Life on Mars

According to Facebook, this was the first picture that the rover Curiosity took after landing on Mars in August.  (And for those of you who did not have a 1970s childhood which included Saturday morning reruns of classic Warner Brothers cartoons, that's Marvin the Martian peering into Curiosity's camera.)

The Oh family of Pasadena, California had their own taste of life on Mars this summer.  David is a NASA engineer and the flight director for Curiosity.  During the month of August David and his entire family structured their schedule according to Mars time.  A Martian Day is 24 hours and 40 minutes long, so after a short while the Martian day, or sol, was out-of-sync with an Earth day.  In trying to follow Martian time, the Oh family found themselves having a picnic on the beach at 1 AM Pacific Daylight Time, or going bowling at 4 AM.  David's thirteen-year-old son Braden blogged about the family's experience of living in Martian time.  http://marstimr.tumblr.com  When school started again in September, the Oh kids reset their clocks to Earth time.

I loved reading about the Oh family's experience of living on Martian time last month, but it also seems to me that 4 AM excursions to the beach or to the bowling alley fail to capture the sense of actually living on Mars.  Somehow I imagine that life on Mars would be more like living in a rust-colored Antarctica with no penguins.  (And no Marvin, either!)

Belden Lane, in his book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, speaks of the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth century who withdrew to the desert "to seek the face of God in a landscape of emptiness." (p. 186)  Compared to the empty Martian landscape, the Libyan desert west of the Nile must seem like the rain forest.

Part of me wonders whether space pioneers of the future will intentionally choose the desert landscape of Mars as a spiritual refuge.  What would it be like to live in a cold, rust-colored desert in which your former home--your former life!--appears no larger than the evening star?  

I also know that we don't always choose our desert experiences.  Not too long ago I visited a member of our congregation who has been undergoing a long and difficult rehabilitation.  "The days are 36 hours long," he told me.  That's significantly longer than either a Martian day or an Earth day, but the salient and poignant point is that his days are radically out-of-sync with everyone else's days.  (No one goes bowling at 4 AM pretending to be a rehab patient who can't sleep.)

To quote Belden Lane once again:  "Desert and mountain places are often associated with the 'limit-experiences' of people on the edge, people who have run out of language in speaking of God, people whose recourse to fierce landscapes has fed some deep need within them for the abandonment of control and the acceptance of God's love in absolute, unmitigated grace."  (p. 6)

What lessons have you learned in the desert?  What has it been like to "seek the face of God in a landscape of emptiness?"

Ash Tuesday

There was a story on NPR this morning about the lower-key ceremonies that were marking the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  In New York City, for instance, no big-name politicians spoke.  As the names of the victims were read and the bagpipers played, there were hundreds gathered, whereas in years past there have been thousands gathered.

One surviving family members said, "Somehow, I feel more normal this year," and Charles G. Wolfe, another surviving family member, said, "We've gone past that deep, collective, public grief."  (As reported by Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne).

Perhaps it is time for quieter commemorations, for lower-key ceremonies evocative of Ash Wednesday worshippers donning ashes in remembrance of their common mortality and in acknowledgement of their collective grief, which might be less public but is still just as deep.

How have you commemorated this anniversary?  If you were to adopt a Lenten-like discipline or practice as a way of safeguarding the memory of 9/11, what would it be?  What would you (or have you) resolved to do?