Radishes and pomegranates

A delightful colleague and writer spoke last week about the different types of writing she does. Scholarly writing, long and deep, layered and expertly crafted. Like slow food from a Michelin chef. Then there are the journalistic pieces, like my op-eds, quickly written for a place and time. Fast food! 

But it is her description of the third space she writes in that I enjoyed. (For her it is long form fiction, for me, my essays and reflections.) It's like a cookbook that you bought to look at the recipes, she said. You cook only one or two of them. But it gives you ideas that simmer. And one day you may say to yourself, "perhaps radishes and pomegranates might work well together. And you try it."

Scrabble and Lenten penances? Will they go together? Read it and see!

So what kind of writing is the blog? In my household we call a meal put together from leftovers in the fridge “scrounge.”  When there's not enough meatloaf for a sandwich, or just a couple of spoonfuls of soup, there's what you can scrounge. Here are the bits and pieces that might or might not make a whole…essay, reflection, thing? And sometimes I scrounge around in this space, like the fridge, to see what I might put together into a whole.

And do radishes pair well with pomegranates? According to The Art and Science of Foodpairing they just might. They have similar aroma profiles: fruity, green and vegetable notes.

Prayers for Pope Francis

 

Pope Francis is very ill and he has asked for our prayers. I am praying for him, for his consolation and his recovery, but I’ve also wondered if we also should be praying for him, that is, for all those he prays for. To take on some of the burden of caring for those on the margins so that he might rest.

So I pray…

For Pope Francis
For all those struggling to breathe
For those who cannot afford medical care
For those laboring in brutal conditions
For those who are starving
For those without access to clean water
For those exhausted by caregiving
For those who have lost their jobs
For those fleeing war and economic disruption
For those denied their human dignity
For those...

Let us pray...

Keep us attentive to the needs of all

There are times when the second half of the Eucharistic Prayer just pours over my head, cascading off the altar, flowing down the aisle. Sometimes it murmurs in my ear, soothing, calming, a burbling fountain in a hidden courtyard. Other times, I regret to say, the grocery list starts jittering. Remember to get eggs and lettuce at Acme after Mass.

Then there are the moments when I really hear the words, battering at my defenses, badgering me long after we have been sent out the door. Ite, missa est? Not so much. We may have been dismissed, but I can’t so easily dismiss what I have heard.

Last weekend, the pastor used one of the Eucharistic Prayers for “various needs” (EP VN 3). Given the current political situation, and the insistence of some that Christian faith does not demand that we have a care for those beyond our immediate circle, those we love and those who love us back, these words struck home:

"Grant that all the faithful of the Church, looking into the signs of the times by the light of faith, may constantly devote themselves to the service of the Gospel.

Keep us attentive to the needs of all that, sharing their grief and pain, their joy and hope, we may faithfully bring them the good news of salvation and go forward with them along the way of your Kingdom."

It’s a potent examination of conscience. Made with the body of Christ right there on the altar in front of us. Can I — can we — constantly devote ourselves to the service of the Gospel in these times? Where are the signs pointing out the needs of the world? What do they say? How are we being attentive to the needs of all? Without exception. Do we think about their grief and pain? Do we share their hopes? Are we willing to walk with them?

I used this snippet of the prayer as the closing prayer for a celebration of the Liturgy of the Word last week, and as we creep toward Lent, I am thinking that I should let this prayer shape my Lenten discipline.

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Aside: I wondered how VP Vance reconciles the Gospel today, where Luke recounts Jesus’ command to love your enemies, to give more than the bare minimum to those in need with his version of  the “ordo amoris” a preferential option for those you love. Then I thought of the part of the Gospel which says I will be judged by the measure I judge others by…

Other weighty matters

I’ve been writing weighty stuff of late. A piece for Nature Chemistry about the literal stardust that sprinkles the earth every year (10 million kilograms of it). An op-ed on metaphorically weighty matters, what gutting NIH funding might mean for people’s health, from my perspective of a patient who has benefited from fundamental research begun at the NIH. 

It’s 1.5 ounces of mass that’s been almost as much a miracle as the medication I take. A hexagonal weight that slides onto a $0.79 Bic pen. And with it, like magic, I can write a grocery list, scribble a thought down on a sticky note, jot notes on a journal article I am reading. Write a short letter to a friend. I suspect I can write comments on students’ papers again, though on a sabbatical leave this year I haven’t tried. 

Like the new found joy of folding my socks, I imagine that I will be excited about grading again. Who knew?

I feel a bit like Disney’s version of Cinderella. A fairy godmother has waved her wand and turned a pumpkin of a pen into something that can take me to the ball. I love my Japanese gel pens and my fountain pens, but I love more being able to make my mark on a sheet of paper.  And it may be that metaphorical midnight might come — and poof! — this hack will cease to work. But for now, the physical therapy fairy’s magic still holds sway.

Elon's Fermi problem

Elon Musk posted a table on X claiming that enormous numbers of social security payments are being made fraudulently, as much as 83%. That seemed...excessive. I teach my students Enrico Fermi's technique for getting quick estimates, good enough numbers to help direct you toward a more accurate solution. Also great for detecting bullshit. Let's see how it works for Elon's claim!

One way to estimate roughly the number of social security recipients is to say everyone in the US over 65 collects it.  (Not true, but Fermi's approach says look at the big effects.)  In 2023 that was 59.2 million people. The Social Security Administration says that the average annual payment is $24,000. So that means we should pay out 59,200,000 x $24,000 a year. That's about $1.4 trillion. What did Social Security pay out in 2023? Its total budget was...wait for it..about $1.4 trillion. Just what you'd expect. So, BS, Elon.

This may be the biggest fraud ever, but I don't think the payments are the problem.

Reality check

I have an op-ed coming out in tomorrow's Philadelphia Inquirer that covers some of this ground. It's up online here.

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Last night I did something I hadn't done in almost two years. I made lasagna for dinner. I used the recipe I reverse engineered from my favorite restaurant in Albano Laziale.  That's nice, I hear you thinking, glad it is back in your rotation. What I want to say back is, "nice? nice? It's a miracle." 

The lasagna is that good? Well, it is, but it's the preparation that's the miracle, or rather that I can undertake it. 

I use a homemade tomato sauce, which requires dicing onions and mincing garlic and opening cans of San Marzano tomatoes. I brown Italian sausage. Grate Parmesan. Hand knead dough for fresh pasta. And make béchamel sauce, which means briskly stirring to emulsify the sauce. From start to sitting down at the table it takes about four and half hours.

But recently I couldn't: dice things, open those cans, break up the sausage in the pan, knead the dough or stir the sauce to emulsify it. Some tasks on that list were merely very difficult (dicing was glacially slow) and some were just impossible. Stirring that sauce.

It was a bit like the frog dropped in a pot of cold water, slowly being heated. Things almost imperceptibly got difficult. My handwriting got smaller. Writing on the blackboard for an hour got harder. Then it was a problem to get through an entire problem. It became tough to cut a sandwich in half. Folding my socks was a challenge. So was tying my shoes. And stirring. I couldn't make a quick pan sauce. (I know, I know, first world problems.) Then it was folding flour in to make a cake (more first world problems.) Then it was stirring my tea. That was a problem. I was in hot water.

Like that frog, for the longest while I kept adapting, or at least not noticing. Adapting my wardrobe, choosing blouses that did not need buttoning (or ironing, yep, I still iron stuff). Adapting my approach to research, dictating more, typing less. Not noticing that I wasn't making lasagna on a winter Sunday afternoon. Or choosing to have yogurt for lunch instead of a sandwich. 

This is not a bid for sympathy. It's a grounding in reality, in what can be at stake in scientific research that on the surface seems quirky (lizard saliva or getting a tranquilized rabbit's ears to perk up) or esoteric (using singular value decomposition to help assign atomic charges to atoms in a molecule.²) Or that is supported by the government, or was done by someone in the US from another country. 

Some of that research can be life changing. (Both the lizard saliva and the pop-up bunny ears research was.¹) And some of it will not be. We try as researchers to follow trails that will be productive, but not every line will lead to immediate results, some will not lead to results at all. We are exploring the universe, not following well-trod paths to known destinations.  There will be dead-ends. This is not fraud or waste. It's how research works.

The drug I take, that allows me to dice onions and emulsify a sauce, that makes it possible to care for myself and continue to work was developed in part by a scientist here on a visa at the NIH. The reality is that without it, I would be disabled and unemployed. Thanks to NIH funding (and medical insurance), I have access to a life-altering therapy. It's not a cure, but it is a miracle. Other people deserve their miracles, too. 

But Trump and Musk cry, "Fraud! Waste!" and say the NIH is a disaster. Their cuts to indirect costs will save each household less than the cost of 2 months of Netflix (about $30), and cost some people their lives. 

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1. A study on lizard saliva led to Ozempic, the bunny ears to a Nobel prize. Rabbits that had had Parkinsonism induced chemically had their droopy ears almost instantly perk-up when L-DOPA was administered. L-DOPA is still the gold standard for relieving many of the motor symptoms of Parkinson's. And as miraculous as it is, it is not perfect, so I am still rather personally invested in ongoing research.

2. That bit about singular value decomposition and charges might seem esoteric, but is my work and is used today in in silico drug design, including therapies for Parkinson's. 

Photo is of an earlier lasagna, circa 2022.

O Cecilia!

 

I was working on a reflection for this coming November 22, the feast of St. Cecilia, for Give Us This Day. (I generally have my feet in two different parts of the liturgical year. Right now, it's Ordinary Time and Lent. Which sometimes gives me double vision.) 

As I do when I start these reflections, I noodled

around. I read the scriptures for the day (and for the days on either side). I read some commentary. And about Cecilia,"of whom almost nothing is known for certain" (according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Saints I pulled from the shelf).

There was poetry, there was polyphony (Arvo Pärt's lush Cecilia, vergine romana.) And there was Simon and Garfunkel.

Oh, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees
I'm begging you please...

This last was an earworm (and might or might not have anything to do with St. Cecilia). Try as I might I could not banish it. Begging St. Cecilia for her intercession didn't work either. And surely this wasn't going to be a helpful earworm? Argh. I'm down on my knees...

Earworm or not, I needed to write. And write I did, Oh, Cecilia...

Simon and Garfunkel's ode to Cecilia (whoever she may be), opens with a thumping percussion. As I discovered when I was trying to figure out if the composition had anything to do with St. Cecilia, they were messing around one night and beat out this rhythm on a piano bench, recorded it and used the sample to open Cecilia. So perhaps that's where this line in the reflection came from? "I felt the pew shiver under my hands ..." God knows.

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The photo is of the mug of the day. St. Ignatius and his hot beverage hanging out on my bookshelf. Not shown, my Jerome commentary on the shelf below.

For the record, Cecilia is once again stuck in my head. Apologies if I have stuck it in yours.

Just google "ordo amoris"

 

"Just google 'ordo amoris'," suggested VP Vance on 30 January 2025, defending his remarks earlier about who we are obliged to help:

JD VANCE: There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world... 

Apparently Pope Francis did. Or rather he used his common sense and dug into the Gospels and the deposit of Catholic social teaching that draws upon them.

"Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception." — Pope Francis in a letter to the Bishops of the United States, 11 February 2025

The whole letter is here.

Writing in isolation

I had two pieces of writing due in the last week. And...I lost a day to a medical procedure that turned me into a vampire, cowering in the sunlight. So I was feeling a bit pressured. Whoosh - one piece went off last Sunday (though I still have the earworm it gave me). The next piece needed more than a bit of wrangling. So much stuff I could say, but a firm word limit. So many tangled lines in the narrative, but in a short piece you can't have too many threads. And I was tired (vampiring is tiring, I discovered, is that why they are so pale?). 

Every time I got to work, I was interrupted. Math Man wanted some advice about floating point numbers and high precision calculations. A Girl Scout was at the door with cookies (I bought Crash some Thin Mints). Egads - that meeting! A colleague with good news. A colleague with challenges. Time to get online to give that talk. Each interruption took time to recover from, to recapture where I was. I felt like I was trying to untangle a skein of yarn, forced to stuff it back in the bag every few minutes, where it gathered more tangles. I was...frustrated. Also grumpy (sorry, Math Man!). 

This photograph turned up in one feed or another. It is an Isolator, invented by Hugo Gernsback (the founding editor of Amazing Stories and the Hugo for which the Hugo Awards are named). The article introducing this gadget in 1925 (it was the cover article for Science and Invention!) notes that it blocks out 90% of distractions (relative to what it doesn't say). The user found that after about 15 minutes under the hood things got stuffy, hence the oxygen tank, which the author said was found to "liven the subject considerably." 

The article also gave a design for an isolated office, which looked far more conducive to working than that helmet. All I might add would be a bar on the door.

I did get both pieces written and dispatched, without recourse to a isolating helmet. I just firmly closed the door to my office. (Though post-procedure the  helmet might have been welcome. No light!)

Aliens in my office

Terrible things are happening in the world, and as sometimes it is more than I can take in, I am seeking refuge this morning in wonder and awe.

Today's mug comes from Rome, and features astronauts and an asteroid. Two pieces of writing are on my desk this week, both due soon. One about extraterrestrial intrusions (of the rocky sort, not the animate sort) and the second a reflection for the feast of St. Cecilia next November. You can guess which one I am working on this morning.

The piece on meteorites opens with the note that I keep three aliens in a Petri dish on my desk. Lest you imagine tiny creatures with six eyes and green skin jumping up and down in their glass prison, let me assure you that my aliens are inanimate. Well, at least I'm pretty sure they are, unless they are related to the Horta.¹

The meteorites on my desk never fail to awe me. These were once in outer space. They are old, so very old, older than earth, as old as the solar system. Windows into times and places I have never been and will never be.

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1. See "The Devil in the Dark" episode of the original Star Trek series.

Slot machine prayers

Representative Josh Breen walked out of last Tuesday’s prayer service, offended he said, by Bishop Budde’s hijacking of a religious service for political purposes. I came to pray, he said. For many things. For the newly inaugurated president, for his family, for success of the new administration. And for the nation — though apparently not for all the nation. Certainly not for the immigrants, or the LGBTQ+ community, or others frightened by the cruel and vindictive rhetoric that flows from the Trumpian right wing.

It struck me that Breen has a very limited idea of what constitutes prayer. That prayer is a solely a divine request line, directed at letting the Almighty know what we want. As if the omniscient God doesn’t know. Or perhaps, since not every prayer gets the answer we want — something Rep. Breen is surely aware of — a holy slot machine. Pull the handle and if you are lucky or deserving(?), three angels pop up and you get what you asked for.

Who does prayer change? Us or God? What do we hope to accomplish in prayer?

I was further stunned to hear Breen flat out accuse the Bishop of lying when she said Christianity asks that the stranger be welcomed. The Bible only means welcome the stranger who conforms to the norms of the society, says Breen. I went back and read (in Greek) Matthew 25:35: “ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in” ξένος or xenos, is rendered as “stranger” here. None of this carries any hint of limitations. The call is not to feed or offer water to or welcome only the deserving. Breen may not agree with my exegesis (or the Bishop’s) but to call it a half-truth, or an untruth? Or is it that it is an uncomfortable question that Breen prefers not to entertain? 

Breen says we might be better off if more people got up and walked out of churches in righteous anger. I agree. I have prayed and listened to the Gospel and a righteous anger is upon me. I will stand up and walk out of church, and seek to feed the hungry and see that the thirsty have something to drink and that the stranger is made to feel welcome. Without limitation. As was done for me on Calvary.

May God have mercy on us all, that is what I am praying for.

The tale of the great tea kerfuffle

A year ago today, Steeped was published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. I was excited to see all my work come to fruition. But little did I know what the day would bring.

There had been an article in La Civilta Cattolica, and another in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few days before publication. I had gotten up at 4am a couple of mornings to check my mail for interview requests with UK publications. I did a couple, including one with The Telegraph and one with the Daily Mail. I might have mentioned that adding a tiny amount of salt to tea can ease the bitterness, particularly if you'd let your tea oversteep. 

On Wednesday, I woke to a lovely email from my editor at the RSC offering her best wishes and some suggestions for publicizing the book. It was the first day of teaching, so I figured I'd tackle some of those tasks after my classes wrapped up at 1 and before office hours at 3:30. (Confession, there are still a couple of those tasks I haven't managed yet.) And off I went to the college to catch the 9am departmental meeting. 

I went to pull the meeting agenda out of my inbox and noticed I had an email from the RSC's PR firm. The Telegraph was wondering if I had a response to the US Embassy's statement. What statement??? This statement! Turns out that Britain was up in arms over the suggestion that salt in tea could be desirable. We drafted something light and I went off to the departmental meeting. But I kept a wary eye on my inbox. An email from a reporter at the NY Times popped up. Would I have time to talk to him now? I excused myself and went back to my office. We had a lovely conversation, and I was pleased he asked me about my (non-tea related) science. I rang off.

That's when chaos ensued. My phone started ringing. There were DMs on what-was-once-known-as-Twitter, on LinkedIn. In my college email, my personal email. A text from my sister summed it up, "this isn't REAL is it?" It was crazy real. I grabbed a marker and started writing times and interview requests on my glass-topped desk - a space I usually used for working out quantum mechanics problems with my pchem students. Then I went to teach.

The next three days were wild. I did an interview with Lauren Frayer on NPR, and was too flustered to dig out the passage in the book about salt and bitterness when she asked me to read it to her. A TV crew came from the Philly station. I did interviews for media outlets in Ireland and Canada and South Africa and Turkey and Australia and Japan. And of course for the UK. For CNN and the BBC and PBS. At all hours. Like at 1:30 am my time - morning in Britain. By Zoom and phone and via fancy web set ups. And I taught my classes. 

I was the subject of a press briefing at the US State department.

Saturday morning I was sorting my laundry as one does on the weekend when the texts flew again. I was a limerick on NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me:

Before all you Britains find fault
Take a sip and your whinging will halt
While sugar is nice it’s not quite the right spice
Because your tea needs a wee pinch of…salt

It got a bit less wild the following week. I did more interviews, but got more sleep. One of my favorites was with WHYY's Cherri Gregg and Avi Wolfman-Arent for their show Studio 2. I brought tea to taste and it was fun to meet the people behind the voices that I had heard so often. I enjoyed giving a Joseph Priestly Society lecture at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, which played a role in the book. In the end the PR people estimated that the news had been seen 19 billion times. I'm with my sister, this isn't real is it?

I'm still talking tea (four events coming up in the next month including a reading at an independent book store and a virtual talk with the ACS -- you can sign up for free here) and doing the occasional interview about the chemistry of tea (December's Consumer Reports) beyond salt. I got to meet and talk tea and baking with chemist and Great British Bake Off finalist Josh Smalley in London last summer, hosted by the RSC. Most of all I enjoy taking people for a dip into their cup to better appreciate the rich molecular mash-up that is the world's most popular beverage after water. And to find ways to make their tea taste better! Even to the adding of a pinch of salt.

A Binary Meditation: The Two Standards

On this day in 2009, Barack Obama was being inaugurated as president of the United States of America. I wasn’t watching, I was on retreat at Eastern Point on the Massachusetts coast, wrapped in 30 days of silence making the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. No TV, no newspapers, no internet. No conversation. No idea what was happening in the world.

Reading the news about today’s events (when I know all too much about what is going on in the world), I found myself thinking about one of the meditations from the Exercises, called the Two Standards. I pulled out my journal from the retreat to look at what I had written about it. It is, in fact, the mediation I was making on January 20, precisely sixteen years ago today. 

Ignatius asks you to imagine two armies arrayed on a great plain, their standards snapping in the wind. On one side, Satan. On the other, Jesus. Choose, says Ignatius. Easy, you think. Think again, says Ignatius. Choose riches, choose honors, choose to be puffed up with pride in what you have accomplished. Or. Choose to risk being stripped of whatever you have — wealth, health, positions, honors. Choose humility. This is the binary that matters, not the binary that the new administration wants to enforce. Choose. 

This is not the prosperity Gospel. This is not a stance that bulldozes the encampments of the unhoused or vilifies the immigrant or fails to provide for the millions of children in the US — and in the world — who are hungry.  This is a choice to reverence our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters (and daughters and sons) as we reverence Christ. This is a choice for peace.

I chose. To echo poet and priest Daniel Berrigan SJ, “Know where you stand, and stand there.” I know where I stand. I intend to stand there, for the next four years and beyond. 

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“Not the goods of the world, but God. 

Not riches, but God. 

Not honors, but God. 

Not distinction, but God. 

Not dignities, but God. 

Not advancement, but God. 

God always and in everything.” — St. Vincent Pallotti

Photo is of my bed in the shelter my parish hosts for unhoused families. I don’t so much stand there as I occasionally sleep there. But I sleep there because of where I stand.

MMOD: My mug of the day

 

I have so many mugs. Mugs that were gifts. Mugs that were swag. Mugs I bought because I was enamored of their shape or color or material. Mugs bought as mementos of a trip or event. Mugs bought out of desperation. (I'm thinking of one bought in South Bend so I could make a morning cup of tea that did not taste of coffee.) I still have the Sandra Boynton mug Tom bought me in graduate school during a particularly awful week, 45 years ago.

I keep a selection of mugs in the kitchen, and a few at the office. Periodically I rotate what's out. When I grab a mug for the day I often pick one to match my mood or one that speaks to the work of the day. Yesterday was a mug from the Vatican Observatory, to get me in the mood to talk about my work there with a group of 7th and 8th graders at a local parish.

I bought today's mug at the St. John's Abbey pottery when I was on retreat there for a few days in 2014. I met the potter who shaped  it. This is a traditional Japanese pottery, where the wood-fired kiln is loaded with a year's worth of ceramics, then sealed and fired for 10 days. After everything is cool, the pieces are dug out of the ashes.

I think about the shape of this mug, which feels so suited to my own hand, but also reflecting the hand of the potter. It looks delicate, thin. But cup it in your hands and you can feel its strength. Fire has turned clay to jeweled stone. The glaze pattern has a touch of cool blue at the top, yet you can see the marks of the firing on the side, like stigmata. Fire and water.

What do I feel like held in the hand of God, I wonder. Shaped by the divine potter, by water and fire. Dug out from the ashes, again and again. 

Germanium anniversary

[Written in September and left languishing in my drafts folder] 

Math Man and I have been married for 32 years (100,000₂ for the CS crowd). As we drove to dinner last night, we wondered what the traditional gift was for your 32nd. The 30th was pearls and the kids got us these beautiful oyster shells with bits of the nautical chart of the area we sailed on our honeymoon. The 31st? Last fall was a haze — between the college and Math Man's health issues. (Turns out the gift was "travel" — but the most travel we did was to UPenn's hospital.) 

The 32nd turns out to be bronze (at least on the couple of lists that include it). Most lists start to only give the “gifts” for the years divisible by 5 after the 25th, perhaps because 5 years goes by in such a flash at our ages? Though if you make it all those years, it seems to me it’s time to start counting each and every one, if not each day. That would be almost 12,000 days for us.

Frankly bronze seems a bit blah for any anniversary. 32 is 100 000 base 2, which seems to demand something more valuable. We batted various gemstones and metals around. I suggested germanium (Ge), which is atomic number 32. It’s lustrous and silver-white, like our hair these days. It’s a bit pricier than silver, not as precious as gold. Math Man suggested he get me a new laptop (germanium has applications in electronics) as a gift. No need, I said. The one on my desk is fine. 

What did I get him? A new water bottle! Not made of germanium, though roughly the dusty green of geranium leaves. Maybe he should have gotten me a potted geranium.

Fifth week epiphany

Sixteen years ago, as the feast of the Epiphany approached, I packed my bags and drove north to Gloucester, MA to make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola  — the long retreat. You can do the Exercises in daily life, devoting time each day to the meditations over 30 or so weeks, as Ignatius suggests in the 19th annotation (he prefaced the Exercises with 20 notes). Learning to balance prayer and work in real time. Or you can spend 30 days sequestered in silence, moving through the four “weeks” or movements Ignatius proposed, then be pushed back out the door into the world — the fifth week. 

For a mother and wife and scientist, the second version was a luxury (ok, either version is a luxury TBH). It was the longest stretch I had ever spent away from home. I was a commuting student in college, so packing up for an extended stay away was a new-to-me experience.  Like the Magi, I would return home by a different route, or rather, routed in a different way. (Unlike the Magi, I didn't have to ride a camel into town to get what I might need. Post-it notes, as it turned it out).

I had a star to orient me. A gift of a lovely friend and talented artist. It now hangs in a west window at home, still bringing color to a winter landscape, still leading. 

I remarked to my spiritual director last week that the fifth week of the Exercises has a long tail. "Like the rest of your life?"  Yep. 

I left the Exercises with the Suscipe in my heart, "Receive, O Lord, all my liberty. Take my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. Whatsoever I have or hold, you have given me. I surrender it wholly to be governed by your will. Give me only your love and your grace and I am rich enough and ask for nothing more." 

These days, what surrendering my entire will looks like is not at all what I imagined at 50. And I still come to prayer with desires and entreaties, asking for much. But with enough grace I can occasionally recognize how richly beloved I am.

What does the fifth week look like? Like a carpenter smoothing a piece of wood by hand. The plane peeling a layer off here. Sanding down rough spots there.  Oil to keep the wood from drying and breaking, both a balm and a guard.

Portals

I have been thinking about Psalm 88 lately. The psalm is unusual in that no matter how dark other psalms get they tend to finish with images of redemption, glory, rescue. But not the 88th. It shows up every Friday at Compline (Night Prayer) in the Liturgy of the Hours. One might think it is not terribly consoling to pray such a desolate psalm just before bed. But to me it feels like a reality check, a reminder that I do not always find resolution at the end of each and every prayer, or closure at the end of every day. There are times in my life where I might despair of rescue, be unsure where God is in the darkness or in the waves that engulf me. Times when I must perforce sit with uncertainty.

I appreciated Sister Joan Chittester's wisdom in a reflection in Give Us This Day last fall. "Prayer is not an analgesic designed to protect us from life. It is, more times than not, part of the problem of life. One day we don't feel like praying. The next we pray but it doesn't make any difference… We try to pray but were far too distracted than we are soothed by the quiet or comforted by the sense of the presence of God." In his book, Into the Silent Land, Martin Laird, OSA, points out that when we go in search of peace in prayer, we often find instead what feels like chaos. But, he says, it is precisely in this meeting of confusion and peace that healing happens. Not by erasing our pain, but by offering a path for grace. 

So what are we to do? In her lovely book An Altar in the World, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor reflects on keeping an altar: “Since I am a failure at prayer, I keep an altar in my room. It is really an old vanity made of rosewood, with fancy scrollwork around the oval mirror and a small stack of drawers on either side. At worst I think of it as a piece of furniture that I offer God as a substitute for my prayers. At best, I think of it as a portal that stays open whether I go through it or not."

This makes me wonder about the altars that we keep, metaphorical and literal, that leave the door open to God, even when we think we are failures at prayer. Like a doorstop, keeping us from being locked out when our hands are too full to open the door, or when we need a breeze on a hot day. For me that might be Night Prayer at the end of the day, it might be the literal prayer space that I keep in my study upstairs, or the prayer rope I wear on my wrist. Sometimes it is my parish church, bathed in warm light. What portals do you keep propped open in your life?

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This got its start as part of a homily I preached for the memorial of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, whose last days were marked by spiritual darkness. The photo is of St. Thérèse on my home altar, along with a small first class relic of St. Thérèse. And of course, there are roses.

Time past and time future

"Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present." TS Eliot, Four Quartets

The year of our Lord 2024 faded to 2025 as I climbed out of a hot soaking tub last night. The light was dim, the towel warm and soft. The aches of one year soaked out, the grit of another year washed away. A baptism of sorts. I spent the first minutes of 2025 in prayer, the ablutions an apt way to enter into that time and space.  

This last year has been eventful. Delightfully so at times, and at others presenting new and enormous challenges. In January, Steeped came out and caused a minor brew-ha-ha. (Or perhaps not so minor, the PR people estimate the news was seen more than 19 billion times.) There were many puns. There was a limerick (on Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me). There was a US State department briefing. There have been molecular tea parties. I did a tea and cake meet-up hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry with Josh Smalley  — a chemist and GBBO finalist. I signed many books. And most delightful of all, I heard from so many former students.

In early April I gave a weekend retreat at a retreat house on the Finger Lakes in upstate New York just before the total solar eclipse. The retreat was a chance to read God's other book with a wonderful group of people  — friends old and new. Despite the clouds that obscured the sun, the eclipse was a moment of awe. 

I wrote about hope in the context of the election and in my own life, and about what made chemists think about putting fluorine in so many drugs. 

In July, on the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, I learned that I had Parkinson's disease. For the moment my symptoms are well-controlled and physical and occupational therapy have given me back so much that I had thought lost. May I never again take for granted the ability to sign my name or stir a cup of tea or cut a sandwich in half. Or fold my laundry. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch some of the video footage from the RSC event last summer, it is painful to see how much difficulty I was having. As for the future? It is unknown.

To what end does all this point? When I was studying for my master's in theology, one of my professors said if you were ever stuck in your comps, remember that the answer was always the Paschal Mystery. (This, I would like to point out, was no help at all when I failed to remember the dates of the minor prophets.) Passion, death and resurrection, a triplet of mysteries, all arising from the incarnation. Or if you'd rather, the mysteries of beginnings and endings, joys and pains. Woven together by threads of hope and wisps of grace. Everything points here.