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Good morning. At first I felt quite cynical as I followed the story of the space capsule that brought material from an asteroid back to earth this weekend. With all this world’s suffering and conflict, how could it be right to spend billions on space exploration? Wouldn’t this money have been better spent tackling poverty and other injustices? The Gospels tell us that some of Jesus’s disciples asked similar questions when a woman anointed him with expensive perfume in the week before his death. Jesus rebuked them, telling them that she had done a beautiful thing for which she would always be remembered. Gradually, my cynicism has given way to a sense of awe. The insistence that every human activity must be commodified in terms of its usefulness and cost drains us of curiosity and imagination. G.K. Chesterton wrote that “the world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” Comedian Peter Cook inverted the wording of one of the most famous psalms to joke about how modern individualism dulls our capacity for wonder: “As I looked out into the night sky across all those infinite stars it made me realize how insignificant they are.” The material collected from that asteroid weighs about nine ounces – less than a small bag of sugar – yet scientists are hopeful that it might help to explain how life on Earth began. Samples are being distributed to laboratories around the world, and they are saving some of the material so that future generations can analyse it with perhaps even greater expertise. In these dark times, this bold, far-reaching endeavour is surely a cause for wonder. Yet even as we make vast progress in science and technology, the questions we ask have changed very little. It is of the very essence of our humanity to ask questions about life’s origins, as part of our search for meaning amidst the struggles and vulnerabilities of the human condition. Like us, the ancient sages of all the world’s religions and philosophies sought to understand the nature of the universe and our place within it. Our desire for meaning leads us to ask not just what, when and how, but also why. For that, we need poets and artists, philosophers and theologians, myth makers and storytellers, as well as scientists and inventors. I feel a sense of amazement that today, in an American laboratory, a handful of matter from space might be about to reveal something about the origins of life, which are our origins. The words of the psalmist sing in my soul: “When I consider your heavens, the moon and the stars, what is humankind that you are mindful of us, human beings that you care for us?”