Skip to footer

'Dare mighty things'

A Christian Science perspective: The Mars rover Curiosity is scheduled to land on Mars on Aug. 6. The author, who was involved in the mission of the Mars rover Spirit in 2004, shares her perspective.

  • By Mary Bothwell

That phrase, “Dare mighty things,” was originally spoken by US President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910. It’s used as a banner at the end of a recent NASA video, “7 Minutes of Terror,” of the upcoming landing of the rover Curiosity on the surface of Mars.

Watching the video reminded me of being in the Multimission Image Processing Lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when a previous rover, Spirit, landed on Mars in early 2004. We were waiting for the first pictures from the cameras my employees had built for the rover. The 10 to 15 minutes between the time we knew the rover was supposed to land and the time we received a healthy signal seemed like an eternity for some people.

When one “dares mighty things” in the high-tech world of space exploration, it seems that there are more things that can go wrong than right – that the margin for error is so small that one miscalculation will lose the mission, that the distances involved are so great that we humans are out of control of critical events. Let’s face it: One-third of the Mars missions launched by the United States have failed.

Yet sitting in front of the video screens watching mission control, I felt a calm assurance that all was well. Why? The summer we were building the cameras, I chaired daily meetings to monitor my team’s progress. Before I went to work, I prayed specifically for our camera engineering team and the mission team, knowing that God, as divine Mind, was the guiding “force” and that each one of His children, specifically the hundreds of people working on the project, would be guided to wise, workable solutions to enable a successful mission. Their creativity was a reflection of God’s creative activity, going on continuously.

Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Monitor, wrote an exegesis on the first chapter in Genesis, the spiritual account of creation, in her primary work, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” In it, she said: “The calm and exalted thought or spiritual apprehension is at peace. Thus the dawn of ideas goes on, forming each successive stage of progress” (p. 506). Our Mars missions are the embodiment of the evolution of ideas that result in great technological progress. These new ideas have their source in God and enable the mission teams to “dare mighty things” with confidence, rather than terror.

My prayers, and the prayers and best wishes of many others, are supporting the Curiosity mission team as it awaits the entry, descent, and landing phase of the mission, a recent “dawn” of new ideas.

To receive Christian Science perspectives daily or weekly in your inbox, sign up today.

To learn more about Christian Science, visit ChristianScience.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Enjoying this content?
Explore the power of gratitude with the Thanksgiving Bible Lesson – free online through December 31, 2024. Available in English, French, German, Spanish, and (new this year) Portuguese.
Read the Thanksgiving Lesson
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to 'Dare mighty things'
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/A-Christian-Science-Perspective/2012/0719/Dare-mighty-things
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe