By Anjji Gabriel
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.
LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (Psalm 8: 5
On April 1, 2026, humanity returned to the Moon. NASA’s Artemis II mission carried four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — farther from Earth than any human beings had ever traveled, 252,756 miles into the darkness of deep space, around the far side of the Moon, and safely home. The world watched, breathless. When Hansen stepped onto the stage at Ellington Field in Houston four days later, he held up a mirror to everyone watching. “When you look up here,” he said, “you are not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you. And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.” It was a stunning and generous thing to say. But it invites a question Hansen’s mirror could not quite reach: who, precisely, are we? And once we truly know, what are we going to do about it?
Consider, first, the names. NASA did not choose them accidentally, but perhaps without fully understanding what they were encoding. Apollo and Artemis are brother and sister in Greek mythology — both children of Zeus, king of the gods. Apollo, god of the sun, of reason, light and mastery, gave his name to the missions that first carried human beings to the Moon between 1969 and 1972. Now Artemis — goddess of the Moon, of wildness, mystery, and the far reaches of the night sky — carries humanity deeper still. Brother gives way to sister. Reason reaches its limit and wonder takes over. The near gives way to the far. There is a progression here, an unfolding, that speaks of something more than engineering advancement. For those with eyes to see, it whispers of children made for a greatness they have barely begun to inhabit. Because we are not, in truth, children of Zeus. We are children of a far greater Father who is in heaven.
And the ancient song of Psalm 8 knew this long before any rocket left the ground: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor.” The God who flung the stars into their places paused — and made us. Not merely conscious creatures wandering a minor planet, but image-bearers of the living God, crowned with glory and honor, entrusted with dominion, made for purposes that exceed anything even the most ambitious space program can imagine. Hansen was right to hold up the mirror. But the mirror goes deeper than he knew.
The novelist and philosopher Walker Percy once posed the great question of self-aware existence: “Knowing what I know about what the world is, what am I going to do?” It is the question of someone who has seen through the comfortable anaesthesia of ordinary life and refuses to settle. But we must extend Percy’s question into its full theological depth: what am I going to do, realizing that I am a creature made in the image and likeness of God? This is no longer merely an existentialist question. It becomes at once doxological, ethical, and vocational. It is the question every human heart must eventually face — and answer.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw the imago Dei not as a static possession but a dynamic trajectory — we are image-bearers in motion, drawn forward toward the Christ he called the Omega Point, in whom all things find their completion.
Simone Weil saw it as a summons to attention — the patient, self-emptying practice of actually allowing the truth of what we are to penetrate us, rather than deflecting it with noise and busyness.
Stanley Hauerwas saw it as irreducibly communal — we can only truly know who we are inside a community that keeps telling us the true story of our origin and our destiny. Together they insist: forgotten identity is not merely a personal tragedy. It is a vocational catastrophe.
No story has shown me this more powerfully than The Lion King. I confess it freely — this Disney film is one of the most profound parables of vocation I have ever encountered, and it shaped in no small way how I lived my own vocational story across four decades of professional life. Simba, son of King Mufasa and rightful heir to Pride Rock, spends years in exile — numbing himself with the comfortable philosophy of Hakuna Matata, no worries, no responsibilities, no self. He has forgotten who he is. More devastatingly, he has forgotten whose he is. Then Rafiki finds him, leads him to a still pool, and the spirit of Mufasa speaks across the darkness: “Simba, you have forgotten me. You have forgotten who you are, and so forgotten me. Remember who you are. You are my son.”
Identity restored. Vocation reawakened. Kingdom reclaimed.
That is the movement Hansen’s mirror was pointing toward, even if he could not name it. The courage, wonder, sacrifice, and joy the world witnessed in that Orion capsule were not self-generated. They were borrowed light — the image of God flickering brilliantly in four human beings doing what human beings were always made to do: press deeper into the mystery, serve one another, carry the weight of the world’s hopes on their shoulders. Apollo gave us the Moon. Artemis is taking us further. But the deepest journey remains the one Rafiki invites each of us to make — back to the still pool, back to the voice that speaks our truest name.
Remember who you are. Remember whose you are. The kingdom that is here and now and yet coming is waiting, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear.