Slipped Behind the Moon
Field Note: A liturgy for the departure lounge
I’m sitting in a departure lounge. A small one, tucked away in a remote corner of the world where the clocks seem to tick a little slower. The door to the tarmac is propped open with a rusted chock and the kind of airport flotsam that only sees the light of day during a deep clean.
Then there’s the smell. You know the one. Jet fuel, burnt coffee, and that thin 5 a.m. light that hasn’t quite decided what it wants to be. Out on the tarmac, the engines are cycling, clearing their throats like a nervous best man before a speech.
It still feels like a miracle, doesn’t it? That anything this heavy, this much metal and luggage and human history, can be persuaded to leave the ground.
And yet, we keep finding ways to go further. Further than we have ever been.
That’s the part that lingers.
Victor Glover is a pilot. An astronaut. The first Black man to orbit the Moon. As the Artemis crew reached the edge of their journey, their closest point to the lunar surface and their furthest point from a hot shower and a familiar face, he opened the radio.
He did not talk about fuel cells or orbital mechanics. He did not give a systems check. He spoke about love.
He shared Christ’s answer to the question of what matters most1. Love God. Love your neighbour.
And then the spacecraft slipped behind the moon.
For forty minutes, there was nothing but silence. He spoke. And then he disappeared into the dark.
There is something liturgical about that. A kind of Amen, followed by a long pause.
We remember Grissom, White, and Chaffee. We remember the Challenger. And others, known and unknown to us, who paid that same cost. There is no version of reaching for the stars that does not carry grief with it. No distance without a kind of ache woven into the leaving.
And still, we go.
Glover looked back at that small, lit world from a quarter million miles away and reminded us that we are not accidents. We are here on purpose. We are loved.
He spoke that from further away than most of us can imagine. And then the signal went dark.
I look around the departure lounge again. Here we are with our carry-ons and our lukewarm coffees, waiting to be lifted into a sky we do not fully understand. All of us mid-departure. All of us carrying something we didn’t fully declare at the check-in counter. All of us further along than we feel, and not as far as we hoped.
But we board anyway.
We wave goodbye through the glass, sometimes not quite sure who or what we are waving at, but hoping it finds somewhere to rest.
Maybe faith is like that.
Not a perfect systems check. Not a guaranteed arrival time. Just a word spoken at the edge of the dark, trusting it will land. Trusting that love, of all the things to say before the silence, is the right thing to say.
The engines rise. The floor hums.
It is hard to believe anything this heavy could ever fly.
And yet.
Matthew 22 from verse 36