Gagarin at the Half-Century Auspicious events tend to cluster around April 12th. When Paul Simon sang "Kathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, Michigan seems like a dream to me now," he was singing about a girl he met on April 12, 1964. That night he played his first Folk Club in England. Okay, I admit almost nobody knows or cares about that, but the Civil War started on this day in 1861, and Franklin Roosevelt died in Georgia this day in 1945. And fifty years ago today the Soviets launched the first man into space. At that moment the news seemed almost as threatening to the future of America as the start of the Civil War. We were being drubbed in the space race. It meant we kids had to take lots more math and science courses than we would have had there been no Sputnik or Soviet first in manned space flight. That alone probably shut me out of Harvard. Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut on board, became for awhile the most famous man in the world. When we lived in Moscow we passed Yuri Gagarin Square when we traveled to the center. The space pioneer was commemorated by an obelisk which resembled a kind of poor man's Washington Monument. The Soviets were not content with their very real technological victory over the West. They insisted on piling on. They claimed an ideological victory as well. That 'victory' was patently bogus. Amazingly, they chose the theological rather than the political side of ideology. At the press conference Gagarin declared (in words no doubt scripted by someone else) that when he looked out of his space capsule he didn't see God anywhere. As if God were someone like the Great Oz who lived in danger of a little dog pulling the curtain back. As if a Russian could somehow stumble onto His hideout. WA Criswell, my future pastor at First Baptist Dallas observed that if he'd taken his helmet off for a moment then he would have seen God. And my future and current hero CS Lewis wrote in the Saturday Evening Post "I wouldn't want to worship a god who could be sneaked up on by a Soviet Cosmonaut." In 1968 Yuri Gagarin perished when he crashed his MIG jet. On that day he saw God too late. Have a good April 12th. Make it auspicious if you can.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
April 12th and the Soviet Achievement
Gagarin at the Half-Century Auspicious events tend to cluster around April 12th. When Paul Simon sang "Kathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, Michigan seems like a dream to me now," he was singing about a girl he met on April 12, 1964. That night he played his first Folk Club in England. Okay, I admit almost nobody knows or cares about that, but the Civil War started on this day in 1861, and Franklin Roosevelt died in Georgia this day in 1945. And fifty years ago today the Soviets launched the first man into space. At that moment the news seemed almost as threatening to the future of America as the start of the Civil War. We were being drubbed in the space race. It meant we kids had to take lots more math and science courses than we would have had there been no Sputnik or Soviet first in manned space flight. That alone probably shut me out of Harvard. Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut on board, became for awhile the most famous man in the world. When we lived in Moscow we passed Yuri Gagarin Square when we traveled to the center. The space pioneer was commemorated by an obelisk which resembled a kind of poor man's Washington Monument. The Soviets were not content with their very real technological victory over the West. They insisted on piling on. They claimed an ideological victory as well. That 'victory' was patently bogus. Amazingly, they chose the theological rather than the political side of ideology. At the press conference Gagarin declared (in words no doubt scripted by someone else) that when he looked out of his space capsule he didn't see God anywhere. As if God were someone like the Great Oz who lived in danger of a little dog pulling the curtain back. As if a Russian could somehow stumble onto His hideout. WA Criswell, my future pastor at First Baptist Dallas observed that if he'd taken his helmet off for a moment then he would have seen God. And my future and current hero CS Lewis wrote in the Saturday Evening Post "I wouldn't want to worship a god who could be sneaked up on by a Soviet Cosmonaut." In 1968 Yuri Gagarin perished when he crashed his MIG jet. On that day he saw God too late. Have a good April 12th. Make it auspicious if you can.
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