Andy Weir’s best-selling novel “Project Hail Mary” opens with a computer asking the recently comatose Ryland Grace a simple question: “What’s two plus two?” Grace knows the answer, but he can’t seem to speak, sit up, or remember where he is. Nor, he quickly realizes, can he remember his own name. His thoughts whir through question after question (What’s going on? Why can’t I open my eyes? Can I move my hands?) as the computer brings him back to the simple question at hand: “What’s two plus two?” Grace, of course, is finally able to remove enough tubes to spit out the word “four,” and what follows is a page-turning space adventure, now a film, starring the perfectly cast Ryan Gosling.
Readers familiar with the words, “Hail Mary, full of grace,” will, of course, appreciate the nod that the novel’s titular spaceship, the “Project Hail Mary,” is full of exactly one human: astronaut Grace. But Grace’s story offers critical lessons for all of us, not just Hail-Mary-praying Catholics, about answering the call to serve others at the often-unexpected junctures of our lives. Though few of us will ever wake up and find ourselves on an extraplanetary mission to save the planet, we all, ultimately, wrestle with the question of what our particular vocation is on this earth. Let’s take a look at some of the lessons Ryland Grace offers us about what to do when we, like Grace, start to discover the callings of our lives, even in terrifying, unexpected, uncertain circumstances.
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While trying to keep plot spoilers to a minimum, we start with Grace’s amnesic struggles to discern his unique mission. As he slowly moves from the sterile bed he woke up in, to the chamber surrounding it, to the spaceship he discovers beyond his sick bay, he vacillates between being completely overwhelmed by his circumstances to returning his focus to the task at hand. At one such moment, he tells us, “A million questions run through my mind…What am I supposed to do? How do I steer this ship anyway? Why would I, of all people, be part of this mission?” He abandons the trains of thought resulting from these impossible questions and makes the decision to “start small,” thus giving us our first lesson on what to do when we find our lives in uncharted territory. Rather than fruitlessly looking for an instruction manual, or, “instead of waiting for an epiphany,” as Grace says, we can ask ourselves the same question he does: “What can I work out right now?”
As Grace continues to tune into the memories that are coming back to him, telling himself, “Breathe…one thing at a time,” he starts to piece together that he is very likely Earth’s only hope for avoiding extinction. He could easily turn inward with this knowledge, to despair, but instead he turns outward — to task, to service, and to work out the next step for the people depending on him. As he does so, he finds that one completed step grows into awareness of what the next step is. Grace’s second lesson for us is that, despite our fear, despite the painful knowledge that we are flawed humans unprepared for many of the callings of our lives, it is in the doing that we find that we can lean into our missions anyway. “I’m good at this,” Grace realizes with surprise as he continues from lab experiments to ship navigation, from spacewalks to molecular analysis. As he acts in service to his mission, he reminds us that doing so often gives us confidence and ease to greet what’s next.
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Once we’ve made the decision to move our scope away from the maddeningly mysterious big picture to the task at hand, once we’ve started to complete the little steps needed to answer our life’s callings, we sometimes find that we get to an absolutely terrifying next step. Grace experiences one of these moments when he experiences zero gravity for the first time. His reaction, as he begins to unnervingly float off the floor, is the same as many of ours when we find ourselves in frightening new circumstances: “panic.” “No amount of mental preparation would have worked,” he says, “I scream and flail around. I force myself to curl into a fetal position…I clench every part of me that I know how to clench.” But Grace finds, like many of us, that “after an eternity, the panic begins to ebb away.” And, he tells us, “the slight reduction in fear has a feedback effect. I know I will get less afraid now. And knowing that makes the fear subside even faster.” Once again, Grace shows us that it is in the doing that we discover we have everything we need to complete the often-terrifying callings of our lives, even when the doing results in a physical feeling of panic.
Whether our calling is to a new vocation, a new friend, a new baby, or a new town, Ryland Grace’s story gives us a thrilling example of what happens when we decide to use the critical moments of our lives to serve others. Like “Project Hail Mary,” Pope Leo XIV offered perspective on this theme for all of us, Catholics or not, at the Mass when he promoted St. John Henry Newman to Doctor of the Church. A mission-focused writer himself, Newman’s most famous hymn, “Lead, Kind Light,” echoes Ryland Grace’s focus away from the impossible and towards the task at hand as it prays, “I do not ask to see the distant scene, one step is enough for me.” Citing this hymn and Newman’s example, Pope Leo tells us that “Life shines brightly … when we discover within ourselves that truth that we are called by God, have a vocation, have a mission, that our lives serve something greater than ourselves.” It is with these words, and Ryland Grace’s thrilling example, that we can continue to discern and pursue the unique missions we were created for.
