O Cecilia!

 Writing this reflection gave me a serious Simon & Garfunkel earworm last February!

I will give thanks to you, O Lord, with all my heart;
I will declare all your wondrous deeds.
I will be glad and exult in you;
I will sing praise to your name, Most High. — Psalm 9

On this day, we celebrate the memorial of St. Cecilia, so it is not surprising that a line in the opening verse of the psalm caught my eye: I will sing praise to your name. Cecilia is, perforce, the patron saint of music and musicians, of all who give voice to God’s praises in song.

Over and over in the psalms, we hear the imperative: Sing! Qui cantat, bis orat, said St. Augustine (perhaps). To sing is to pray twice. Music propels a text out of two dimensions. It pulls us into a space where beat and timbre, harmony and counterpoint can rouse us, can give shape to what is ineffable, unutterable.

I take a deep breath to begin the entrance hymn, and encounter God’s expansive grace, enabling me to be just a little bit more than who I was a moment before. I feel the pew shiver under my hands as the organ digs into a deeper register, my awe of the all-powerful, ever-living God literally palpable. I hear the woman behind me in line for communion break into a soprano descant and am reminded that in prayer, as in music, we are called to be one Body, one Word, our differences intricately woven into a stronger and more beautiful whole.

St. John of the Cross called prayer the breathing of God in the soul and of the soul in God. So, whenever I sing in prayer, the living Word of God breathes within me, and I, alive with that Word, breathe within God.

— From Give Us This Day, November 2025

Light from light

I am giving a day of retreat at a retreat house in Bryn Mawr on the first Tuesday of Advent:

“God comes to us in light and in shadow. Aflame in a bush calling out to Moses, brilliant in the star that led wise men to a savior in a manger, and radiant in Christ transfigured on a mountain top. But as poet Rainer Marie Rilke noted, God can also be found deep in the darkness. A billowing cloud led Israel through the desert, the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary so that she might bear the Messiah, a voice from a cloud spoke of a beloved Son. As we await the celebration of the birth of the Light of the World, join us as we pray with these luminous images.”

I spent today sketching the texts for the four reflections that will frame the day and working out the discussion/sharing sessions that (I hope) will draw people into conversation with each other and the material. It was such a grace to have an entire day to devote to writing and thinking, to work at an unforced pace. This is what I am looking forward to in the next phase of my life!

And I learned how to use my phone to capture what I am thinking aloud and transcribe it for me. I had been using Dragon dictation on a PC when I didn’t want to type, but it’s nice to be able to not have to mov between devices (the phone syncs automatically to the laptop). 

Quantum quacks

Could I fund my retirement not by writing, but by hawking “zero point energy wands” sold by a real quantum mechanic? 

For  $119.97 (marked down from $169.99) you can buy a “scalar energy tool… infused with a full spectrum of over 18000+ beneficial vibrational frequencies.” Made of a  “ proprietary blend of semi-precious minerals, bioceramics, and crystals.” Ah, and a free wanding guide is included. 

Zero point energy is the inaccessible energy that a quantum mechanical system can have. For example, at absolute zero molecules are still moving, quivering in their places. This residual kinetic energy isn’t recoverable, by physics or by a wand of any sort. The wanding guide would be funny ("Drink a glass of wanded water before wanding yourself as it frequently speeds things up as your internal water molecules listen more effectively to the wand energy.") except that the list of maladies they purport to treat tells you that they are preying on the vulnerable. Cancer pain.

So definitely not how I'll be funding my retirement. 

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Walmart sells them for $19.99.

I'm not linking to the wanding guide or the wands themselves, because I don't want to give them more visibility.

“Quantum quacks” is the title of my next column in Nature Chemistry — about semantic drift and the woo that clings to “quantum” these days. It’s framed around zero point energy wands.

Tiny transporter

 

The family chat is sprinkled with photos of what we are cooking and baking. A way of being in each other’s kitchens when we are far apart. I can drool over Math Guy and his husband’s focaccia stuffed with mortadella. A loaf of Crash’s sourdough brings back memories of tending the starter during the pandemic. Math Man’s breakfast omelet. 

Today I am trying a recipe for an orange cranberry loaf. (The recipe suggests it freezes well and I am hoping I can slice and freeze for an occasional treat with my afternoon tea!) Photos of the process went into the family chat. Crash’s partner responded, “I wish you could send that overseas!!”

“We need the transporter, at least for loaves. Like how much power should it take for a little one, the size of a microwave?”

Math Guy bounced in to suggest that you just need a tiny fusion reactor. Which reminded me of the time he created a ball of plasma in the microwave, a little tiny sun hovering between two halves of a grape. 

Next kitchen renovation? Never mind a pot filler for the stove, I want a tiny fusion reactor and a toaster oven sized transporter to beam a slice of cake across town or across the Atlantic.

Last times

There is, they say, a last time for everything. It is certainly true for me this (last) academic year. There are many last times.  I have graded the last quantum midterm, and today made up the last problem set for the class. Last week in intro chemistry, I taught VSEPR theory for the last time. It takes practice to be able to visualize the 3D structures of the molecules from the sketches that chemists make, and so I give them all a simple molecular model kit they can carry around. It all fits neatly into a centrifuge tube.

I bring all the pieces to class and have students assemble their own kits. This time when I went to put the extra bits and bobs away, tossing the little signs — “Take 3” — into the bag I realized with a start that I would not need these things again. I could just toss the signs and give away the 50 extra octahedral centers. Except I couldn’t. It seemed too…real. Too final.

Somehow the last things are less real when there is not actual stuff attached to them. Literally weightier, they feel metaphorically heavier, too. I repacked the bag and put it back in the cupboard. 

Maybe it is the time of year, not just my imminent retirement. The days are shorter, the sun struggles to climb high in the sky, and the readings at Mass are circling around the end times.

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VSEPR stands for valence shell electron pair repulsion and basically says that bonds around an atom will arrange themselves to be as far apart as they can because the electrons that make up the bonds repel. So if an atom has two other atoms bonded to it, they will be in a line (CO₂ is an example), 180^o apart. There are a dozen or so patterns based on this theory.

Centrifuge tubes are great for storing small amounts of stuff and you don’t have to be a scientist to buy them. They don’t usually leak, either.

Back to the ordinary

"We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…" I created the document in mid-June. Forty-seven reflections to write (forty-eight if you count the preface), forty-seven meditations to design. An empty space waiting for words, or perhaps waiting on the Word. Twenty weeks and seventeen thousand words later, it's off to the editor.

These last few weeks in particular I feel like I have been living in Lent: walking toward to Jerusalem, jostled by the crowds, facing the Passion. The lectionary selections for Lent are like a greatest hits list, so bits and pieces appear in the Ordinary way of things. And each time they do I am momentarily disoriented. The Pharisee and the tax collector are praying...Is it Tuesday in the first week of Lent? or the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time? Or both?

I keep envisioning it as a Fourier transform experiment, hitting all the frequencies at once, then capturing the free induction decay and transforming it into the other domain, where each peak pops up out of the noise. It's just not clear which domain I am in when writing. (Apologies to the non-spectroscopists out there.)

For today I am grateful to be anchored back in a single time.