Jul 21st, 2009
Moon Landing: Speeding through the Immensity of Space
O Son of Man! Wert thou to speed through the immensity of space and traverse the expanse of heaven, yet thou wouldst find no rest save in submission to Our command and humbleness before Our Face. Bahai writings
I was driving with Moojan from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Wilmette, Illinois, on 20 July 1969, trying to arrive there before the astronauts landed on the moon. We had car trouble on the way and I had to use a coat hanger to keep the exhaust in place as we drove through Nebraska.
I had not been to my family’s home in Wilmette, as they have only recently moved there, and had no idea where the street they lived on might be. There was no such thing as a SatNav and the map we had showed Wilmette as a suburb of Chicago but no streets. Once in the Chicago area, I just pointed the car towards Wilmette and, having arrived there, looked for the dome of the Baha’i House of Worship above trees, as I knew the street to be nearby. Just before 3:00 in the afternoon I pulled into the parking lot next to the House of Worship, my car roaring as the silencer (muffler, for those in the US) had completely gone. A car was just leaving the car park as I drove in, so I asked the driver where Greenleaf was — and got directions from Hand of the Cause Zikrullah Khadem!
We quickly drove the two blocks and ran into the house just in time to sit with my family to watch the historic moon landing at 3:17 Chicago time.
We were thrilled by the words of Neil Armstrong as he set his foot on the moon’s surface: `That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ - they seemed to capture the very spirit of the changes and advances that were happening in the world. For me, it was particularly poignant to watch with my grandmother, the first Baha’i in our family, who was born in Norway in 1896 and had come to the US on a ship in 1902.
But it was Buzz Aldrin who, unwittingly, echoed Baha’u'llah’s truth-statement of more than a century before - `Wert thou to speed through the immensity of space and traverse the expanse of heaven, yet thou wouldst find no rest save in submission to Our command and humbleness before Our Face - when, in the first broadcast from the moon, he requested us to be show humility and gratitude to our creator: `I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.’
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Sweet and very special memories!
Wow, you drove from Tulsa to Wilmette thru Nebraska?…that was a long time ago, wasn’t it.
Cheers, Randy
There are convolutions - on the one hand it may be that Abdu’l-Baha predicted space travel - with some encouragement, and yet also with some warning (p 32-33)
I know, verily, that the universal, never ending, eternal, bright and divine establishments are only the diffusing of the breaths of God, and the spreading of the instructions of God, and all that are beside these, though they be the reigning over all the regions of the earth, or the construction of railroads from the earth to the heavens, or means of transportation with the rapidity of rising lightning from the globe of earth to the globe of the sun, all are but mortal, perishing, demolishing and disadvantageous, in comparison with the divine establishments. Because the latter (divine establishments) are intrinsic matters, while the former are but metaphorical matters; the latter are truth, while the former are imaginary.