Gritty grace

A version of this op-ed appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few weeks ago and in these last few days before the election I thought to share it again. Gaudium et spes means “joys and hopes”, which can be difficult to find when tensions run high, but which I believe are signposts worth following. And please, if you are eligible in this US election - vote! 

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So is it madness to hope — or conceit, or cowardice, or grace?” That is the question Jesuit priest Alfred Delp asked as he sat in a Nazi prison cell in January of 1945 awaiting execution. How could he hope? It seemed illogical to entertain hope, he wrote, yet he could not stop returning to the question.

 As the presidential campaign enters its final weeks many of us are refereeing an internal wrestling match between hope and despair. How can we risk hoping when fear and chaos threaten to engulf us?

St. Paul famously said in a letter to the Corinthians of the virtues faith, hope, and love, that the greatest was love. What he didn’t say is that the hardest of these is hope. Love we can experience, faith we can cling to in the moment, but hope? Hope is always about what is just out of reach, always about a future we cannot predict with certainty, despite all the polls and statistical models.  

It’s not just the election that has me grappling with questions about hope. In July of this year, I sat in a doctor’s office in downtown Philly and listened to her say, “I know this is not the news you hoped to hear.” She went on to tell me I had an incurable and progressive neurodegenerative disease whose course is unpredictable. For now treatment is working, but the future is uncertain. So believe me when I say I know something of the dance between despair and hope.

Five years ago I wrote a book titled Living in Joyful Hope. Like Delp, whose story opens the book, my personal path toward hope — whether about the outcome of the election or my own health — takes its cues from a lifelong Roman Catholic faith and theological training. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope) that “[t]he one who has hope lives differently.”

 To live in hope is to thirst. To thirst for justice, for mercy, for healing, for welcome, for peace. To hope is to build up, not tear apart. St. Augustine wrote that the courage to challenge injustice was a daughter of hope. To live in hope, then, is to stretch my heart wide enough to encompass the needs of my neighbors as my own, to feed the hungry, house the homeless and welcome the refugee. “We are workers,” said St. Oscar Romero, “We are prophets of a future not our own.” 

Fear is the antithesis of hope. Fear seethes and rails. It preaches ruin and destruction, it deafens us to reality. Fear is a failure to see what is possible, a failure to see the worth and dignity of everyone I encounter. Yet fear clings like tar, I confess I cannot easily shake it off.  There is a reason, I suspect, that the phrase “Do not be afraid!” appears again and again in the Gospels. To live in hope is to turn down the volume on the rhetoric that demonizes others and tune in to the voices that call us to companion each other, as Jesus has promised to accompany us.

Gaudium et spes, Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, reminded believers that we have our feet simultaneously planted in two cities, our earthly dwelling and the divine one. The Kingdom of God, then, is not for me a distant dream but part of my present reality. And if joy is the surest sign of the presence of God, then to have a foot in that kingdom is to have access to joy. So I cherish the small joys offered to me — chocolate, the cheerful conductor on the crowded SEPTA train — and strive to offer them in return. (Yes, I absolutely keep chocolate for students and colleagues in my office.) To live in hope is to be mindful of the joy that is here now and for which I believe we are destined in eternity.

So is it madness or conceit or cowardice or grace to hope as we come to vote in this election? Perhaps it is a touch of holy madness. Certainly it takes a gritty grace. It may be conceit or even cowardice, but given the choice between hope and despair, I choose to live in joyful hope. 

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Photo is of fountain in the courtyard outside the apartment I am staying in Vatican City. Hope springs forth.

Hope has feathers -- and talons

Hope, wrote Emily Dickinson, is the thing with feathers. Which feels a bit like something you might cup in your hands,  careful not to ruffle it or outright squash it. Or perhaps not. I saw this description on social media (but haven't been able to track down the source - so if you know, please share!): “People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s [sic] webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”

Should hope have feathers, I imagine it as a hummingbird dancing just out of reach, heart beating ferociously. Or maybe she is a red-tailed hawk come screaming out of the sky, her talons out and ready to defend her young. 

I have been thinking a lot about hope lately. The presidential campaign has something to do with that, certainly, but also my kids are at what mathematically I would call critical points -- big changes in direction are coming. Crash Kid is shopping for a house -- on the other side of the Atlantic. Math Guy (formerly known as The Egg) is defending his doctoral dissertation this semester. But mostly I have been thinking about hope because a few weeks ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I know, I buried the lede. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I have not gotten any better at telling people other than to simply say it.

It’s a challenging diagnosis, and a disease with an unpredictable course. I am doing well at the moment, and am mostly hopeful and grateful. Grateful for good medical care, and a treatment plan that has helped my day to day functioning in a way I can only describe as a miracle. Grateful for a physical therapist who suggested a weighted pen that let me write out a grocery list again and scrawl an outline for an essay on a yellow pad of paper. (Bonus, my handwriting is no longer microscopic, which drove my teachers batty back in the day. Which I now totally understand as my eyes have aged.) I am utterly grateful for each day. 

And however illogical it might be, I am hopeful. I contemplate Alfred Delp SJ’s question as he awaited his execution, “So is it madness to hope — or conceit, or cowardice, or grace?” It seemed illogical to entertain hope, he wrote, yet he could not stop returning to the question. Nor can I. It gives me and God something to talk about.

Hope is not fragile, nor is it always gentle. Sometimes it is a bit gritty. But it is always a grace. 

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Read a tangentially related reflection on the Holy Spirit and feral pigeons here.

Trapped in the multi-verse

I am trapped in a writing multi-verse. I am working on a book review due in two weeks. I have read the book (it was great!), made my notes, sketched out the points I want to hit in the review. I know more or less how I want to wrap it up. If only I knew how I wanted to start it. So far I have ten different ways in. It's the opposite of writer's block, but just as painful. I have leaned on Taylor Swift, radioactivity, crafted mother-daughter analogies, evoked rom-com scenes, tread closer to personal grief than one should in this sort of writing. I am no closer to getting that first paragraph out than I was at 10:30 this morning. 

I just. Need. To. Pick. One.

  

Bibliophilic blind dates

 

When I was visiting Crash and his partner in London I paid a visit to House of Books in Crouch End which has a delightful assortment of books to "blind date". Wrapped in brown paper and twine they remind you not to judge a book by its cover. Clues to the content are printed on the wrapping, but no titles or authors. I bought two - both tagged Noir. I was intrigued by the biopunk set in Thailand and what was Tartan Noir going to be? 

I unwrapped the surprises last week while at the beach on vacation. I am halfway through the biopunk novel, which turned out to be The Windup Girl which won both Hugo and Nebula awards in 2010. It's set in a world where global temperatures and sea levels have both risen. Reading it on a steamy summer day at the beach adds to the atmosphere which Paolo Bacigalupi evokes. A world with no ice, no AC, and where generippers try to stay ahead of the plagues.

Tartan noir? It is a mystery by Ambrose Perry!

In Torrents of Light

For a fleeting moment the heavens opened, and God’s glory spilled forth. Time itself gave way, the ancient prophets Moses and Elijah come to converse with Jesus. Hearing this account two millennia later, I feel as if the entirety of the Gospels has collapsed into this one moment in time, fragments of encounters swirling in torrents of light. 

Hovering behind Peter’s wild desire to hold onto the moment, I see Jesus in a garden gently telling Mary Magdalene not to cling to him. Listen to my son, says a voice from a cloud, and I see spit and mud and a deaf man who can suddenly hear and be heard. Ephphatha! Be opened! Rise, says Jesus, and Peter comes to him across the water, a paralyzed man rolls up his mat, and a young girl gets up from her death bed. 

And always, do not be afraid. Resounding over and over. On a storm-wracked sea. To a worried father. To his disciples gathered for one last meal. To the multitudes. To all of us. 

I wonder what the conversation was as Jesus walked Peter, James and John down the mountain. Or perhaps I don’t, for all these Gospel stories end the same way. We want to cling to the God of glory, to fall at the feet of the divine. Instead Jesus reaches for us in the dust and says, get up. Be opened, that you might hear my voice, that you might be my voice. And above all, do not fear. Walk with me and be transfigured. Walk with me and transfigure the world.

From Give Us This Day August 2023

Blisters, irony and mercy

It is cold and rainy in London. Yes, it is July. Yes, I brought my umbrella. And yes, I’ve been walking everywhere or taking the buses. Yesterday I wore my “conference flats“ which are great for walking many miles in city streets. My day was ending with a visit to the theater, so I thought perhaps an upgrade from my sneakers was in order. 

My trusty flats have never given me blisters. That is until yesterday. Fifteen minutes into a twenty minute walk to the Underground the back of my heel was hot. By the time I got to Russell Square for a lunch meet up, it was raw. I grabbed a bandage from my little first aid kit in my bag and patched it. By the end of lunch, I’d patched the other heel. On to my next meeting. By the time I arrived, I had another blister. You would’ve found me sitting on the (very clean) floor of the  bathroom of the very prestigious journal publisher patching up my foot. 

When I left, I hit the button on my app for navigating the city for “less walking“ and was relieved to find I could catch a bus right in front of where I was that would take me straight to dinner.

By dinner, two more blisters had blossomed on my now sopping wet feet. My feet have not been such a hot mess since I did ballet in graduate school. As we headed home from the theater, my companions pointed out the perch I could lean against in the bus stop. “Ah,” I said, “a misericord. A mercy seat.” For sure it was a mercy for me at this point, at least as much as its predecessor must’ve been for the elderly monks of old. “Not really,” responded one. “ It’s unwelcoming urban architecture. No place for someone to lay down and sleep.” I sighed. There is an irony in having  a mercy seat that doesn’t offer mercy to those most in need.

Broken threads

My maternal great-great grandmother, Leah Lopes Dias Mercado, is buried in London. She rests in the Sephardic Jewish cemetery at Mile End, or what is left of it after much of it has been taken over by Queen Mary University’s expansion in the 20th century. One of the buildings that was erected is the chemistry building, which now abuts the northeast edge of the cemetery. I wonder if my great great grandmother would’ve been pleased to discover that her great granddaughter and great great granddaughter were both university trained chemists.

I visited her grave this week in between London rainstorms. Finding the university was no problem, getting in a bit more of a problem. It’s an urban campus and closed, except for those with IDs. When I asked to visit the cemetery, the security guard told me that I needed to have arranged for that ahead of time by email. I had checked the university website, which did not mention that and asked her who I could contact because I was only here from the US for a short period. At which point she said, “Well, just this one time!” and waved me in. The graveyard is just 100 feet or so beyond the entrance. It was also locked up. But as I circled it for an entrance that might be open I found the spot where people clearly climbed over the wall, and I followed suit. I was a little worried that I might get booted from campus by security for trespassing, but thankfully was left undisturbed.

I had an index to the burial ground, but it was still challenging to find her grave given how worn the inscriptions were on most of the graves. I found a grave where the inscription was legible and a relatively uncommon name, Jane Botibol, wife of Isaac. As I tried to find it on my online index on my phone, it finally popped up and turned out to be only three graves away from Leah. It was an extraordinary experience to stand there, and to pray for her, and to wonder what her life must’ve been or like that of her daughter, my great grandmother, who was orphaned at 12 and eventually immigrated to the US. I left two pebbles on her grave so that she might know she’s remembered. There were a few others, and I wonder if family members here in London might’ve left them. I washed my hands and did not dry them and wished I  I knew more about this part of my family, but I fear too many connecting threads have been broken to ever know much more. 

Thorns and grace

From Give Us This Day for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

(Written last fall! Readings are here.)

Last week a colleague welcomed a new baby. Her good news meant I abruptly acquired two extra classes to teach and fifty more students whose names I have yet to learn. My husband had surgery, so I am caretaking. Dear God, I prayed, no more thorns this week. I grabbed the laundry basket and opened the basement door to find water lapping at the steps. Oh, God. As I reached for the mop, I prayed for just enough grace to get through the day.

What was I expecting of this just-enough, just-in-time grace? After all, grace didn’t relieve St. Paul of his thorn in the flesh, nor was I expecting God to miraculously deliver me from the grading or the wet basement floor.

God assured Ezekiel that regardless of the success of his mission, people will know that a prophet has been among them. Perhaps that is the grace that Paul—and all of us—are promised. Not that grace will relieve us of the troubles that beset us, but that by the light of that grace we will know that God has been with us through the thorny days. Like the people in Jesus’ hometown, we may not see great miracles come to pass, indeed, we might not even dare to hope for such signs. Even so, Jesus moves among us, quietly healing our wounds, setting us back on our feet.

Nada te turbe, begins the little prayer found tucked in St. Teresa of Avila’s prayer book: let nothing disturb you. All these things will pass. God alone is enough. For today, it is grace enough for me to know that, too.

Statio: a sacred pause

Michael Peterson OSB, a monk of St. John's Abbey in Minnesota, had a reflection in Give Us This Day in April that has stuck with me. He writes of the monastic practice of "statio", where the monks line up two by two to process in to the church proper for a liturgy. It is, he says, a chance for a sacred pause, a chance to stop and collect oneself to be sure, but also a chance to reflect on what God is calling you to do, here and now, to consider what you believe and why. A full intentional stop.

I'm at the very start of a sabbatical leave. An intentional stop, a full year pause in my teaching. This reflection is a reminder that my vocation (unlike the pneumonia vaccine I got this week) is not "one and done". It is the relentless call of God, shaping and reshaping my life.

So, yes, the sabbatical is for rest and renewal, a stop, but it's also a sacred time for growth. I'm getting ready to retire from teaching, one more year after I return from sabbatical. "What next?" I wonder. "What now?" I ask God.  

Pause. 

Stop. 

Breathe. 

Listen.

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Reflection is here.

Deliquescent: I am melting

I am currently reading "Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair" by Christian Wiman. It is part poetry, part lyric essay, and part commonplace book. In the third entry he quotes Imre Kertész, "under certain circumstances... words lose their substance... they simply deliquesce..." Kertész is, I think, referring to grief, but I was struck by the Dali-esque image of melting words that deliquesce implies. It is originally a term from chemistry, referring to the process by which a salt absorbs water from the atmosphere and turns into a solution. Looking for all the world like it is melting away, but of course it has not. All the ions that were in the salt are still present, simply now unseen in the water, and the water that swirled around the salt unseen is now made manifest. 

Ten entries later deliquesce appears again, this time in a long ouroboric discourse on snakes. I look deliquesce up, wondering what the non-chemists make of it. Metaphorically, suggests Merriam-Webster, it means to soften, perhaps with age. Am I deliquescing as I write? (Certainly as I age.) Pulling something unseen from the air, making it manifest, while I myself vanish? Still there, tucked unseen between those water molecules...those words. 

It makes me think of efflorescence, where water flows through a salt, dissolving it, carrying it to the surface where it then turns back into a solid. But instead of the tidy crystalline packing, now it looks like flowers have erupted on the surface. Perhaps that's another metaphor for my writing, looking for what's in the depths to carry it up to the surface where it can flower. (Or lose its intended structure -- not an image I'd chose.)

All things visible and invisible. All things exchanging and interchanging.

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Sodium hydroxide is what I think of as the iconic ionic substance that deliquesces.

Daughters of the moon

One of the delights of graduation is standing in line, well not the standing-in-line part, but the who-I'm-standing-in-line-with part, sometimes with colleagues I haven't seen since last commencement. I am privileged to work with some pretty amazing people, and this year stood across from a colleague who is an award-winning poet (she won a Guggenheim!). We chatted about the moon, its moods and modes, how it can seem to loom so large in certain places. Her students, she tells me, are in love with the moon. My students, I confess, not so much.

We wondered what it might be like to swap classes, perhaps my students could learn to swoon over the moon as hers do, and perhaps her students might enjoy raiding my language for their own purposes. I would tell them about the daughters of the moon, that carry the history of their mothers with them in their cores, bearing it forward billions of years. A process in which decay does not mean loss and despair, but instead transformation and eventual stability.

My students are peevish about the moon because of a problem we worked about dating the rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. It's a problem that crosses two of the topics we've discussed, chemical kinetics and nuclear chemistry. I'm fond of the problem because it uses material from the very beginning of the course and from the very end and shows both how they are connected and can be used in a very practical way by another field. But making connections can be challenging, and at the end of the semester my students are tired. They are less intrigued and more resigned.

The moon, like the earth and pretty much everything on it, contains radioactive elements. Sometimes these radioactive atoms are versions of stable elements, sometimes all of the versions of an element are radioactive. (Carbon-14 is radioactive while the most common carbon atoms on earth, called carbon-12, are not. On the other hand, there are no stable versions of uranium.) Radioactive elements are like tiny clocks, transforming themselves from one element into another at a particular and fixed rate. Comparing the amounts of a radioactive element at two different times can tell you the time spanned. For example, if an artifact like a wooden carving has 50% of the carbon-14 that it had when it was made, 5500 years have elapsed since its creation. We say carbon-14 has a half-life of 5500 years.

These built-in atomic clocks can run on short timescales, a matter of days or seconds, or on incredibly long timescales. The rule of thumb is that a given radioisotope can measure out time spans up to 10 times the half-life. So carbon-14 can be used to date materials up to about 55,000 years old. Potassium-40, the main reason human beings themselves are radioactive, has a half-life of 1.3 billion years and can time processes going back to the Big Bang.    

Uranium-238 gives birth to daughters such as thorium-234, radium-226 and polonium-218. (I note that some of these daughters were discovered by a daughter and a mother, Marie Curie.) Eventually all her energy is exhausted and U-238 finally plops down onto the island of stability as lead-206. This is not a short process, it takes 45 billion years for (nearly) all of the U-238 to find its way to the stable space of lead-206. But her daughters will hold tight to her history all along the way.  And we can read it in their very identities.  

Itadakimasu: wearing gratitude

“Itadakimasu," a Japanese word said before eating, roughly translates as "I humbly receive." It's an expression of gratitude for the meal and for those who prepared it. When I traveled to Japan with students we taught them to say, “Itadakimasu” before any meal.

A film crew from a Japanese news show came on the Friday after my book launched to interview me about the kerfuffle around the salt but also about the making of tea. (You can watch it here, the scene where I make a cup is at the beginning. Yes, it’s in Japanese.)

They had asked me to be prepared to make a cup of tea for them on camera, which I did. When I handed the interviewer the cup that I had made, he murmured, "Itadakimasu." In all the whirlwind of those days that one word — said so quietly, so matter of factly — touched me deeply.

I’m grateful for so much lately. I’m trying to “wear gratitude like a cloak” (to quote Rumi) to let it be what I wrap myself in, to let it be what I show first to the world. Itadakimasu.

Lessons in chemistry

One of the questions I’ve often been asked in the interviews I have done around the tea book has been, “Have you read the book Lessons in Chemistry?” and when I acknowledge that I have, the logical follow up:“What did you think of it?”

The first time the question arose I was surprised, and had to scramble for an answer. I shouldn’t have been. It is a best selling book, it has been made into a series. It has chemistry in the title. The interviewer is fishing for a bridge to what’s in the current cultural zeitgeist. 

But for me the answer is, as the kids say, complicated. Even though the book is set slightly earlier than my time as a graduate student and newly minted scientist, my experiences were not so different from Elizabeth Zott’s. There was enough similarity that it was an uncomfortable read at the start. And then there is the day that Elizabeth‘s partner is suddenly killed. When I was reading the book, it was like a gut punch.  It was as if some enormous hand had picked me up and dumped me back into the confusion and chaos of that April night when Tom died so suddenly. Still, I needed to read to the end. I had to know if Elizabeth made it out of the depths of grief. Truth  be told if I known what the plot was, I wouldn’t have read the book. (I really want something like the website “Does the dog die?” for books. No children in peril, no suddenly grieving widows.)

Of course, to say that I found the book difficult for a very personal reason is not the answer a reporter is looking for. I finally settled on saying that I enjoyed the scenes where Elizabeth gave as good as she got, and that the historical difficulties of being a woman in science inspired me to teach the next generation. True, and truly bland. Next question!

Scathed by totality

"There is a mysterious woundedness that somehow goes with great blessing. When we truly encounter the night in all its beauty and terror, we have no assurance whatsoever that we are going to come out unscathed."

— David Steindl-Rast

 I came to upstate New York, to Canandaigua on the Finger Lakes, to give a retreat around the theme of the solar eclipse, and then stayed to experience totality. The weather forecast oscillated for days, partly sunny to mostly sunny and back to partly sunny and finally to mostly cloudy. And mostly cloudy it was. We had a single glimpse of the sun about two minutes before the moon began to eat away at the disc. As the time approached for totality, there was really no sign that an eclipse was on the way. I wondered if this would just be like the experience of a thunderstorm where the sky grows dark, but night doesn't fall. I fitfully checked the radar on my phone, hoping that the break in the image would translate to, if not clear skies, clearer skies. It did not. 

The clouds were louring and dark, as before a summer thunderstorm. It grew colder. Suddenly there was a deep violet funnel shape visible on the horizon. Even with the sun hidden behind the clouds, we could see the shadow of the moon flying at us at 1800 mph. It got darker and darker. The horizon, where the shadow had yet to fall, was smudged with the deep pastel colors of sunset. And it got darker yet. Nightfall had come. 

Totality lasted over three minutes where I was standing. Three minutes is longer than you think in these conditions. Annie Dillard was right. The difference between a total eclipse and a partial eclipse is like the difference between kissing someone and marrying them. I have seen partial eclipses, the first in Illinois when I was young (1963), one unexpected in California, and one in 2017. This was nothing like them. While I wished I could've seen the corona, the swiftness of nightfall, and the swifter return of light left me breathless. The enormity of that shadow hovering over us rang a disquieting chord inside of me. And it did not leave me unscathed.