CONVERGENT PATHS:

Seven heroes, seven faiths: Columbia crew represented wide variety of spiritual paths (ABCNews.com/Beliefnet, 2/04/03)

The grieving are calling out to Jesus — and God and HaShem and Krishna. They are chanting passages from the New Testament, the Torah, Unitarian readings, and the Vedas.

The crew of Columbia represents an extraordinary variety of faith traditions:

Kalpana Chawla - Hindu

William McCool - Roman Catholic

Ilan Ramon - Jewish

Rick Husband - Charismatic

Laurel Clark - Unitarian

David Brown - Episcopalian

Michael Anderson - Baptist

This is just the way America is right now. Seek the best and the brightest, and you'll invariably scoop up a great assortment of faiths. [...]

To commemorate the crew, a retired Episcopal priest, the Rev. Vincent Uher, wrote a special new verse to the hymn "Eternal Father, strong to save," often known as the Navy Hymn. Uher said that he used the passage in Isaiah that President Bush quoted and also the poem that President Reagan quoted after the Challenger disaster.

"O God who names the starry host
and by whose love not one is lost,
who stretched thy arms wide to the sky
from cross to heav'n so death would die
Oh care for those who traversed space,
Embrace them now who touch thy face."

The most pertinent story is Colonel Ramon's. A non-observant Jew, he understood that his own presence was quite insignificant but that for the Jewish people to have reached space was epochal. So he turned his voyage into one soaked in the history and traditions of Judaism.

And the most moving story was that told at the memorial service the other day, of how Kalpana Chawla noticed that the Earth was being reflected in her eyes and of how she summoned the crew, who could gaze into the face of a Hindu woman and essentially find all humanity there.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 6, 2003 1:33 PM