@HomewithDean – Homily 01/15

Today’s thought is about looking up.Have you heard of the Overview Effect? It’s a psychological phenomenon so common among those who have traveled out into space that they’ve given it a name.Wikipedia describes the Overview Effect as the “cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space … a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities.” A state of awe means of course that something you’re experiencing is overwhelming. Self-transcendent is a fancy way to say that overwhelming experience is changing you and growing you beyond who you were before. The most common effect of experiencing the Earth from space are an “… appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole.” And here’s my favorite part … “the effect can cause changes in the observer’s self concept and value system.”I’ve never heard anyone explain the Overview Effect better than Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell—the sixth human being to ever walk on the surface of the moon—who described how he felt the first time he saw the earth hanging silently like a tiny blue marble in the vast blackness of space in the kind of language you’d expect from a man who was both a scientist and a Navy test pilot:“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon … politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”Ladies and gentlemen, the Overview Effect. I can imagine a day not too long from now when perhaps it will be common for anyone to go into space and hopefully experience the Overview Effect for themselves. And perhaps when that day comes things down here will really begin to change. But if we’re going to make it to that day a whole lot more of us down here need to spend a wh