If We Reach the Stars

There is something in the human person that has never been fully at home here.

Not in the anxious, escapist sense, not the dissociation of someone fleeing their life, but something older and stranger. A constitutional restlessness that seems woven into the fabric of what we are. Augustine called it the heart that finds no rest until it rests in God. The desert fathers called it penthos, a holy ache. The physicists and the tech visionaries are calling it something different now. They are calling it the stars.

The question underneath all the orbital launch schedules and humanoid robots and longevity research is the same question it has always been: what kind of creature are we, and what are we for?