The Overview Effect
How returning astronauts offer us a healthier definition of "salvation"
When astronauts, like those returning from Artemis II, come back from space, they talk about this phenomenon called the Overview Effect.
You leave Earth as someone—American, conservative or progressive, Christian, white or POC, educated or not, whatever labels you’ve picked up or had handed to you—and then, somewhere along the way, a conversion takes place. You start to see it.
The whole dang thang.
That blue body just… hanging there. No visible borders or property lines. No sense of “us over here” and “them over there.” Just one awesome water-covered rock, full of marvelous earthlings.
Something in you turns or rearranges. The categories that once felt so solid begin to loosen and dissolve.
One of the astronauts on Artemis II, Christina Koch said it plainly,
“you don’t see political boundaries or religious divisions—you just see Earth, and you realize how alike we actually are.”1
Lately, I can’t shake the sense that if I’m going to use the word salvation, this conversation surrounding the overview effect is about as close as I know how to get.
A turning toward seeing reality rightly.
A kind of cosmic sobriety. A consciousness reoriented by a larger love. A way of seeing that’s actually big enough to hold all of us in it—without flattening our differences or weaponizing them.
The Tiers of Things
If that kind of seeing is salvation, then the thing we’re swimming in right now feels like a kind of collective nearsightedness.
We damn sure don’t lack opinions and we’re not short on information. We just see through really small openings.
Call it the pinhole effect.
We peer out through these narrow windows—political tribes, media ecosystems, Substack algorithms, and lived experiences that slowly harden into assumptions we simply name as reality.
Meanwhile, we shake our fists at the Epstein class (billionaire class), at how insulated they are, how out of touch, and rarely notice how that same instinct toward siloed insulation shows up at every doggone level of society.
Sure, different scale, but it’s all the same reflex.
You can feel how thick it’s gotten. Not just in headlines pitting left against right, but in our everyday conversations—in the tone people carry, in how quickly basic differences turns into dismissals. We don’t just land in different places anymore; we start to lose the ability to recognize each other along the way.
We just… see through really small openings.
I’ve done this and continue to do this, in small, usually unnoticeable but often laughable ways.
A couple lifetimes ago, in seminary, I wrote a 20-page inductive study on a passage in James, full of Greek verbs and structural nuance. I got an A and was so proud of it you’d think I’d landed on the moon.
I had to show off my accomplishment, so I sent it to family members.
They were so kind and encouraging, quick to share in my celebration of my grade. And… completely uninterested in everything I thought made it impressive.
No comments on verb tenses. No fascination with linguistic nuance. Nothing.
And I remember that flicker of frustration—how are you not seeing what I’m seeing?
Of course they weren’t! I’d been immersed, imbedded in a very particular nerdy world of seminary where all those little details mattered, where the language of academia almost felt like life or death. And without realizing it, I started to expect everyone else to live in that space too.
That’s the pinhole effect! A tribal consciousness whereby I got the goods and you don’t.
And that posture seeps into everything.
It shows up in politics, sure—but also in my marriage, and parenting, in education, in recovery groups, in church. Anywhere life sorts us into different experiences, the temptation is the same: to lose relational vision.
I know you know what I’m talking about. It’s the source of all your sharp and prolonged pangs of loneliness.
The pinhole effect.
That tiny window of perspective where our empathy starts to atrophy. We feel deeply for some people and strangely numb toward others. We extend grace so selectively. And beneath all of it is this quiet assumption: my vantage point is the truest, the right one.
The real humiliating human thing is the fracture isn’t just out there in external systems or in the other party or denomination or in whoever’s currently driving us crazy. It’s foundationally within us.
Henri Nouwen had such a gentle yet to the point way of describing this,
It is the growing ability to allow the dark side of our personality to enter into our awareness and thus prevent a one-sided life in which only that which is presentable to the outside world is considered as a real part of ourselves. To come to an inner unity, totality, and wholeness, every part of our self should be accepted and integrated. 2
The real “overview” isn’t just something you get by leaving the planet.
It begins by stepping back from your own self-constructs long enough to see yourself more truthfully. Which I believe is where true prayer is meant to take us.
Jesus gets at this from a completely different angle, but it lands in a similar place:
“Unless you change… unless you become like little children…”
That word in Matthew 18: 3 —στραφῆτε—turn, be turned, keep turning (aka. change, convert)…
It’s a verb. It’s not about a one time insight, but an ongoing posture of consciousness.
Children, before we carelessly train it out of them, don’t live by tiers. They’re not scanning the room for status or sorting people into categories of worthy and dismissible. They move toward each other. They share their stuff. They fight, and then five minutes later, they’re back to playing again.
They haven’t yet learned how to see and imagine all of life from the limited view of the pinhole.
Salvation!
The invitation right now isn’t to abandon conviction or pretend differences don’t matter. The invitation is to get saved… and keep getting saved! And by that I mean the perpetual pursuit of larger windows.
To notice where our vision has tightened without us realizing it and to humbly recognize how damned easy it is to turn people into caricatures. To admit we might not be as clear-sighted—or as special—as we’d like to think.
You can still care deeply about justice. You still gotta name what’s broken.
But you do it from a different posture.
One that remembers the person you’re frustrated with is standing on the same fragile blue planet, breathing the same air, carrying their own special 3 of wisdom and blindness—just like you.
The Overview Effect doesn’t erase difference.
It just refuses to let difference be the defining thing.
That’s what these astronauts are returning to offer us.
Salvation ain’t about climbing higher into some superior vantage point.
It’s about learning to see again—
recognizing the limits of our pinhole perspectives,
and, in a paradoxical kind of reversal, taking a step back into something more like the open, unguarded vision of a child.
Nouwen, Intimacy: Pastoral Psychological Essays, (taken from The Dance of Life, p.66)
Matthew 18: 3 (NIV) And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
I LOVE this, Ryan. I work every day to confront my tendency to dismiss some people. It's such a fundamental self-protective process but mindfulness is helping overcome it. (I like to think of it as "firmware," not hardware, in the brain. It takes special effort to replace it, but it's possible.)
Yes! Perspective is everything!