I recall, as a kid on a family trip to Disneyland, wandering into Tomorrowland with my brother David and finding ourselves at the entrance to an attraction called Adventure Thru Inner Space (sponsored by Monsanto). A colorful, space-age mural was on one side, and a wall sculpted with some sort of ultra-modern, metallic material was on the other. We were immediately drawn inside to join a winding queue where the guests ahead of us were boarding a series of swiveling blue pod-like vehicles. These “atomobiles,” as they were called, with their passengers ensconced inside were now entering one end of a giant microscope.
As David and I waited our turn, I grew concerned looking upwards at the long transparent glass barrel of this enormous microscope, as I could now see a line of the blue atomobiles, just like the one we were about to board, running along on a track inside the glass—only the vehicles were now much smaller, almost as if they were tiny replicas of the real thing. But more astonishing still was that inside each tiny version of the atomobile, there were equally tiny people. Disney, along with Monsanto it seemed, had perfected some kind of shrinking technology. As I took this in, I recall asking David what would happen if the ride broke down while we were onboard. Would we get stuck in our miniaturized form forever? He said it’d be fine, but I wasn’t completely sure.
Settling into our own atomobile, we were quickly informed by a disembodied voice—I assumed it was one of Monsanto’s best scientists—that the miniaturizing process was about to start. Sure enough, as we entered the big microscope ourselves, our pod began to shimmy and shake. A flurry of gigantic snowflakes suddenly appeared all around us. At this point, I was fully persuaded we were shrinking—a conviction that was confirmed throughout the ride as the narrator described all that was happening around us. Soon orange flashes of light raced past us. Electrons, we were told. A moment later, we were deep inside the atom, face to face with its nucleus where we were warned that going farther might put us at risk of shrinking forever, which was my main concern in the first place. Fortunately, just then our pod swiveled backwards and a giant eyeball staring down at us from above through the microscope lens assured us that we were now back “on visual.” It wasn’t long before we were fully restored to regular size, back in the sunlight, once again in Tomorrowland.
I eventually came to recognize, of course, that not only had I not actually been miniaturized, but that the Monsanto scientist who talked us through the ride was the same guy who narrated the Haunted Mansion on the other side of the park. Nevertheless, I’ll still never forget how the Adventure Thru Inner Space made me feel. It captured my imagination, lodging in my young mind the notion that along with outer space, of which I was already a big fan, there was also something called inner space. I learned that everything around me was actually made of atoms composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons and that atoms, the building blocks of everything are, as it turns out, 99.9999999999999% empty space. While the world seemed as if it was composed of hard physical things, actually nothing was as solid as I was experiencing it.
In the fifty years since my Adventure Thru Inner Space at Disneyland, scientists have made even greater strides, adding to our knowledge about the world all around us. However, in many ways, their work has just uncovered more and more of the mystery that resides at the core of our reality.
Not long after that Disneyland trip to California, back in Texas, guided by our parents, my brother and I were baptized and acknowledged our belief that there is more to the world than what can be seen—confessing, in fact, a belief in an unseen spiritual realm, a God who though invisible to us, knew us by our names. Being so young at that time, maybe it’s not so crazy that I remember the Adventure Thru Inner Space more distinctly than I recall the details of my baptism. But looking back on it, in some ways, maybe I was just being taught the same lesson twice. The first time, it was in a lively scientific vernacular. The second time, it was spiritual but the same lesson still: There’s so much more to the world than we can see.
God—I see now dimly in a mirror, but then it will be face to face. Now I know only partly; then I will know fully, just as You fully know me. Amen.
