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Moon Goddess reigns as Jade Rabbit scampers
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Each year during the Mid-Autumn Moon festival, a pastry shop near our house in Saigon during the Vietnam War would display the figure of a dancing goddess in a flowing dress who, I was told, resided on the moon.
Then one year the goddess was gone, replaced by three strange creatures adorned with Christmas lights. “Mother,” I asked, “are those angels?”
“No,” she answered. “They’re American astronauts and they’ve landed on the moon.” That was in 1969. Ever since then other nations have followed suit, and most recently China has launched a rover known as the Jade Rabbit to collect data on the moon.
If I as a child had believed the goddess really did live on that silvery globe that hung outside my window at night, that mindset has long ago shifted toward something else.
Science dethrones all the old, known gods. The Hubble telescope and the Kepler Telescope have found at least 150 billion galaxies, many of them still being formed.
There aren’t enough gods and titans in human history to name the planets in our own vast Milky Way, let alone the rest of the awesome universe. Instead, scientists use letters and numbers — MS13 for a galaxy, GC143 for a star.
When Nietszche asked, “Have you not heard that God is dead?” it was a rhetorical question. Galileo, Newton, Einstein and the like revealed a universe more startling than any ancient myth could describe. The sea on which humanity now sails is infinitely more vast than that imagined by Columbus.
And yet it is my contention that science, even as it slays the old gods, does not destroy human spirituality.
Quite the contrary, they reinforce each other.
Some years ago, at UC Berkeley, my physics professor offered his attentive students proof that God exists. He called it the Big Bang theory. Most scientists now believe that the universe began with an instant of creation some 20 billion years ago. The fragments of that formative explosion are still flying outward from the focus of that unfathomable blast.
Limitations of science
So what triggered the original blast? Where did the energy come from that defies all known physical laws to form the universe? No one knows. Science has its limitations, after all. The ultimate source of energy remains, always, a mystery. ÒYou may say God, if you like,Ó the professor told his startled students, Òset the ball rolling.Ó
God set the ball rolling once again with the recent news that water has been discovered in Mars soil. I have to admit that the moment I heard the news, my mind went blank, so dumbstruck was I by its implications. There’s a high probability of life existing out there after all, just as I had secretly hoped and, perhaps, always known.
At such a moment science and spirituality seem to mingle in a metaphysical embrace. The more science reveals, the more mysterious the revelation. Science, in other words, is at its best when it evokes, like art, the experience of wonder.
So now there’s a Jade Rabbit on the moon studying her soil, but where did my beautiful moon goddess go?
She neither lives nor dies and has no name; she has been internalized. She’s the moment of wonder itself. In her presence the child still gazes, wide-eyed. Beyond her, there dances a marvelous night sky full of stars.
Andrew Lam is New America Media editor and the author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” and “Birds of Paradise Lost” which won a Pen award in 2013. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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