“I’m not really a religious person, but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything,” Commander Reid Wiseman
When the Navy chaplain walked through the hatchway of the USS John P. Murtha, Wiseman had never met the man before, but he saw the cross on the chaplain’s collar and broke down in tears. “It’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through,” he told a NASA press briefing days later.
What makes Wiseman’s confession so striking is what he chose to say in a room full of engineers and journalists: there was no other avenue. The data, the physics, the debriefing reports didn’t take priority. When he needed to process the enormity of what had happened, the instruments of his profession fell silent. Only the cross spoke.
During the mission, Wiseman stood at the farthest point any human has ever been from Earth, 252,756 miles, and declared that “humanity has not evolved to the point of being able to comprehend” what the crew was seeing. That man came home still reaching for something his career had never taught him to name: his heart’s God-shaped hole.
Augustine wrote that our heart is restless until it rests in God. Pascal observed a God-shaped void within every human soul that earthly things cannot fill. What Wiseman experienced was that ancient restlessness meeting its only answer.
We are all worshipping creatures; that’s what we were created to do. Regardless of one’s persuasion, every person directs the deepest allegiances of their heart toward something. The question is never whether we worship, only what we worship.
When life strips away our constructed anchors, the substitutes reveal themselves as insufficient. Wiseman didn’t go looking for faith but his need for it came looking for him.
“I saw the cross on his collar and I just broke down in tears,” Wiseman stated after touching down on earth.
C.S. Lewis once observed that a desire no earthly thing can satisfy most likely points toward another world. Wiseman orbited the Moon, witnessed sights that staggered even his seasoned imagination, and came home still reaching. That reaching isn’t a weakness; it’s the most human thing about him, and about all of us. He was, in the oldest and most important sense, finally finding his bearings.
