It’s possible, when encountering the cosmic vastness, to feel oneself to be so small as to be insignificant—to be an accident. But the testament of history, art, literature, and poetry points to another possibility: that the expanse of the evening sky can bring us to the feeling, not of arbitrary chance, but of some divine purpose too huge for us to get ahold of: someone greater than I made that sky, and, more strange still, made it somehow for me.

Something like this feeling lies behind the Greek and Norse myths from which we take the names of our constellations and behind the celestial stories of American Indian traditions. It also lies behind the constant cosmic images that shape the Abrahamic faiths. As long as human beings have been looking up, they have been confronted with the fundamental and final questions about life in the world. Most often, these reflections have ended in submission to the mysterious God, Gitche Manitou, the One whose personality echoes among the flaming orbs and through the gigantic halls of blackness.

Americans, perhaps, were particularly ready to embrace this ancient urge in the face of a competing world power that explicitly rejected the life of the spirit and the notion of the loving, creator God. Space travel may have been, for both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., about asserting some kind of dominance on the world stage. But Gene Kranz, the mission director of the Apollo missions, was not alone when he wept at the reading of scripture. It seems clear that, for many in this country, the moon landing had a meaning greater than the political machinations of the hour. Indeed, now it is an accomplishment shared and loved by the whole world.

And surely we feel this too; surely the effort of Apollo 11 makes us feel like a family with our species. Who are we? We are human beings, we are the explorers, the darers, the adventurers; we are the ones who, with dogged determination, throw ourselves across oceans, over mountains, and into the stars. We are the knowers and the lovers of the cosmos, the poets of the universe, the priests of Creation. There’s a brotherhood in this.

The Apollo 11 mission draws our hearts together, and then draws us higher. The human being, it has been said, is a meaning-seeking animal. The exploration of space is a search after meaning. It is an act of faith that the universe makes some kind of sense, that it is beautiful, and that it is worth knowing. And if this is true, we might reason, it is only because the fundamental ground of reality is a meaningful, purposeful, beautiful one.

***

Whatever we might conclude about questions of faith, it remains the case that contemplating the heavens draws us away from the petty squabbles of the hour toward more deep and abiding questions. In our day, so much of life seems to be occupied by the horizontal, by fretting about things on our own level. We look to the left and to the right to cast blame on our neighbors, we look behind to the past in bitterness and resentment, and we look forward to the future in the hopes of material comfort, wealth, and pleasure. But perhaps our happiness lies elsewhere than this lateral plane. That is the true meaning of the moonshot. The flight of Apollo 11 filled the eyes of onlookers with joyful tears only because, for once, they had remembered to look up.

Nathan Beacom is a writer living in Washington, D.C. His work has been featured in America Magazine, The Des Moines Register, and Commentary Magazine.