It’s only natural you should hate spirituality. The word almost always refers to someone using the spir­itual as spackle to fill a defect in him or herself. A beached fiftysomething with a face like a worn coin, suddenly terrified of death and enrolled in a com­munity college goddess course. Spirituality doesn’t flow in that direction. It doesn’t give a shit about you. We are in its stream and even if we dream of water­wheels to harness the flow there’s no anchorpoint to take a foundation. Most of the time we ignore the fact that we’re going where it wants. This makes our situation invisible.

Infrequently, it announces itself. We are helpless then, and irresistibly magnetized. The Apollo Program is a good example.

Everybody thought Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon were spending four-and-a-half percent of the Federal budget each year to prove that America owned Science. This was all a fiction. The Apollo Program was an elaborate demonstration of how even the blandest among us are under the heel of the spirit.

NASA needed astronauts to plant a flag on the Moon. For obvious reasons the astronauts selected were the most reliable type of man America makes: white, straight, center-right and full-starch protes­tant, each spawned from the union of science and the military. Every last one of them the heart of the heart of the TV dinner demographic. But then they get shot into space.

They are tossed from the gravity of this planet, tossed across a quarter-million miles of nothing, to be snatched by the Moon after three days of coasting. Eighteen guys did this and twelve descended further to discover the Moon smells like a recently fired gun.

Every last one of them came back irrevocably changed. America had sent the squarest men it could find to the Moon and the Moon sent back humans.

Armstrong became a teacher, then a farmer. Alan Bean became a painter. Edgar Mitchell started be­lieving in UFOs. Along the way he also managed to crystallize the experience of seeing your entire home planet at once: