Too Far From Home

I have always been interested in space flight. As a little boy, growing up during the glory days of the US space program I would watch every Gemini launch, sometimes even faking an illness to stay home and watch Walter Cronkite describe a launch. I send letters to NASA asking for pictures of the astronauts and other information. I built plastic models of space ships (rather badly). I turned several large boxes into Gemini space capsules, cutting open portholes and decorating the outside of “the capsule” with the letters USA drawn in crayon.

As an adult I have continued to be enthralled with space flight. I watched Ton Hank’s wonderful HBO series, “From the Earth to the Moon”. I own the movie “Apollo 13”, which stars Hanks. I have built, or better to say rebuilt, plastic models of spacecraft and done a fairly good job, I might add. I have been to the Kennedy Space Center several times to see launches of the Shuttle.

As an avid space fan I’ve read dozens of wonderful books, some by the astronauts themselves, on space flight. I just finished reading a marvelous book by Chris Jones, Too Far From Home. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in modern day space flight.

Mr. Jones book recounts a little known and hardly remembered story in the history of the US space program. Too Far From Home tells the story of three men, two American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut, who became stranded in space aboard the International Space Station after the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in early 2003. Immediately following the loss of Columbia the entire US shuttle fleet was grounded for two and a half years. The three men on the ISS were left orbiting 290 miles above the surface of the earth.

The three man crew was eventually returned to earth by a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The men stayed aboard the ISS several months longer than had been planned. At first, all three men were content to be in space, even with no way of getting back to earth. They had enough food, water and other supplies to last them in orbit. They enjoyed living in the weightless environment of space.

They were especially enthralled with looking at the beauty of the Earth passing beneath them. Everyday they witnessed fourteen sunrises and sunsets. They could see the glorious colors of the Northern Lights. They witnessed lightening storms far below them. They even saw meteors burning up in our planets atmosphere from above.

Their view of earth was Godlike. Yet, they were totally and completely removed from Earth. They could gaze on the surreal beauty of Earth from space with no way to get to the planet and more importantly the people they loved.

It would not be too much of a stretch to say that a deep gulf or chasm had been fixed between those space travelers and the earth when the Columbia was lost.
Luke, the gospel writer, tells us a story of a gulf or chasm in his reporting of Jesus’ parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). In the parable the rich man finds himself in hell because of his lack of care for the poor man, Lazarus, who used to lay at his gate. In the story the rich man can see Lazarus in paradise with Father Abraham. He can see a place of life and refreshment that he cannot get to because, as Abraham tells him, “between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and one can cross from there to us.”

That was pretty much the situation of the men of Expedition Six, the official designation for those three standard space travelers. They could see Earth. They could speak to Earth. They could e-mail their friends and families. They gaze at the beauty and the goodness of Earth, but they couldn’t get to Earth anymore than the Rich Man could get into paradise.

It’s that sense of being so close, yet so far away that makes Too Far From Home a compelling read. It’s that sense of being so close, yet so far away that makes the reading of the parable frightening. We, some of us, are raised to think of hell as a separate reality cut off from the vision of heaven. But, that’s not what this parable suggests. The Rich Man can see the party that Lazarus is at. He can’t get there. As some wags might say, “and that’s the hell of it”.

The men of Expedition Six did get back to the good Earth. The chasm and gulf was bridged by their capsule when it streaked back to earth.
Jesus tells his parable to us, I think, as something of a warning. The chasm between Abraham, Lazarus and the Rich Man was a result of the chasm that the Rich Man had set between himself and Lazarus during their lifetimes.

What, I wonder, are the gulfs and chasms that even now I am setting between myself and other people?