This sample column appeared in the San Antonio Express-News as Sunday Commentaries on June 20, 1999, the 40th anniversary of our landing on the moon. For more samples or permission to reprint, email anamcdonald@corridor.net.

            When Neil Armstrong stood upon that mystery suspended above, mystery ceased.
            We'd thought the friendly face in the sky might be made of green cheese.  We remembered the ancestors who knew that the moon governed fertility. That it was the torch of a distant chariot that rode across the heavens. A glorious, glowing ball, plaything of the gods.  We did not quite know what the moon was.  But we knew it was wonderful, beyond the limits of imagination - proof of unseen realities.
            But when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, spoke to us from the moon, carried bits of it back to us, we discovered the truth.  The moon is a rock.  A big, round rock.
            Suddenly, all became explicable.  We discovered that if we knew enough, could form our understanding into the right patterns, then we could claim the knowledge that had once been God's alone.
            For the first time, a human penetrated the realm that all our ancestors knew as God's domain.  Neil Armstrong stood where God stood, walked where God walked, and brought that sacred soil home to study and explore. Only it wasn't sacred anymore.  The mystery was gone, and our understanding of God with a capital G drowned in the wealth of human knowledge.
            Change is our only constant, technology, the last source of wonder.  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office received 211,600 applications in 1996.  It granted more than half.  One thousand semiconductor chips - little, tiny pieces of metal - were copyrighted in 1997 alone. Already, they are obsolete.
            For limitless possibilities await. I transcend the limitations of time and space, for on the Internet I can discuss theology with a monk in Tibet or trade recipes with a French barmaid. Right now.  At this very moment. And thanks to constantly evolving medical technologies, I can expect that by the time I've passed my Grandmother's 97 years, I will be utterly unable to understand the world around me.
            And yet, will I? Was life so very different when this millennium began? In Ecclesiastes, we learn that "What was, will be again; what has been done will be done again; and there is nothing new under the sun.
            Certainly, we cannot understand those words literally. For on July 20, 1969, something new happened. A man walked on the moon, and that had never been done before.
            Though the changes in our world are breathtaking, they exist on the surface.  They have no depth. We live within the confines of political systems, just as our ancestors have done since people began forming communities. We still tremble under the threat of destruction, though the new fear of nuclear holocaust makes us scorn the destructive powers that terrified past generations: flood, fire, and famine.  And just as humans have always done, we produce and distribute valuable products designed to sustain and enhance life (though our standards have risen considerably in the last few years). Only the details have changed.  Never the substance.
            We have always and will always seek to understand the universe and our place within it.  And though our vision can reach into distant galaxies or dissect invisible particles of energy, we cannot explain love and fear.  Mystery exists.  For the soul's journey belongs - still and always - to God alone.  And nothing is new under the sun.

Free-lance writer Ana McDonald has only just begun to understand that even the solid, still, immutable rock is made of atoms.  And atoms are made of empty space and ceaseless motion.