Run along and bake cookies...sweetie

In a video piece offering Hillary Clinton some New Year's resolutions, Vanity Fair suggested Hillary Clinton take up some new hobbies in 2018, such as knitting.  Beyond the sort of sexist undertones to taking up knitting, I'm really bothered that most of the digs are aimed at distracting her from running again.  But she has made it quite clear that she will not ever run for office again, why can't we take her at her word?  Does "no" still not mean "no" in 2017?

I'm sympathetic, having recently been told to wander off and bake cookies now that I'd been schooled about God and science.  Like I was some doltish child who had dared to interrupt the adult conversation.

The suggestion that women take up some domestic activity, such as knitting or cookie baking, has long been a proxy for get out of the conversation and leave the field to the (obviously more qualified) men in the room.

Last month I got tangled in a Twitter exchange about God and science.  I was responding because a friend had pointed out a tweet stating that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle proved the existence of God. For obvious reasons he thought I might be the right person to shed some light on this notion.

The characters involved were fabulous: a self-aggrandizing anti-evolutionist with a superficial knowledge of science whose favorite epithet is "sweetie," an ingenuous evangelical woman, someone who invokes Luther as a source but thinks Thomas Aquinas is likely fictional, an atheist or two, and a pantheon of baffled scientists.  C.S. Lewis could have a field day with this crowd.

The conversation was definitely illuminating, though not quite in the way my friend intended.  There was no intellectual engagement as all, the style of debate runs to  don't you know anything about science and flat assertions: you are delusional if you believe in evolution. Because. The scientists are baffled because observations and experiments are dismissed as nonsensical. From this perspective it is not fodder for Lewis or his ilk at all, because there is no content, no actual arguments to lay out.

Best lines...

Ingenuous evangelical: "Are you Christian?"  Yep. [In retrospect, I wonder if she is a bot. I scrolled through the tweets to find lots of odd repeats.]
Scientist:  "Dude, she's a chemist."
Other scientist: "Are you trying to intimidate a Vatican Scientist?" [For the record, not in the least intimidated. Amused, saddened, but not intimidated.]
Onlooker: [in response to a comment I made that the statement of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle provided was a simplified version] But what is it then?  [Someone told him to Google it, but if you don't know some quantum, that's really not going to help.]

---

Epilog

I still don't know what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has to do with the theory of evolution, and the responses by the original poster was....hardly illuminating. The first one was "because it means things are uncertain."  Yeah.  The final swipe was this:

"actually it proves the theory of evolution cis [sic] not falsifiable, and the simple claim that ToE is unfalsifiable according to the problem of demarcation, proves it is a pseudo science."

We could be all flame

From a reflection in Give Us This Day, Christmas 2016.

A light is kindled in the darkness.  A word is spoken. The cold air crackles, the stones stir underfoot, a fire hisses out its breath, coals creaking like wind-racked pines. A woman labors to give birth. 

And so God arrives among us, shivering in the cold, howling with hunger, begging with each breath to be fed and clothed and sheltered.  A voice crying out, aglimmer with a Gospel demanding to be proclaimed.

Gloria, we exclaim, and hunt in vain for angels in the sky. But Isaiah hinted at the shape of the light we seek: Share your food with the hungry, shelter the poor, clothe those in need, then your light will blaze forth like the dawn. 

Three decades later, ablaze on a sun-bright hillside outside Jerusalem, is he remembering that night?  “I was hungry and you fed me, a stranger and you made me welcome.”  When, we asked, the wailing child and spent mother long forgotten.  “Whenever you did this for the least among you.”  And we saw his glory.

Can we stop hunting for the cherubim and seraphim long enough to listen to the unending and all-sustaining Word, crying out in need, or for the Light pleading for light, for warmth, for food and shelter? If you wish, said one of the desert mystics, you could be all flame.  If we wish, we could be Isaiah’s blazing dawn.

The Word came to dwell among us, that we might be a word spoken, a voice for those in need, a light to the nations.  Children of God, all flame.

-->

#realDesksOfAcademia

My desk at its worst.

My study-under-the-eaves has two tables in it.  My computer resides on one and the other, tucked into a gable, is for spreading out and thinking.  Except when it's not. For the last three months I have been dropping stacks of papers and books on it, as one project has moved into the next without respite.  The surface vanished somewhere in late September.

Giving a talk at another institution earlier this fall, I was captivated by the states of various offices.  From starkly empty — nothing on the walls or desk or shelves — to stacks of paper on every surface, the monitor for the computer half on, half off a pile on a small side table. And every permutation in between. These are the #realDesksOfAcademia.

I really don't work well without a clear surface to spread out, and two current projects are in the stage where I really need that space.  And my office at the college (where the desks are indeed clear, and thus where I have been doing that sort of work) is going to be inaccessible for the next several weeks due to construction.

"Clear off the desk." was stuck on my Saturday to-do-list all November, finally morphing into an (aspirational) item on my daily list — "30 minutes on the !@#$& desk" — staring at me each morning, mournfully.

I finally got a breather on Thursday and spent an hour on the desk.  It's progress.  Perhaps next week I will see its surface.

Light aborning, light bearing

A summer sunset over the gardens at Castel Gandolfo.

As I drove home from an errand yesterday evening, there was a single, vein of pure gold in the indigo clouds piled up on the horizon.  So, too, in these days do obligations and crises pile up while I scan the leading edge of my calendar for any sign of hope, of relief, for cracks that will let in light, and not the cracks that presage collapse.

It was a vivid reminder that Light is what I yearn for, but am I longing for passive illumination or am I willing to expose myself to a light that will not leave me unchanged, a light that I will be expected to bear. For...

"Chemists see light as active. It doesn’t just illuminate, driving away the darkness, it can fundamentally change what it touches. One molecule becomes another, electrons shift allegiances, marching ‘round materials like armies of stars. Yet more wonderfully, once the light has soaked in, it can shine forth again, in new ways and new directions: fluorescence and phosphorescence appear at different wavelengths from the exciting light. And from these depths, the light speaks to us, telling us what was and perhaps, what will be. What is the shape of this molecule? By what pathways can it change?Light of the world, light of my heart." — read the rest at the Vatican Observatory Foundation's blog. 

 Light born, light a'borning, light to bear.

What do we value?

Heated debates over the "War On Christmas" have raged for years, with many on the right complaining that political correctness has made it less acceptable to say Merry Christmas. Trump has seized on these feelings, regularly telling primarily religious audiences that his presidency has made it acceptable to "start saying Merry Christmas again." CNN

We are promised "returning moral clarity to our view of the world" and an end to "attacks on Judeo-Christian values."  I cannot recognize my Christian values, nor any particular moral clarity, in the White House or the Senate or Congree. 

Perhaps because it's not whether we say "Merry Christmas" that's the measure we are told we must meet, but Matthew 25. Feed the hungry, care for the sick, bring water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger.  It does not say wish everyone a Merry Christmas while cutting nutrition programs, undermining health care, and making sure that strangers are demonized.

Meanwhile on my denomination's calendar (and we would be the largest Christian denomination in the US), the Christmas season has yet to arrive.  If we were really keeping the religious season, not the secular one, the stores would be decorated in violet, and offer free socks to the homeless.

Love. Period.

I flew to Boston earlier this week, an early evening flight so I could hit the ground running for a talk on Wednesday.  We were held on the ground at Philly, after a long taxi out to the edges of the airport.  It felt like the pilot had decided to drive to Boston.  And truth be told, with the delay, elapsed time door to door was the same for the trip by plane or by car.

When we were finally at the gate in Boston, it took them some time to get the jetway open. (#waiting #Advent #amIright?)  The guy behind me was dictating a text to (I presume) his wife. "I am on my way to the hotel...period...I will get dinner and then call...period...love you...period."  The guy who had been in the middle seat next to me was rolling his eyes at this.  "Gotta have that punctuation," he muttered.

I, too, was musing about the punctuation.  He had the pacing down, so this was clearly his habit.  But love period.  What about "love you exclamation point"?

Would I be that stingy with punctuation to my spouse?  I hope not!

_______
How many exclamation points should you use? A delightful essay in The Atlantic.

What's appealing about normalizing Nazis? Nothing.

On Facebook, Mr. Hovater posted a picture purporting to show what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II: a streetscape full of happy white people, a bustling American-style diner and swastikas everywhere. 

“What part is supposed to look unappealing?” he wrote. 

— From "A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland" New York Times 25 Nov 2017

Coincidentally this article appeared the same day my mother-in-law's immigration documents arrived on a CD in the mail. (Crash, the historian, had made a request for the records.)  As I browsed the nearly 40 pages of scanned documents, this one line stood out for me: I am citizen or subject of none. The Third Reich had stripped her of her citizenship because she was Jewish.  She was stateless.  Fleeing from a government that would strip her of her life if it could.

What looks unappealing to me?  Unappealing?  As if racism and anti-Semitism were some sort of choice on a menu.  Pizza tonight?  No, that's unappealing. 

Unappealing?  No.  It's terrifying.  Horrifying.  Intolerable.  Monstrous.

Hitler was not just "a guy who really believed in his cause...fighting for his people and doing what he thought was right.”  Hovater is not just the guy next door with some weird views.  He's actively advocating for a white nationalist state.  He bakes muffins and has cats.  Great.  He thinks the guy who wanted my mother-in-law dead was doing what was right. Monstrous.

I'm troubled that the Times dilutes the horror of this man's beliefs with descriptions of shopping at Target and making dinner.

Worry(ing) Beads

Former Vice President Biden has been seen wearing a rosary wrapped around his wrist.  The rosary belonged to his late son Beau.  You might think it touching that he wears this keepsake.  You might think it inspiring that he holds this iconic Catholic sacramental so close.  Those of us whose clothes often lack pockets might even think it practical.  Or you might think that no one is really in a position to criticize someone else's prayer life.  Ah...but not everyone would agree.

It's sinful.  It's sacrilegious.  How dare he, he's not a real Catholic/a good Catholic.  It's wrong, wrong, wrong.  And the very best?  Try to see in those who wear a rosary an opportunity for evangelization. Should you see someone with a rosary around their necks or on their wrists, take a moment to teach them how to really pray with it.  Or if you can't manage that, pray for their conversion. (*face palm*)

Oh, dear.  I wear a chotki, a knotted prayer rope which looks much like a rosary, around my wrist. It's a pray help far older than the rosary.  The tradition stretches back to the 4th century desert solitaries, The method for tying the knots is attributed to St. Anthony the Great.  Please, do not try to tell me how to 'really' pray with it.  (Yes, people have tried.) And while I think we should all pray for each other, you don't need to pray for my conversion on this account.

I'm trying to imagine under what circumstances I would possibly consider approaching someone and "correcting" their prayer.  Frankly, I can't think of any.

Yes, yes, I realize that at times people have worn rosaries and chotkis as jewelry, with no intention of using them for prayer.  I still think you have to assume that they are worn in good faith.  No scolding.  No sanctimonious prayers for their conversion.  Instead, try this one:  Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me — a sinner.

---

The chotki is worn to remind one to "pray without ceasing" as St. Paul recommended to the Thessalonians. Prayers ropes are worn on the left hand (or kept in the left pocket). To pray with them, take them off and hold them in your right hand, and say the Jesus prayer on each knot.  My preferred variant:  "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner." They come in many lengths from the 33 knot version I wear to longer versions of 100 or 300 knots such as the one that has been seen on Pope Francis' wrist.  Traditionally they are made of black wool and have a tassel on the end of the cross to soak up your tears of contrition for your sins.

Writing Exercises

It's a book.  In February of 2016 I created a document on my computer labeled "Not By Bread Alone."  Forty-seven reflections and 12 months later I attached a document with the completed manuscript to an email to my editor.  It felt oddly unceremonious. Somehow a book manuscript ought to have real heft, to weigh something more than a few electrons.  But off it went, weightlessly and nearly instantly, to Liturgical Press to return with edits and queries, and as proofs and as final proofs.  No version weighing my computer down anymore than that first blank file had.

In many ways it was like making the Ignatian Exercises again, this time in the form of the 19th annotation — a retreat in daily life.  There was assigned scripture. There were familiar themes: contrition, the Gospel stories, gratitude and humility.  The Third Week came again, and the Fourth dawned with joy.

There was repetition, as each reflection was visited multiple times growing from a sketched sentence or two to full length.  (Not to mention the repetition that accompanied the proofs.) Colloquies were made as I crafted questions for readers to grapple with.  And there was a prayer to end each day's contemplations.

It was a privilege to walk those roads again, almost a decade after making the 30-days.  It was a privilege to write a path to walk with others. Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

---

You can buy the book at Liturgical Press, $5 for the large print version, less for the easier to carry around version or for larger quantities, or for the weightless ebook!

Writes first time, every time

I've been going "back to school" in the fall for 53 years.  At some level the questions haven't changed since kindergarten:  What to wear? Will the kids in my class like me?  Will I be able to do the work? What supplies do I need?  I loved the sensation of writing on a stack of fresh paper, the scent of the ballpoint ink tickling my back brain.  The snick of the three ring binder as I snapped a completed assignment in.

As I tried to crack a case of writer's block a few weeks ago, I decided to get off the keyboard and onto a pad of paper.   I tend to start writing on paper, move to the keyboard, then back to paper at the end.  But was midway through a complete re-write of an essay I was writing in circles, unable to find a line through it that would make sense to a reader.  It was a bit like decided to take the next offramp from the highways when traffic has come to a crawl and try the side roads.  They might not be as fast, but there's hope that you'll get there eventually, and you're moving and filling the page.

Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones has a writing exercise that I sometimes use with my students:  "Pen or pencil.  Five minutes.  Go." What tools do I pick up to write with? Does it matter to me? Sometimes.  Why and when?
This task:  Yellow college-lined pad of paper. With a pen. Not a pencil.

I had to rummage in the drawer of office supplies to find a pen. The drawer contains principally leftovers from school supply lists gone by (why, oh, why do we have so many unused protractors in there?)  I pulled out a classic Bic pen, the one that I remember from my own school days. Clear plastic, medium point, viscous tacky blue ink.

I remember the ads on TV where they would strap the pen to the skate of an Olympic figure skater who would do some fancy turn, ice chips flying.  They'd take the pen off and write with a flourish.  "Writes first time, every time."  I thought that might be a good omen for the writing.  It was. 

Stuck

Door knocker in Albano Laziale, outside Rome.

It was late on the Friday afternoon of fall break and the science building nearly empty when I went to the ladies room.  Right.  TMI. Anyway, I got stuck in the stall, the mechanism that turns the latch was stripped and while it latched without incident, it wasn't unlatching for anything. Call for help?  Or crawl out?  Checking the floor and thinking about how long it might be until someone heard me, I opted for the latter, which brought back memories of elementary school, when several classmates and I had latched the doors to all the bathroom stalls shut, then slithered out underneath.  Needless to say, sister was not pleased with us.

I am grateful that the floor was reasonably clean, that in my sixtieth year I can still do that and that no one came in as I was doing so.  I put a sign on the door, and a call in to facilities to fix it.

Today, I was stuck again, this time locked out of what I wanted in to.  Before I went off to teach, I dumped the remains of my soda (don't judge) into my insulated bottle, screwed the top on and left it on my desk, all set to grab on my way out the door to the meeting I had across campus directly after class.

After class I dumped my teaching bag, grabbed the papers I needed and my cold beverage.  I hiked up the hill, took the last seat at the meeting and...couldn't open my bottle.  Ugh.  I tried again. And then realized I was not going to be able to open it.  The soda had released its CO₂, increasing the pressure inside and effectively sealing it shut. We have this issue every time I do bomb calorimetry, students can't get the top off with 25 atm of pressure inside.  The bombs, I must point out, have relief valves.  I wished for one on my bottle.  Since it wasn't 25 atm inside (was it even 2?) all it took once I got home was Math Man (larger hands) and a bit of leverage.

I'm hoping I'm all unstuck for the rest of the week.

Yearning for the living God

My body pines for you
like a dry, weary land without water.  — Psalm 63:2b, Morning Prayer, Sunday, Week 1

Two weekends ago my parish anointed the sick at the 5 pm evening Mass.  We normally reserve the front pew for those who find it too demanding to get to communion. We keep space so those in scooters or wheelchairs can sit with their families close to the front as well, seating to the north and south of the altar is moveable chairs instead of pews.  The ministers of the Eucharist know to come to people sitting, bringing both the Body and the Blood.

At this Mass, though, we needed more space yet, so an entire wing was set aside for those who were to be anointed, chairs spaced widely so the priests could move through for the sacrament.  When it came time for communion, there was a bit of a scramble, but a minister quickly came through and distributed the Body. But the cup did not follow.

One of the ministers of the cup noticed and when her line vanished, walked to the other side and gave the cup to the first row.  Sitting across the altar from the scene, I realize that almost everyone was leaning toward the  minister as she gave the cup to the first person in the row, hoping she would come to them. Yearning with their whole selves for the living God.  Do they believe in the real presence?  I don't need a CARA survey to tell me, their posture gave it away.  Their souls are thirsting for God, the living God.

---

A perceived nonchalant attitude toward receiving the sacrament attributed to Catholics' failure to grasp and assent the doctrine of the real presence is a common trope in some corners of the Catholic web.  I wonder how much of this is seeing what they think the data show.  According to CARA, more than 90% of those who attend Mass weekly believe what the receive is truly the Body and Blood of Christ.  Numbers drop to 2/3 of those who attend at least once a month, but not weekly.  But... if you look closely at the demographics, about 80% of the congregation at a given Mass are there every week, and that roughly 85% of the adults in the congregation believe as the Church does. Not that "about half" or "two-thirds" that gets cited in these screeds.  The people in the pews know, don't school them. The real question isn't about the Real Presence, it's about why people aren't coming through the door in the first place.

On the immensity of space

The Total Solar Eclipse of August 21, 2017 - fly along with the shadow! from Eclipse2017.org on Vimeo.

(A version of this post appeared on the Vatican Observatory Foundation's Catholic Astronomer blog.)

Not quite two months ago I spent a late morning and early afternoon watching the moon slide across the sun, turning midday Philadelphia into twilight and back again.  I stashed the eclipse filters for the occasional look at the sun, and dove into the semester.  But each time I head out for a late evening walk and see the full moon hovering over the neighborhood school's field, I think about it coming between the earth and the sun.

I tend to think of the moon and sun as large objects ponderously processing through space, from my perspective taking ten or a dozen hours to creak 'round the sky. Their movements marking out days, months and years, not so much minutes and seconds.  So I was struck on the animations of the eclipse by how fast the moon's shadow moved across the ground, even when you account for the speeded up motion  (in this video slightly more than a factor of about 13).  With family in California, I've flown coast to coast more time than I can count.  It takes me 5 to 6 hours to fly from here to there, soaring through the sky at three-quarters the speed of sound.  The umbra — the shadow —  took only 90 minutes to make the same trip, traveling at more than 1200 mph.

As I walked yesterday afternoon, watching the sun vanish behind the horizon as my spot on the earth rotated to face away from the sun, it occurred to me that the moon's shadow isn't the only thing moving fast.  When standing "still" on earth I am, of course,  in motion relative to other points in the universe. Points on the surface of the earth (at my latitude 40^oN) are moving at 750 mph. Fast indeed, but not so fast I cannot imagine it.

In this moment in history, where I can climb on a plane and be on the other side of the world in half a day, or video chat with my kids who are thousands of miles away or I can go to a lab downstairs and with a quantum mechanical trick, nudge atoms around, arranging them to suit me, I might be tempted to think of myself as commanding great powers. At least until I think about how fast the earth is moving around the sun.  67,000 mph hour.  The solar system?  Orbiting the galactic center at a half million miles per hour.  I am moving through space at speed I cannot truly fathom: a thousand feet flash by in a millisecond, a hundred thousand in a second.  Eighty thousand miles in a minute.

Lines from Psalm 29 from Lauds, Week I, came to mind:

The Lord's voice resounding on the waters,
The Lord on the immensity of waters;
The voice of the Lord, full of power,
The voice of the Lord, full of splendor.

The Lord on the immensity of waters, the Lord on the immensity of space.  Adore the Lord in his holy court.

The psalm ends with an assurance that God, whose strength we cannot fathom, who with a word can strip the forests bare, and spin a universe into being, will grant us peace.  I can think of nothing else we need more now than this. Peace and God's unimaginable strength to sustain and protect us on this tiny world hurtling through space.

Pathetic prayers and holy defiance

The end of the letter from Dom Christian.  The entire letter is reproduced here:

  http://www.moines-tibhirine.org/images/stories/Testament/manuscrit.pdf

Elizabeth Scalia, who blogs as The Anchoress, has a post up entitled "A prayer for Somalia, and for the pathetic killers who face eternal darkness."  I was taken aback by both the title and the prayer.

I was reminded, too, of the very different stance evident in the letter left behind by Cistercian monk Dom Christian de Chergé, who was abducted and subsequently killed by terrorists in Algeria.  In it, he prayed:

I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems to prevail so terribly in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down. 

I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.

(I learned of the story of the monks of Tibhirine from a poem by the luminous Marilyn Nelson, which I enjoin you to read, the full text is here.)

Scalia begins by asking us to place ourselves with the hundred of peoples who died and were injured in the bombings, to see beyond the numbers to the human stories. As we did for those struck down in Las Vegas.  But then she shifts to praying for the "pathetic killers," a prayer she characterizes as "holy defiance." She prays (or quotes someone else's prayer, it's unclear): "for the murderers who will spend eternity apart from the Source of All Love, that they may yet turn away from what is dark, and into God’s marvelous light."

She prays for their redemption, not their condemnation, but I wish there were more mercy, more a sense of that those who killed are as much children of God as those they killed. Dom Christian ends his letter with

Yes, I want this thank you and this goodbye to be a "God bless" for you, too, because in God's face I see yours. 

May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.

I am praying for those killed, and those who killed. But I'm praying, like Dom Christian, that I will be graced with a moment of clarity that lets me forgive, in the hopes of being one day a happy thief in Paradise.  That I will grasp that what it means to put on Christ: to forgive, to redeem, to die, to rise. That prayer, I think, might truly be "holy defiance."

________
Read the entire letter from Dom Christian here in French, here in English.

Memory management

One of the platters from the 80 Mbyte drive I used in grad 

school.  Note the magnetic materials has been scraped down

to the bare metal. Always back up.  I lost six weeks of work

that had to be retyped in.

It's the start of fall break here and fall weather seems to have arrived with it. (Though not quite to stay, the temperatures for next weekend exceed the 90th percentile for high's at this point in October.)  I've been looking forward to some time to write and some time to do some of the low priority things I'd pushing to the back.  Even as I write this, I keep remembering things I wanted to accomplish!

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at St. Edward's University in Austin for their annual Lucian symposium.  Four speakers, a dinner, a student poster session. My talk was organized around the tools that chemists have for exploring structure, including some we might not think of as "modern" such as paper models, making the case for broadening the base of tools chemists have access to along with modernizing them.

Along the way I showed some of the computational tools I had used, including our "big" drive.  80 Mbytes and the size of a washing machine.  I can now keep 128 Gbytes on my key chain and forget I have it.  One feature of the coding I did in those days was the need to intentionally allocate memory for lists and arrays, including deciding could be moved into memory as a piece. For these computationally demanding tasks, having a carefully designed overlap was key.

My to-do list feels like that old-fashioned overlay.  I have the teaching list, the administrative list, the writing list, the personal lists. Load them in, wiping what is currently in memory.  Repeat.  Can I keep things from accidentally writing over what I need to keep in working memory (the load of wash in while I write?).

I go before you always

We buried a parishioner today, a woman of 103. The funeral was small, a handful of friends and relatives.  I stood beside the font near the entrance of the church, vested in baptismal white, as we clothed her body one last time in white, outward sign of the inner reality of her immersion in Christ, then took the processional cross and stood in front of the coffin.

"Let's go, Michelle," came the sure low voice of the pastor behind me.  As the cantor sang the refrain, "I go before you always," I smoothly lifted the cross high, and my eyes on Christ in the crucifixion scene which hangs in the lunette of the dome, led the small procession to the altar.  Me, the pastor, the pallbearers and her body. I go before you always.  I could almost sense the corresponding heavenly procession.  The cross before all. A great cloud of witnesses.

At the end of Mass we sent her soul onward, incense under and over her casket, around and around, a great cloud of prayers gathering her up.

Afterwards, I went out back to get my bike, to find the censer cooling on the ramp behind the church.  The holy wreathing the quotidian. Remember that you are dust, it said, and unto dust, you will return.

Talking football and quantum mechanics

My mom and dad with my sibs.

The ur-football fan in my life was a woman, my mother, who took immense joy in the nuances of the game whether it was the local Bearcat high school team or her beloved Raiders.  My father wasn't a fan, but Math Man is, so on Sundays in football season, she'd call him from California and they'd watch the game "together," chewing over the plays and their execution.

So I found it, well, funny, to hear Florida Panther's quarterback Cam Newton smirk and say in response to a female reporter' question, "It's funny to hear a female talk about routes like...it's funny."  (After careful thought and 24 hours, he's decided this wasn't an acceptable response to the reporter's question.)

I'm trying to imagine this in my context, asking a question at a seminar or talk only to have the speaker smirk and come back with, "It's funny to hear a female talk about quantum mechanics like...it's funny."

I actually don't have to think all that hard. Two years ago at a dinner before a talk, the female speaker asked me a technical question (what basis sets I preferred to use with a particular density functional, if you must know), and as I started to respond to her, I was interrupted by a young (undergraduate) male researcher at the table.  "Why are you asking her that question?" he demanded of the speaker, clearly irked.  Perhaps because I am one of the people who did the work, and the first author on the original paper?

The whole incident reminds me of Rudyard Kipling comments on visiting Chautauqua (a resort in New York State where women denied educational opportunities in more formal venues gathered each summer to study): “I’m awfully sorry for the girls who take it seriously. I suppose the bulk of them don’t... One never gets to believe in the proper destiny of women until one sees a thousand of ‘em doing something different.  There is something wrong with it.”

A few thoughts and prayers

Near is the LORD to the broken-hearted
and the crushed in spirit He rescues. Ps 34:19

Listening to Donald Trump quote the psalms in his remarks to the nation after the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday made me gasp aloud, it was such a switch from his usual nondescript religious language: "God bless America!" and "thoughts and prayers."  And though he attributed it only to "scripture," after decades praying the psalter I had no trouble recognizing the source:  Psalm 34.

It drove me to pick up Walter Brueggemann's short and pointed book, Praying the Psalms, last night. In it, Brueggemann points out that the psalms as prayers are direct, perhaps uncomfortably so.  The images are concrete and familiar.   Mud and bees.  Waters frozen, hoarfrost scattered like ashes. Tears. Vengeance.  There is an unfiltered immediacy to them.  A trust so deep we feel we can say anything?  Or a world so shaken, there is nothing left to lose?

We pray, and in doing so presume to entangle ourselves with the transcendent, all-powerful, ever-living God.  How can we imagine such an encounter will not leave us untouched, unshaken, unmoved?  What are we thinking?  "I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me." (C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands) Are we willing to pray to be changed?

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Beg so that your continuing prayer of petition appears to be a pledge of your faith in the light of God in the darkness of the world, for your hope for life in this constant dying, for your loyalty of love that loves without reward. — Karl Rahner, S.J., “The Prayer of Need” in The Need and the Blessing of Prayer

A lens on the sacred and the daily

There are no unsacred places;

There are only sacred places

And desecrated places.
— Wendell Berry

There's a meme on Facebook these days, a challenge to post one black and white photograph a day for a week, a glimpse of your day.  I've been enjoying seeing the world through the eyes of various friends. The incredible photo of a bumblebee on a sunflower, one petal folded over like a sunshade.  A sky that looked like rippled silk. Mugs holding hands.

These are apples in the sous vide, seen from above, with a bit of spice and brown sugar.  Simmer at 70^oC for a couple of hours, then chill. 

I spent a good chunk of Saturday cooking ahead for the week (and the month), along with organizing the results of the monthly major shop.

Aliens have landed on my roof

Classes have begun at the college, a season about which I have selective amnesia.  No matter how many times I have done this (33 times, I'm counting), no matter how prepared I am with handouts and room arrangements and...it is always nervewrackingly chaotic and utterly exhausting.  It's fun like riding a really big wave is, equal parts exhilaration and terror, and you can feel pretty bedraggled by the time you wash up on the beach.

And of course, while you are riding this wave of new school year energy, you can't do anything else. All this to say, it felt delightful today to have some quiet time to do some research and a bit of reading.

I had Jon Larsen's  In Search of Stardust¹ on my stack of books to read because last spring the upper division research methods course I taught did an experiment to measure the heat capacities of meteorites, using the method developed by the Vatican Observatory's Guy Consolmagno, SJ and Bob Macke, SJ and colleagues.² The students were curious about the astrochemistry context (where do the samples come from, how can you distinguish regular rocks from these stony aliens) and I've been collecting resources for this coming spring when a new batch of students will make these measurements.

I tend to think of meteorite strikes as spectacular and rare events, fireballs roaring through the sky that finally come crashing to earth.  Still they aren't as rare was you might think — tens of thousands of meteorites weighing as much or more than a euro coin hit the earth each year, most of them landing in the water.  But what takes my breath away are the hundreds of trillions of micrometeorites that come to rest on earth each year, adding as much as 100,000 metric tons to the earth's mass.  Invisible, unremarked.  Perhaps as many as one a day hits the roof of my house, there are surely some of these ancient bits of dust in the water I drink, still others stuck to my hands after weeding the garden.

Larsen, a Norwegian jazz musician, discovered that you could find and identify these micrometeorites by looking at the dust on urban roofs, previously it had been thought you couldn't find them in the midst of the general detritus of a city. But a careful eye is rewarded, as these cosmic intruders have a characteristic morphology. Their shape and appearance means you can sort them out under a microscope, much like Pasteur manually sorted the crystals of tartaric acid, and they are astonishingly beautiful.

From J. Larsen, In Search of Stardust , p. 51.

Larsen offers a brief and readable glimpse into the science of micrometeorites, but I enjoyed simply browsing the images, reading them as I might clouds.  There is a golden glass meteorite with deep blue inclusions (p 51) that looks like some alien aquatic creature's shell, while the burnished cryptocrystalline specimen on page 45 looks like a bronzed wasp's nest — until one remembers it is less than a millimeter long. One scanning electron microscopic image of an ablation spherule from the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 looks like a tiny alien skull.

As much as I learned about the dust from outer space, Larsen's register of the terrestrial imposters gave me an entirely different view of road dust, which contains polished spheres of glass from the reflective markings on the roads and tiny crystals, microgemstones.

In one of the most beautiful passages in Isaiah (Is 54:11-12) we are told, "I lay your pavements in carnelians..." Who knew it was literally true.  The world is a beautiful place, if only we know where and how to look.

(A version of this post appeared at the Vatican Observatory Foundation's Catholic Astronomer blog.)

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1. J. Larsen, In Search of Stardust   If you get it at Amazon through this link, the Vatican Observatory Foundation will get a donation. There was an article in the NY Times last spring about the project as well.

2. Guy J. Consolmagno, Martha W. Schaefer, Bradley E. Schaefer, Daniel T. Britt, Robert J. Macke, Michael C. Nolan, Ellen S. Howell, "The measurement of meteorite heat capacity at low temperatures using liquid nitrogen vaporization" Planetary and Space Science, 87 (2013) 146-156

Renewing vows: 9131 days

It's the nine thousand one hundred and thirty first day since Math Man and I walked through the doors of the parish church, processed down the aisle and vowed to stand by each other and cherish each other in weal and in woe.

It's our 25th anniversary, if you don't want to do the math (yes, Math Man included the leap years!).  It's not a prime number, but composite, with a prime factorization of 23 x 397.

Our sons had a life sized photo cutout of us made and restaged the wedding — right where it happened in our parish church. It is an entirely different take on renewing your vows.  They photographed the 'event' and gave us the photos (and the cutout) for an anniversary present.

It seems unthinkable that we've been married more than 13 million minutes, millions seem so large and the time so short.  Other significant dates to come?  On January 22, 2020 we will have been married 10,000 days and on Monday, May 13, 2024 for a billion seconds.  Billions and billions. And yes, these days are on my calendar!

Labor, crosses, prophets and floods

I've lost count of laundry loads and dishwasher runs and dinners cooked, the house has been bouncing since I got back from Rome in early August. The boys have come and gone again, back to school and work, one to the east, the other west.  The Egg's friends have come to visit, sleeping on sofas.

The long and short of serving.

My sister-in-law, No-no came to drop my niece, She of the Book, off at college.  From Houston.  They arrived here the day Harvey hit, awoke Sunday morning to texts from my brother Geek Guru that the waters of the nearby bayou had risen fast and he and my nephew were shocked to find they were now trapped in the house.  They spent a damp, dark day surrounded by flood waters, checked on by police on a Zodiac, watching neighbors get pulled out by boat and helicopter.

They are, I am relieved to say, now safe. When the waters went down, they evacuated to my other Houston brother's house. The house is OK, it was raised up past the 100 year flood level.  The garage and the cars in it?  Toast.

Labor, crosses, prophets and floods. And yet still, ordinary time.

Blood Feuds: The Great Bryn Mawr Bake Off

"Can you search to find what to substitute for glucose syrup?" I asked Crash.  Corn syrup, as it turns out. "It's cool to find a use for corn syrup besides making blood." he mused.

Math Man likes eclairs.  For Father's Day I bought him a book of fancy eclairs (or rather a book of eclair recipes) to browse, and promised to make him some.  The Egg has been home for a few days between a summer of math research and the start of his senior year and binge watching the Great British Baking Show.  Crash is also here for a few weeks between a stint in England and his next stage management gig, and thought to stretch his cooking repertoire beyond Budget Bytes and blood. Hence the eclairs.

Raspberry and chocolate, it still looked like Macbeth in the kitchen yesterday. (See below)

This afternoon we had The Egg making bread, Crash making choux for the eclairs (from Tom's mom's recipe after the book's recipe failed us) and me making braised short ribs for The Egg's departure dinner.  It was a lot like an episode of the Great British Baking Show.  Right down to Chris fanning the chocolate glazed eclairs with the baking sheet.

Angels in glass

From a old column for CatholicPhilly

Stair treads in Hiroshi Sugimoto's installation, at the restored Go'o 

Shrine on Naoshima, Japan. c. Michelle Francl

No one lingered after the 12:10 Mass. The breezes that spun through the open stained glass windows whispered of an August day too wondrously crisp and cool to be inside.

“What can I do to help you get out sooner?” I asked the sacristan.

“Could you close the windows?”

I found the pole and started down the south aisle. The light streamed through the canted stained glass, and I paused for a minute to read the names inscribed along the bottom of each century-old pane.  “William and Margaret White” under St. Patrick and St. Bridget; the Ancient Order of Hibernians made a gift of St. Rita and St. Nicholas of Tolentine.

Each window gently puffed as I swung it closed. “Peace be with you” they seemed to say, blessing me over and over again as I worked my way around the periphery of the sanctuary.

I am reminded of a line from Sainte-Chappelle by Eric Whitacre, a choral composer famous for his intricate a cappella works: Et angeli in vitro molliter cantaverunt.  “And the angels in the glass softly sang.”  Whitacre’s piece tells the story of a young girl visiting Sainte Chappelle, a medieval gothic church in Paris renowned for its striking stained glass windows.

The girl hears the angels in the windows softly singing “Sanctus, sanctus.” Her voice and theirs twine until the light itself sings, “Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory.”  The score is crystalline, I can hear the dust motes dance in the light that streams through the windows, the stone walls of the church itself sing.

Even a silent chapel has something to say to us. The design of a church is meant to both speak to us of God’s saving work and to encourage us to speak to God in return. Images, whether frescos or stained glass windows, facilitate these conversations.

St. John Damascene, an eighth century Syrian monk, wrote that holy images move him “to contemplation, as a meadow delights the eyes and subtly infuses the soul with the glory of God.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that light and darkness speak to us of God [1147].

Stained glass windows sing to us of the company of faith to which we belong: the angels, the saints, the artists who take light and darkness and bend them into a shape that moves us closer to God, the people who supported these artists financially and in prayer as they worked.

Next time you find yourself in a quiet church, see if you can hear the soft voices of the angels and saints in the glass singing, then join your voice with theirs in hymns of praise, thanksgiving and supplication.  Et lumen canit.  For the Light sings.

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Read the story of the angels in glass (as sung in the Latin or the English translation) here.

Listen to Eric Whitacre talk about the composition of Sainte-Chappelle (along with some snippets of the music).

Take a virtual tour of the Sainte Chappelle sanctuary.

Unexpected eclipses

Midway to the peak of the eclipse.  No, I didn't look through

the camera to take this!  Note the lens flare just to the right

of the sun.

"Aunt Chel," called my youngest niece as she bounded through the front door of my dad's house, "it looks funny outside."

I got up and went to check.  I agreed, something was off. The sky was dimmer than it should be and an odd color, not the desert blue I expected late on a Sunday afternoon, but colored a bit orange.  Thunderstorm incoming?  No, not a cloud in the sky.  And I'm in the desert. Right. Fire? This is more of a worry, there is only one road out from my dad's small farm.  We don't smell smoke, but still, I'm uneasy. And then there are the trees....something is just not right.

We go back inside to check if there is anything on the Cal Fire site about nearby fires, my dad and sister-in-law have worried looks on their faces as I describe the sky. As I'm opening up my laptop , my stepmother mentions in passing that she'd heard something about an eclipse coming next month. Next month?  "Or perhaps today?" I wonder aloud. I hadn't heard anything, but I live on the other side of the continent, and I'd been on retreat for the last week, staying in a hermitage in a spot even more remote than my dad's farm, and before that, spinning around in the end of semester chaos.  

You can see the "bite" the moon has taken out from the sun in
the lens flare!

I type "eclipse" into the search box. We are indeed in the middle of an annular eclipse of the sun, the moon's shadow will sweep over California, but not reach the East Coast.  80% of the sun's disc will be obscured by the sun at the peak.  This is a noticeable amount of shade, and we've noticed.

I breathe a sigh of relief, and take my niece and nephew out to show them how to observe the eclipse by making pinhole cameras with sheets of paper, and by looking at the crescent shadows on the ground (the leaves on the trees serve as ad hoc pinholes, or you can make your own grid with your fingers).

The crescents are visible in the
grid made by my niece's hands.

This time I know there is an eclipse tomorrow. The reports on the radio, TV spots, news reports are hard to ignore.  I am prepared.   I have glasses to watch with, and a pair of binoculars with the appropriate filters on them.I have a good sense of what the sky will look like; outside Philadelphia, where I live the sun will be just under 80% obscured.

But I wonder if being so prepared will change the experience. Will it be as viscerally disturbing, or just a fun science-in-the-neighborhood day, much like the Wallops' rocket launches we gather at the school field to watch?  What do I miss when I am not sitting uneasily on the edge of uncertainty?

The mathematics and science that let us predict eclipses, not only their time and track, but also the phenomena we ought to observe, take my breath away, but I confess I don't long for a universe that I can completely predict.  It reminds me of a line from one of Alice Walker's poems (Before you knew you owned it): “Live frugally on surprise.” Surprise is part of the delight of doing science, the interesting questions for me come when molecules surprise me, in their structures or or in their behavior.

Similarly, my heart and soul are not captured by an utterly predictable God, a clockwork deity. I long to be surprised by mercy, ambushed by God, caught in a whirl of life and love beyond my comprehension, just as I was caught by surprise by that eclipse.

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A version of this post appears at the Vatican Observatory Foundation's blog, The Catholic Astronomer.