Carrying Home

Voyager

Where can I go from your spirit?
    Or where can I flee from your presence?
 If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
    if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
    and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me fast. (Psalm 139: 7-10)

(Voyager 1 Photo Courtesy of NASA)

Voyager I, intrepid explorer and earth’s envoy to interstellar space, is in trouble. After nearly 50 years of faithfully transmitting data about our solar system and beyond back to Earth, it seems that its communication system has gone awry, and its messages are garbled at best.

The useful life-span of this spacecraft is measured by its ability to communicate with its parent planet. So these reports of communication failure may to be its obituary.

But why is this? Voyager may well stop communicating. We earthlings may not receive another bit of data from it. But does this mean that Voyager is indeed lost?

When it was launched on September 5, 1977, Voyager brought a bit of Earth with it, in the form of a record. The famous “golden record,” bearing photos of humans, songs of whales, music from Mozart to Chuck Berry, a diagram of human DNA, and so much more, is encased within it. As it travels, Voyager carries its home planet and all of the species inhabiting it into the vastness of the universe.

This tiny craft, this explorer, this wanderer, crossed a threshold on August 25, 2012, when it cruised beyond the influence of the solar winds and entered interstellar space. The only earth-made object ever to have traveled this far, Voyager is now more than 15 billion miles from home. And yet home is within it. Should Voyager never “phone home” again, a bit of Earth will remain entrusted to its care. And because it carries home deep within, it is not lost.

Is it so different for us? We grow. We explore. We transgress. We forget to communicate with our Source of Being. But the Holy is etched on our hearts and we carry it wherever we go. We are reminded of it in the sound of spring rain. We may recognize it in new life unfurling all around us. We feel it as the sun warms our skin. Because our Source, our Home, is enclosed in our very being, we are never lost. As our lives stretch and turn in complicated arcs we may not always acknowledge it, or even consciously remember it. But like Voyager, as we journey to new places both physically and spiritually, that imprint of Home will never be erased. We carry it within ourselves to every distant shore. And like that wanderer in space, our Source, our Home, will be shared as we open ourselves to unknown friends we meet along the way.

For more about Voyager and the Golden Record, I suggest these sites:

https://www.space.com/predicting-voyager-golden-records-distant-future

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#:~:text=On%20December%2012%2C%202023%2C%20NASA,able%20to%20continue%20its%20mission.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-on-voyagers-golden-record-73063839/