shooting for the moon
Human brilliance is so much dirt in a corner unless it is polished and honed. “Shoot for the moon,” the grammar school posters read, “even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” But the moon and stars demand our awe by their very nature as God’s creation. Yes, the celestial bodies shine down in brilliance on our temples of mud. Placed there by God’s hands as sentinels and witnesses to our depravity, revealing to our ancestors night after night the splendor of Creation. The stars do not care that they repeat their show in the sky night after night, season after season, year after year in perpetuity—they continue saying what they say without preface or qualification. No need for any “it’s been said before but..” Celestial brilliance truly does go without saying.
But human brilliance? All our greatest effort turns to dust, even that which is perpetually prefaced and qualified, repeated and memorialized. Even the brightest shining exemplars of human brilliance dull with the passage of time and the march of human foible to be forgotten. And the stars shine on even when our ‘great cities’ work to keep their wonder from our view. Human brilliance has accomplished a society where I have never seen full celestial brilliance as God made it. To be humbled by the night sky and inspired to hone oneself into brilliance is ever more forgotten. Our modern comfort is so many rags, flashing whirligigs, buzzing doodads, industrial slop, and happy candies.
So yes, grammar school poster, let us “shoot for the moon.” But we must only do so knowing what the moon is and what shooting for it must mean. For I cannot simply be anything I will myself to be. Our dreams must also have some tether to reality. By no measure of my understanding do I think I can ever be a moon or a star (unless the mormons are onto something). But thank God, even with our modern, enlightened and illuminated industrial night sky, the moon still demands to be seen. Ever still, she commands the ebb and flow of our oceans and all the minutiae of inexplicable lunar murmurings. I can still look in awe and know that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and I can, knowing what I know and feeling what I feel, mourn in the success of humanity that has dimmed our view to the moon’s children dancing.
Human brilliance then, is so much dirt and artificial noise that is blinding—that is, when it comes from a humanity that believes we are of this world, that thirsts and lusts after total domination rather than stewardship of natural dominion. Our true brilliance does not come out of our world but of God, for we are not of this world but of God. We can never demand true awe of ourselves—we do not have the capacity. Any worldly achievement, respect, fear, or renown we may accumulate weighs nothing on the scale of time that is in God’s hands. But if we hone a brilliance that is not of this world, our celestial brilliance, our capacity to glorify God, then glory be to God and to God the glory will be, everlasting—beyond the moon, beyond the stars, beyond all earthly toil. So sure, I’ll shoot for moon, but I shoot for the moon not to land among stars but to glorify God as His creation.