POPE FRANCIS reaches to the margins. He’s washed the feet of prisoners and homeless families. Like his Assisi namesake, he’s hugged contemporary “lepers” and made common cause with garbage collectors. But I was still surprised when the pope made a 20-minute video call to the International Space Station in orbit 200 miles above the Earth.
Pope Francis wasn’t the first pontiff to make that long-distance call—his predecessor did that in 2011. But tracking stars and gazing into the heavens have been part of Judeo-Christian tradition since God asked whether Job could “bind the cluster of the Pleiades or loose the belt of Orion” (38:31) some 3,500 years ago. Despite that unfortunate Galileo kerfuffle in the 1600s over the “heresy” of believing that the Earth revolved around the sun, the Vatican has operated state-of the art telescopes since 1582.
As an enthralled 5-year-old, I made a scrapbook about the Apollo 11 spaceflight that placed the first humans on the moon. As an 18-year-old, I marveled at the elegance of physics formulas that served equally well for measuring distances in cells and solar systems. At 54, I laughed out loud when I recognized Fibonacci’s sequence in the passionflower we planted in the back alley. “The universe as a whole, in all its manifold relationships, shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God,” wrote Pope Francis.
Did the astronauts and the pope talk about the logistics of spaceflight? After all, the pope trained as a chemist and the six men on the space station have years of experience as engineers, physicists, mechanics, and biologists.
No. Pope Francis pointed behind him to Romanian artist Camilian Demetrescu’s tapestry inspired by Dante’s last verses of The Divine Comedy: “My desire and will were turned ... by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” As engineers and astronauts, he asked, what does it mean to call “Love” the force that moves the universe?
Aleksandr Misurkin, a pilot born in a rural Russian town near the Belarus border, answered by referencing The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (who was also a pilot), which he’d brought with him into space. Misurkin said he would willingly give his own life to save the plants and animals on Earth. “Love is that force that gives you the ability to give your life for someone else,” he said.
Randy Bresnik, an Iraq war veteran born in Kentucky, told the pope, “What gives me the greatest joy every day is to be able to look outside and see God’s creation a little bit from his perspective. People cannot come up here and see the indescribable beauty of the Earth and not be touched in their souls. ... As we see the peace and serenity of our planet ... there’s no borders, no conflict—it’s just peaceful. And you see the thinness of the atmosphere, and it makes you realize how fragile our existence here is.”
Joe Acaba, the first astronaut of Puerto Rican descent, had looked down on Hurricane Maria as it devastated the island where his parents were born. A few weeks earlier, Acaba’s Houston home was flooded during Hurricane Harvey. Pope Francis asked Acaba about the danger of individualism and the importance of collaboration.
“It is our diversity that makes us stronger,” responded Acaba. “By working together, we can do things much greater than we can do as individuals.”
We live in a season of vanities, as the preacher says in Ecclesiastes, a season of spiritual emptiness masked by agitation and indignity. At the brink of a new year, what does it mean to call “Love” the force that moves the universe?
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
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