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.