It's six fifty-seven on a Sunday morning
yet the congregation's gathering hall is bustling.
Call Your Mother bagels burst forth from paper sacks;
giant coffee urns boast inimitable weak roast
that spouts iteratively into awaiting compostable cups.
This isn't a normal sermon.
All the same,
we're gathered
to witness something holy.
My teenage daughter sulks into a chair like a hostage,
crosses her arms, sighs in that deeply self-serious,
hard-to-take-as-such way
that girls of a thirteenth year can so well execute,
and pulls out her Emotional Support Device.
I am about to comment on her attitude when
a proud member taps my shoulder,
beams down at me light a column of sunlight,
parting the storm clouds of youth,
pulling me back into the present.
She gestures to her tray of hand-painted sugar cookies,
each exquisitely bedecked with space rockets
across an interstellar velvet darkness,
laid out with care on a donated sterling silver platter.
"Take one, please! Let's celebrate!"
She urges.
I take my own seat in a faded stackable event chair,
its burgundy upholstery patinated
with the crumbs and coffee spills
of past decades of wedding and funeral repasts,
Board meetings, town halls.
Add to that, space rocket launch viewings,
as of this morning:
I dab at my spilled tea off the cushion
with a recycled paper napkin.
Both hush and humming
fills the cavernous lofted space;
the gathered masses exchange
eager nods and wavings hands.
Multiple simultaneous conversations
interweave like paper planes flying in the air:
calculations of wind speed;
explanations of tank pressure,
discussions of "thrust" and "orbital pull"
all interspersed with "how was your summer?"
and "how are the kids?"
We have come together this sleepy summer morn
to witness something extraordinary,
something out of this world:
the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.
We sit in several dozen of those saggy banquet chairs
at round tables, each facing a pull-down projection screen
itself mounted atop the mid-century fireplace.
Moving images of a YouTube live stream
flash over its large grainy surface,
a countdown clock features prominently in the upper-right.
Meanwhile, an audiophile congregant at the periphery
futzes with the sound feed on a table groaning with tech boxes and panels.
Our crowd vacillates between mirthful banter
and awed silence.
We chew our bagels,
nibble on precious baked goods,
slurp our tinny coffees.
We stare at the screen while carrying on
half-tuned side chatter with our chair neighbors.
This device preparing for blast-off, is named after Ms. Roman,
a/k/a The Mother of the Hubble,
the first woman executive
and first-ever Chief of Astronomy for NASA.
More importantly, she was a questioner,
and explorer, and curious mind
who never took "No" on face value.
In her own words, Nancy once said,
"I was told from the beginning that women could not be scientists."
The the world shut the door, she build a new one.
When she wasn't allowed in the middle science club,
she stood up her own astronomy club.
She was a Tri-Co member — a Swarthmore alum.
There, she fought for a glimpse through the eyepiece,
though got enough hands-on experience
to move onto University of Chicago.
There, they forbade her tenure
— "...which, Thank goodness!" —
A congregant explains, continuing:
"I'm sorry my alma mater did that, but if not,
then Nancy would've never moved to Maryland
to join NASA and change the trajectory of science!"
These familiar stories arise from our group,
organically, an echo of a Quaker Circle,
each storyteller contributing their connection
to this unstoppable, humble genius,
as the moment moved them.
Another congregant, donning a black NASA tee, shares:
"Nancy was the first to realize that ground-based telescopes
would never get us the answers we needed.
"Instead, we needed to invent something new,
something tremendous.
"And she advocated for decades to make traction
that led to the birth of the Hubble Space Telescope."
His face glows with the type of pride reserved for a family member.
My own vision blurs as tears cloud my built-in ground-based lenses.
I remember Nancy, and my interactions with her,
when she was a mobility-aid-dependent grey-haired church lady.
She had a kind smile and a crinkly eye, she radiated sweetness.
"She was so modest," a woman exclaims.
"Nancy never bragged.
"She just wanted to open the universe to us all."
Her cornflower eyes take on water like a Blue Boat Home.
Clutching her chest, overcome with the sense of connection,
she presses her lips tight, nods twice, blinks for closure.
Nancy was one of us, a Unitarian Universalist.
She was a dreamer, someone who dedicated her life
to making the world a bigger, better place,
for expanding the knowledge base,
for chasing the Whys to unanswered questions.
A fellow congregant of our little place of worship,
she was a faithful attendee and member until her death.
And so, we continue, munching, sharing,
watching, crying, gasping, counting down, recounting.
We all hold our breath as the on-screen timer zeroes out.
"It's time!" Someone cries out.
We allow a velvet cloak of silence to fall over us,
which is punctuated by short outbursts of factoids
that our overly smart audience can't help but to share.
Yet we nod, appreciatively, as those sound bites
intermingle with those of the televised experts.
Breaking the fourth wall of our 2D viewing experience
those first-hand accounts of Nancy and of physics
deepen our immediacy, anchor us to historic events unfolding.
The smoke billows around the twin towers
—one a rocket, one its support scaffold —
however these grey gases hint of success, not tragedy.
Lift-off is achieved; we collectively breathe again
as some of us bounce out of our seats, cheer, whoop, clap.
Again, saline drops fall from faces; gravity's still here on Earth.
I raise my mug of tea to the heavens: "For Nancy!"
Even my teenager smiles.
Together, we are one:
one human made a difference for us all.
The unity and fabric of the planet
and our galaxy carries in it a thread for Nancy,
she wove a future that will open up questions
that we couldn't conceive of asking before:
of deep space, of dark energy, of exoplanets.
May we never stop expanding.
