Sic transit gloria mundi

I am transiting at Dulles airport, headed to South Bend. I’d never been to Dulles before. Somehow I had imagined a small airport, but it is a sprawling thing. I took the train from C to A, enjoyed the video wall art in the tunnel — ads, then a short calm video of ocean waves breaking — then walked the length of the elegant international terminal (I have two hours between flights). It was hushed, with its Dior and Chanel kiosks and sleek glass-doored lounges guarded by uniformed personnel with iPads. (The Etihad lounge was apparently full up, there was a tumble of people on the floor waiting to get in, leaning forward hopefully at every departure.) Spacious gates, a vaulted ceiling hung with flags, sunlight streaming in. From here you could fly to Paris. To Rome.

But my gate wasn’t here. I followed the signs up the escalator. Across. Down another. Down one more. The corridors grew narrower, the ceilings lower, the light more artificial. No fancy oyster bar — burgers and chicken tenders were on offer, TVs showed 5 different sports games, people spilled out into the corridor. A woman walked past dressed in a full-on cat costume, ears and all, tail twitching happily as she chatted on the phone,. Two little kids dressed in lederhosen (really, I promise) whooshed by holding hands and singing. Where, I wondered, was Maria?

I popped out in a spot where each gate has subgates — A1A, A1B…A2F— a dozen gates all squished together in the space of two in the cathedral above. The microphone system isn’t working right. It’s hard to get to the desks. “Raise your hand if you asked for a wheelchair going to Raleigh!” Finding a place to sit is a challenge. Finding a place to stand is a challenge. The building shakes when a plane takes off.  I think of Dante and descending circles.

But. But despite the chaos and crowding (because of the chaos and crowding?) there is something so warmly human about this place. It’s more than an hour to my flight, but I have no desire to return to the sterile marble heights. I score a seat, sit and listen to the man across from me wearing a gorgeous blue turban telling his grandkids he would see them in just over an hour. “Just 60 minutes!” He beams.

The world is filled with glory, fleeting, but no less intense for that.

Talking heads

I’m at Notre Dame (the one in South Bend) today to record a podcast, one of a couple this month. I met the host of this podcast through the blog twenty years ago, when our kids were young, and over the years I have treasured our criss-crossing interests in theology and science. She also introduced me to rose congou tea, a cup of which is sitting next to me as I write. I am also going to the Madeleva lecture tonight — “The Wrath of God(dess): A Spirituality of Feminist Rage” given by theologian Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier. Several of the previous Madeleva lectures are on my shelf, including Kathleen Norris’ The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and 'Women's Work’ and Sidney Callahan’s Women who Hear Voices: the Challenges of Religious Experience. Sidney Callahan is a Bryn Mawr alum, and came to speak to one of my (non-chemistry) courses. 

A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to sit down with Mike Laskey of the AMDG podcast to talk about how science and faith work in my life as a scientist. (This is a great podcast series, in my Saturday morning rotation, with tons of interesting guests, most with some connection to the Jesuits and things Ignatian — rare books, material science, astronomy, songwriting.) I talked a bit about awe and mystery and finding God in a handful of water. Also tea, perhaps because you can (sorry!) hear the noise of my tea cup hitting my desk periodically (also one loud beep from an incoming text — this was not my smoothest interview). 

Tuesday, after a hard PT session, I checked my email to find a request for an interview from EWTN Nightly News to talk about the Artemis II mission. Sure, when? It was 11:35. Could I do this at 12:15? I was sitting in my car, soaked in sweat in desperate need of a shower. 12:45? I got home, showered, professionally attired and to my office in time. Whew — shades of the first days of the great tea kerfuffle!

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Listen to the AMDG podcast here, and the EWTN clip here. 

Photo is from an interview for On The Media recorded at WHYY 11 years ago, about the Food Babe. 

The women gather

I ran across an Easter reflection from 5 years about an Easter morning spent cleaning the kitchen…

“As I scrubbed last night’s sheet pans, I wondered if this really was how I should be celebrating Easter, clad in a well-worn apron and wielding a soapy sponge. Or perhaps this is precisely how Jesus imagined the celebration as he knelt on the floor, a towel around his waist, washing feet. Women, up early to do the work of feeding the hungry and tending to the needs of the living and the dead. Women with the courage to stay in the face of unspeakable pain, and a scandalous death. Women with the courage to profess what they had seen, in the face of mockery and derision.”

...which kicked off a search for a song I had heard from Sweet Honey in the Rock: The Women Gather. I could hear the spare repeating line in my head. “The women gather…” 

And the women still gather. To stand witness to the unspeakable. To accompany the undesirable. To bury the dead. To shelter their children with their bodies. To beg for peace.

We still gather at Easter — the women, the men, the children — even as we are embroiled in this “war of choice.” Though it not the choice most of us would have made. Our leaders demand we pray daily, “on bended knee” — in the name of Christ —  for military victory. I cannot. I will not. 

Yet. I will pray. For the courage to stand witness to the Gospel, that promises the utlimate victory, over sin and death, For an enduring and earned peace. Not one bought with blood and terror, awash in tears.

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The rest of the reflection is here. Listen to The Women Gather here.

Stripped of words: a homily for Good Friday

 

I am preaching at Morning Prayer at the parish today, a reflection which had its seed in an interview with Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe by Fr. Jim Martin SJ (you can hear the relevant piece here) and in a reflection in the forthcoming book for next Lent.

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…So shall he startle many nations,
because of him, kings shall stand speechless;
For those who have not been told shall see,
those who have not heard shall ponder it.…Isaiah 52:15

As we move through the Triduum, we also grow silent in the face of the enormity of what has been accomplished by God. Later today we will sit with St. John’s account of the passion, invited as Isaiah implores us to watch and to ponder. When I hear this version of the passion I am often struck by how Jesus, too, gradually grows silent. Gone is the sharp give and take with the religious authorities. He offers virtually no defense to Pilate. There are no words to reassure the repentent thief crucified next to him about paradise.

Once Jesus wept as he fervently prayed for relief. Now, we no longer hear him lifting up long, eloquent prayers to the Father. In John’s account of the crucifixion, we do not hear him pray at all. He does not cry out to God asking why he was abandoned. He does not commend himself to the Father’s care.

In the end, there is only his battered body, wracked with thirst, hanging on a cross. 

Some time ago I heard Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe reflect on what it had been like to try to pray during his recovery from a grueling surgery. “When I tried to pray the Our Father,” recounted Cardinal Radcliffe, “I couldn’t get past the two words…Our Father…I was just a body lying in bed.”  Still, he thirsted, not just for the water he was not allowed to have, but for God.

Here is this man who preached to the synod — who preached to the pope about hope and prayer —  confessing he could not pray. How many of us have found ourselves in these straits? Caught up in the maelstrom of illness — our own or those of people we love —  or overcome by fear or despair in the face of events that upend our lives, or shake the world, and unable to find the strength to reach for God. When even the prayers we know by heart slip away from us.

I am reminded of a snippet of poetry from Ranier Rilke’s Book of Hours, “like sand slipping through fingers,  all my cells are open, and all so thirsty. I ache…in a hundred places, but mostly in the middle of my heart.” Thirsting for God in every cell, aching for mercy in the depths of our hearts, our physical body becomes the prayer. Like the disciples who ask Jesus to teach them the words to use in prayer, we, too, are looking to Jesus to teach us how to pray in our most desperate moments, when the anguish of our wounds  is more than we can bear, and we cannot find even those words, “Our Father”.

Jesus’ silence on the cross speaks volumes. His arms wordlessly stretched out between heaven and earth, his whole body is a prayer offered to the Father for our salvation. It is a potent reminder that when our strength fails us, we can still pray as Jesus taught us from the cross, arms stretched out in longing, every cell thirsting. That when injustice or illness or infirmity or age strips us of our words, our very body becomes a prayer.

Rube Goldberg mornings

 

I like a good Rube Goldberg machine, I do. Push the marble down the track and zip, ping, zap, eventually the cat's food pours into the dish. Or whatever. But the unplanned machines can be a mess...

This morning I went to put away the clean dishes from last night's dinner. The sheet pan had been set down on a wet soapy counter. It was stuck. I pulled it off. My elbow knocked over my water glass sitting by the sink spilling water. The glass straw from the cup hit one of my favorite tea cups*. Which fell into the sink and broke.  And I cried.

*The tea cup was from the pandemic, depicting all manner of calamities in a classic Delft blue. It always made me laugh.