As the spacecraft passed to the far side of the Moon, it lost communication with Earth for about forty minutes. There was silence. This silence actually meant something much beyond an ordinary technical interruption. Imagine you are at the furthest point a human can go from Earth, and no one can even hear your voice. These forty minutes were actually a time for contemplation, both for those in space and those on Earth. What are we? Where do we come from and where are we going? One day we too will lose communication with Earth, what will we do then? Mission expert Christina Koch, the first female astronaut on a lunar mission, described the far side of the Moon as follows: “It was absolutely fascinating…It was nothing like the Moon we see from Earth.”

In this mission, the astronauts not only orbited the Moon, but also had the opportunity to observe the lunar surface, including the Mare Orientale, lava plains, and many formations known as the Grand Canyon, so clearly and up close. These observations were not just an image, but also an experience that reshaped humanity’s view of the universe. For example, on April 5, 2026, for the first time in human history, the Orientale Basin of the Moon was fully visible to the human eye. Robots had looked at this region before, but what the human eye saw was completely different.  

A gigantic structure approximately 965 kilometers (600 miles) wide. A place scientists call the Grand Canyon of the Moon. Its age? 3.8 billion years. Science considers this canyon a young formation. Your life is 70 or 80 years; what science calls “young” is measured in billions of years.

This basin was formed by the impact of an asteroid approximately 64 kilometers (40 miles) in diameter. After the impact, the lunar surface collapsed and then rebounded, creating the remarkable concentric rings we see today. A destruction, yet there is order within it. A chaos, yet there is mathematics within it.

The astronauts were not merely looking at a landscape—they were looking at time. Because this basin lies along the terminator, the boundary between the Moon’s near and far sides, it is extremely difficult to observe from Earth. Observing it directly with the human eye allows for a better analysis of its color variations, surface texture, and the effects of light, deepening our understanding of lunar geology. Moreover, this basin is considered one of the best-preserved large impact structures on the Moon, providing valuable clues about the violent collisions that shaped the early Solar System.

Space race

Experts say that Artemis II is not just a space mission, but it also carries a geopolitical message. China’s rapidly developing space program, in particular, shows that this race is heating up again. NASA’s Artemis program is seen as an effort by the US to maintain its leadership in space. However, China is also accelerating its own lunar program and planning manned lunar missions by 2030. This shows that space will be an area of economic and strategic competition in the future.

The Artemis II mission has already ignited this competition by taking humans to the furthest point from Earth. Immediately after breaking the record for the furthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth, a very emotional moment occurred inside the capsule.  

The crew proposed that a crater on the Moon be named after Carroll Taylor Wiseman, the wife of mission commander Reid Wiseman, who died of cancer in 2020. The proposal was made by Jeremy Hansen, the first non-US citizen to go beyond low Earth orbit and the first Canadian astronaut to participate in a mission around the Moon.  

Speaking to Houston, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen’s voice trembled with emotion as he said:

“We started this journey years ago, and we’ve continued as a close-knit family of astronauts… and in the process, we lost someone we loved. There’s a formation in a very special place on the Moon. On the border of the Moon’s near and far faces… or even a little closer to that border. So, at certain times as the Moon orbits the Earth, we will be able to see this point from Earth.”

He paused… then continued:

“We lost someone we loved. Her name was Carroll. Reid’s wife… Katie and Ellie’s mother.

If you want to find this point, look at the Glushko crater. A little northwest of it, at the same latitude as Ohm, you’ll see a bright spot on the Moon. And we want to name that point Carroll.”  

Following these words, Mission Control fell silent for approximately 45 seconds. It was perhaps one of the most meaningful silences in humanity’s history. In the NASA broadcast, the crew was seen embracing Reid Wiseman. Afterward, the communications officer Jenny Gibbons responded:

“Integrity and Carroll Crater… clearly received. Thank you.”

You may travel to the Moon, but you take your pain with you. You gaze at the stars, yet your memories remain by your side.

Perhaps the greatest truth to understand is this:

We are not merely exploring space; we are exploring ourselves.

An astronaut leaves his wife’s name on a crater that is billions of years old. What will you leave behind in your own life on Earth?

That is why Artemis II is more than a space mission. It is a letter humanity writes to itself. Even as we look at the Moon, we are, in truth, looking at our own story.

The Qur’an makes a powerful appeal at this point:

“It is He who created the heavens in seven layers. You will not see any inconsistency in the creation of the Most Gracious. Turn your gaze and look; can you see any crack?” (al-Mulk, 3) The astronauts looked. They looked again. They found no crack. They only saw a perfect order, and they were amazed.

Now we come to the critical question. What will going to the Moon bring us? Faster internet?

More powerful technology?

A chance for life beyond Earth?

The possibility of discovering new planets?

Yes, these are some of the benefits. But they are not the main point. The main point is the perspective it gives us.

That is why the words of Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover, spoken live during the mission, are so striking: “I think these observations are important because we are so far from Earth and we are looking back at the beauty of creation. I think one of the most important personal perspectives I have here is being able to really see Earth as one whole. And you know, when I read the Bible and look at all the amazing things that have been made for us—we as created beings—I feel like you have an incredible place, like a spaceship. You are talking to us right now because we are in a spaceship very far from Earth. But actually, you are also in a spaceship called ‘Earth’; this ship was created to offer us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.”

We always think that we live on Earth. But we live more in a spaceship than on a planet. This ship is such a ship that it knows no borders. It doesn’t require a passport. It doesn’t ask for identification. In contrast, what do we, the inhabitants of the spaceship, do? We start wars. We blow small issues out of proportion. We inflate our egos. We tear one another down.

Let’s be honest:

Is what’s consuming you right now really that significant? Or are you making it bigger than it is? From space, your title is invisible. Your wealth is invisible. Your ego is invisible. None of it can be seen.

What is visible is a magnificent, deep blue sphere.

The Qur’an says elsewhere: “We created everything with a measure.” (al-Qamar, 49)

The universe exists in balance. But what about humanity? The journey to the moon should help humanity rediscover that balance in four ways:

1. It should help you change your perspective. Learn to look at your life from above.

You really need to learn this. Ask yourself this question: “Will this problem still exist when viewed from space?” Most of the time you will see that the answer is a resounding “No.”

2. It should cause you to begin your inner journey. Humanity managed to go to the moon. But it still hasn’t managed to go on its own inner journey. This is a bigger problem. Because a person who conquers the outside world but loses their inner world has actually gained nothing.

3. It should help you stop fighting. There is a photograph of planet Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe on February 14, 1990, from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers before leaving the Solar System. In this photograph, our world is seen as a “Pale Blue Dot.” Such great conflicts over such a tiny speck are tragicomic. We are all in the same boat. We are drifting in the same void. Yet, we remain of one other. Why?

4. It should make you take the present moment seriously. Because that’s all you truly have. Only the now exists. The past? It’s gone. The future? It has not yet arrived. And yet, you are missing the present moment as well.

In this tiny blue dot suspended in the infinite universe, in this brief life, we are drowning in the crises of our own making. We fight one another, and we fight ourselves. The regrets of the past that haunt us, the endless anxiety about the future, the insatiable pursuit of wealth… You exhaust yourself chasing a title at work, losing sleep over what others think of you. You live under the illusion that everything is so important, as though you will live forever. Your ego has grown so large that it no longer fits even within that pale blue dot.

Yet the truth is unmistakable. One day, we will all disappear—silently. Our names will be forgotten. Our bank accounts will be closed. The titles we once prized will vanish. Not a single trace of our earthly existence will remain.

And that is precisely why the certainty that everything will one day pass away is not a tragedy but one of life’s greatest freedoms. Stop taking yourself, your endless worries, and your inflated ego so seriously. Nothing is as important as you think. All you truly have is the present moment, and even that is quietly slipping through your fingers.

Now look once more at the photographs of Earth taken during the Artemis II mission, and ask yourself: What, exactly, is worth worrying about as you spend your brief life on this tiny rock suspended in the vastness of space?

Many western readers are unfamiliar with Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, an Islamic scholar who wrote mostly in the first half of the twentieth century. Those few who are familiar with Nursi – who know that he was routinely persecuted by the nascent government of the Turkish republic or that he inspired hundreds of students – are likely unfamiliar with his writings and ideas. His Qur’anic commentary, the Risale-i Nur, is more than 6000 pages long, and his readers have generally been reserved to their own reading circles.

Thankfully, there is a (relatively) new collection of essays out. Titled God, Man, and Mortality: The Perspective of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, the book serves as a convenient jumping off point for Western readers who know little or nothing about Nursi’s ideas.

As is natural in a collection about a thinker as complex and voluminous as Nursi, the essays themselves vary in tone, style, approach, and – yes – quality. The first essay in the collection, by Bilal Kuşpınar, is not one of the most scholarly or incisive pieces, but it serves as a good introduction to Nursi’s ideas and the Risale. It summarizes Nursi’s views on human conscience, which is foundational knowledge for the rest of the essays in the collection: “Nursi believes that ‘the conscience is a kind of metaphysical entity or spiritual faculty inherent in every human being.’” Later, Kuşpınar writes, “Nursi intends to show that man, by virtue of his conscience, can establish communion with the world of the Unseen, provided that the conscience remains unadulterated and uninfluenced.”

Most of the essays in God, Man, and Mortality can be broken down into two broad categories: those that are more scholarly; and those that are more informal and concerned with the application of Nursi’s ideas in everyday life.

Of the former, the standout is “Man as Vicegerent of the Earth: How New Is Said Nursi’s Intepretation?” by Şükran Vahide. Vahide explores how Nursi viewed man’s role in the Universe, as outlined by the Qur’an:

Similarly to other beings, man is thus an official with duties; it is only by virtue of the wealth of his faculties and the comprehensiveness of his disposition that he has been made vicegerent of the earth, and the obligations and functions that it entails have been made incumbent on him.

Vahide does an impressive job of placing Nursi within the proper historical and intellectual context. She illuminates where Nursi’s thinking was drawn from historical sources and where it diverged. To wit:

As was noted above, the present author has not found to date any other commentator who links the teaching of the [divine] names and the vicegerency with the miracles of the Prophets and mankind’s civilizational progress. The whole ethos of this interpretation, based on such notions as civilization, science, and material progress, is clearly modernist and has its roots in nineteenth-century European thought.

Vahide examines Nursi’s place within classical and modernist Islamic thought, but perhaps most fascinating is her study of Nursi’s place within Sufi thought. The movement Nursi inspired has always been difficult to define, but many have thoughtlessly labeled him and his students Sufis. Nursi himself disagreed with this assessment: “Nursi was adamant that he was not involved in Sufism … indeed, he argued that Sufism was inappropriate for the modern age since it was ill-equipped to reply to the intellectual assaults of materialism.”

Among the other more “scholarly” essays Kerim Balcı’s piece, “Agents of Human Spirituality: Dominical Subtle Faculties of Man According to Said Nursi” is another deeply researched text that draws on classical Islamic thinkers to assess Nursi’s ideas. Balcı explores humanity’s Ten Subtle Faculties, as enumerated by Nursi in his Risale. Balcı digs into not just the Sufi roots of Nursi’s ideas, but also their roots in Greek and even Hindu sciences and philosophies. It’s the most complex essay in a collection of thoughtful, complicated pieces.

Zeki Sarıtoprak’s “Nursi on the Problem of Theodicy” is a fascinating examination of the question of evil. Can evil be reconciled with “the Most Just God”? Once again, the author studies Nursi’s ideas alongside those of his historical peers. It’s a fascinating essay about a question that has vexed philosophers and thinkers for millennia. As Sarıtoprak shows, the question is less troubling for Sunni Islamic thinkers than it has been for Westerners. Nursi himself said, “In everything, even in the things that appear as the ugliest, there is an aspect of real beauty.” Echoing this, Sarıtoprak writes, “There is an overwhelming concept of justice in this world, but in the Islamic understanding this world and the other world complement each other. So, if something is not finished in this world it does not mean that there is no justice.”

From among the second category of articles, two were most intriguing. Mahsheed Ansari writes about Millennials’ (or Generation Y’s) struggle with mortality and faith. In his estimation, Millennials (of which this reviewer is one), “are often characterized as being ‘demanding, impatient and bad at communicating’ – a generation of ‘individuals’ who are mostly self-driven.” As she later writes, they are defined by “‘individualism’ that pervades contemporary Western culture.”

Ansari’s essay is equal parts fascinating and infuriating. She’s not wrong that many Westerners live an “excessively material lifestyle” or that traditional religious faith is on the decline. She makes the valid point that materialist philosophy has left many people feeling adrift and without meaning. This sense of meaninglessness has also resulted in higher incidences of self-harm, suicide, and drug abuse.

What one may call a broad generalization in Ansari’s essay is that for her many Westerners “now deal more with machinery and technology than with humans,” which is true. But it’s also true that there are humans behind every piece of machinery and technology we use. More often than not, people are using their cell phones or computers to connect with other people. They may be an imperfect medium, but the communities and bonds they build are real.

Another generalization in this essay is about Millennials. When looking at consumption and voting habits, it is baby boomers, not Millennials, who are excessively individualistic and materialistic. Part of Millennials sense of despair is at having to live in a world that has been desiccated by Boomers’ selfish rates of consumption.

Ansari obviously has a dog in this fight, though: she believes people are afraid of dying and, without faith in God, will never find meaning. As she writes, a person “wants, seeks, and yearns

for eternity, but the reality of his mortality and the inevitability of death bring pain and no fulfillment to his essence and core.” The answer, Ansari posits, drawing on Nursi, “is a firm belief in the ‘Eternal Existent Being.’” Augmenting this argument with statistics – say, lower rates of suicide and substance abuse in religious communities – could have been very useful. But it’s an argument delivered in good faith, and it’s certainly true that many Millennials are searching for the greater sense of community and selflessness that faith and religious communities provide.

In “Sincerity and Wisdom in the Fully Human Person: Ikhlas in the Risale-i Nur,” Father Thomas Michel outlines Nursi’s Nine Rules for Conduct among believers in the same community. These rules were intended to eliminate rivalry and jealousy, which Nursi had observed in his own students. As Michel writes, “Nursi’s point is that differing points of view need not cause division, factions, and enmity within the community.”

Michel writes in an engaging, personal tone. He extends Nursi’s rules to the Christian community and also to dialogue between Christians and Muslims. Knowing Michel to be an all-embracing person of peace, it’s only logical to extend these rules of conduct to people of other faith traditions, too. In such troubled times, one would hope that people of faith understand the need for unity with all people of good conscience, assuming their decency is genuinely held. A person need not believe in Christ or follow Muhammad’s example to live by Prophetic values. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence in today’s world of people who claim faith in God – faith that is, in many cases, sincerely held – who disgrace the good name of Christians and Muslims the world over.

Michel ends by quoting James: “But the wisdom from above is first of all pure, then peaceable, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.” The challenge for believers – and non-believers – in today’s world is to go beyond identities and instead form bonds based on shared goals and sincerity. Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Atheists alike are concerned about the environment, about justice, and about violence. They should be able to work with each other to solve these problems. In fact, they must.

God, Man, and Mortality is the kind of essay collection that poses intractable questions. In the writings of Said Nursi, the book’s authors seek to answer some of the most vexing problems facing the contemporary world. And though they do not always find the answers, in Nursi’s timeless wisdom, they often finds the beginnings of the answers – the roots from which a healthy tree might someday grow. They’ve done a great service by introducing Western audiences to Nursi’s ideas in an accessible, well-researched collection.

Buy This Book

God, Man, and Mortality: The Perspective of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi
Edited by Hasan Horkuc
9781597843294
pp. 208
Tughra Books

The man or woman who faces the reality, the inevitability, and the unpredictability of his or her own death enhances the quality of their life, for that person tends to make better choices about how to live. They use their mortality as a measuring stick to keep from wasting time or energy on things that truly do not matter to them.

Any person who has learned to hold his mortality close to his heart knows that today could very well be the last day of his life. The aged and very ill, those who are facing a short road to the end, are forced to accept this because it is in their face, but I believe that it would behoove all of us to use the overhanging shadow of our mortality to better our lives.

I am not special or different from any other citizen of this earth. I am not gifted with the ability to see into my future and know exactly how many days I have to accomplish all that I would like. Like everyone else, I have squandered precious moments, hours, and days that have added up to many, many years because I couldn’t accept the one great truth about my existence–that today could be the last day of my life.

I have lived my life in the same way as the majority of humans running around our planet. I have scurried from one life event to another. I have committed myself to actions that deep down I honestly didn’t want to do, but that I felt obligated to perform because that’s what society, family, or friends expected of me: go to school, college, grad school, work a job, date, marry, buy a house, have children, the list went on and on.

I was guilty of compounding the issue by idling away precious hours on blatant time wasters–just how many reruns of the same episode of my favorite television show could I watch? How many times could I meet the same people at the same bar and rehash the same tired issues?

I never questioned whether the choices I made were the wisest, most fulfilling use of my time because I was sure that I had all the time in the world. I believed that there would always be time to do everything that I wished, that there would always be a tomorrow.

Along the way, life gave me many hints and opportunities to help me lose my sense of immortality.

I ignored them.

When, at sixteen, a freak accident cost a fellow high school student his life, it caused barely a blip in my consciousness. Years later, when my beloved grandfather passed and my best friend’s mother died, I felt sadness but still I made no changes. Mortality did not factor into my life even though I read daily news stories about young people dying from illness or accident or homicide.

Those events made me pause briefly and feel grateful for my continued good health, but they went no deeper than that. Death happened to other people–it wasn’t something that I needed to worry about. I was young and healthy and completely caught up in living my life–caught up in the challenges and petty grievances and soap operas that seem to consume us all. I was caught up with making a living, forging friendships, making a home, caught up in love and work and fun and disappointment and the games that people play with one another. I was immersed in the whole menu of human emotions and activities that ruled my life.

My first serious wake-up call happened on a morning exactly like any other morning. There was no reason to suspect that my life was about to change. I was sitting ten feet away from my roommate who was cleaning his shotgun across the room, something I had done many times before. I was relaxed, paying no attention to him, reading the paper and eating my breakfast. One moment all was quiet and peaceful, in the next moment a blast blew out the wall right beside my head. I dropped the bowl of cereal and looked at my roommate, stunned.

At first I didn’t realize just how close the shotgun pellets had come to ending my life. I turned to look at the wall and not six inches away from where I sat I could see pinpoints of daylight. The lead pellets from the shotgun shell had punctured the wall and blown a piece of the siding off the house. Six inches more to the right and my head would have been pulp.

People’s lives are cut short every day. They end without any warning, without any apology for robbing them of the time to finally get on to the serious business of living, to become the people they have the potential to be. I was one of the lucky ones. The universe took pity on me and offered me a chance to get with the program.

I carried a heightened sense of my mortality around with me for the better part of a year after that experience, but it was too hard to hang on to, too difficult to keep at the forefront of my mind. It wasn’t long before I was immersed in the soap opera of my life again.

Several more years passed before I got a second chance. The life I had so carefully built imploded, forcing me to take a serious look at the choices I had made and how I was living.

I had married for all the wrong reasons, and none of the right ones. The effort and work that it took to maintain that marriage for almost fifteen years took its toll on my health, mental as well as physical.

I worked at a job that gave me no pleasure, not even a sense of satisfaction from accomplishing something that held meaning. Worse, I worked for someone for whom I had lost all respect. I approached each work day filled with tension and I’m sure that my attitude had a negative effect on my coworkers.

I don’t like to make mistakes – no one does. It’s hard to admit to them. For me, the worst part was that I didn’t know how I had created such a mess. All along that journey I thought that I was making good choices, but with my life in tatters, I was forced to look at the train wreck I had left in my wake and do some serious self-evaluation.

I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t like what I found. I took a good look at myself in the mirror and asked, “Is this who I want to be for the rest of my life? What if I die tomorrow?”

Asking myself those two questions was my turning point. I would not spend one more day of my life going forward thinking that sometime in the future, I would change and fix everything. The time had come: I had to change then, that very moment, or risk losing the opportunity, for there was no guarantee I would live to see another day.

I made the leap and took mortality as my advisor.

Those are no longer just words to me, they have become an integral part of who I am. I took the inevitability of my death deep within me and held it up as the yardstick by which I now measure my life. It was a liberating, exhilarating, and life-altering action. I made major changes to the way I live that gave me a sense of freedom and power unlike any I had previously experienced. I started listening to, trusting, and following, my intuition.

I left an unhappy marriage that, as it turned out, neither of us were suited for, thereby freeing both of us. I quit an unsatisfying job that drained me in many ways because it wasn’t a good fit for me. Those two moves created a vacuum in my life which allowed far more interesting, and suitable, situations to step in and fill the voids.

By reminding myself that I could die today, I stopped putting energy into anything that didn’t feel right. I put aside any task or commitment that didn’t resonate deep within me–that included activities that I had once pursued so I would be accepted by people whose opinions I realized were no longer important to me. Finally, because my time here is limited, I stopped putting energy into those people as well. My time has become too precious to waste on anything that does not fulfill me.

To some this may sound selfish, and I agree, it is. I do not however, see anything wrong with this type of selfishness because it means that I am one hundred percent sincere in everything I do, and that I give my best effort to whatever I do. There are no more half-measures in my life. I give my all to my work, to the people I love, to my commitments, and to my responsibilities. In return, I am filled with a deep satisfaction and happiness, and the knowledge that I am living my life well.

It took reaching a miserable, rocky bottom to motivate me to make the drastic changes to my life that I wish I had made years earlier. My fears prevented me from taking any action. I feared what others would think of me. I feared being unemployed. I feared being alone. I feared making more mistakes. I feared the unknown that changes would bring.

Once I took my own mortality as my guide, I found that there was nothing left to fear. I could survive losing a job, or a spouse, or making mistakes. With my mortality as a measuring stick, all of my fears disappeared, for what could be more serious, more final, than the loss of my life? All other losses pale beside that, and that knowledge can give a man the courage to reach for the stars.

Live each day as if it is the only one you have. Embrace your mortality and experience how precious each action, event, and relationship becomes. It is the path to not only reaching your fullest potential, but more important, it is the path to deep and lasting happiness.

A retired wildlife photographer, Noble Lee now farms and writes in the bluff country along the Upper Mississippi River.