The Spirit hovers over the chaos...and Tim Horton's

Actual photo of Holy Spirit on the streets of
Rome checking on a very tired and hot
pilgrim walking to the Holy Door in the 
Jubilee Year of mercy. 
 

"This morning, a few of the monks had their chapel service at St. Timothy of Horton's, a coffee shop down the road. After sharing prayers and singing in four-part harmony, "The Lone Wild Bird" to a shocked crowd of retirees and truckers, they prayed for the tired and weary souls going through the Drive-Thru. The Spirit doesn't just hover over altars; She hovers over coffee tables, Tim Bits, and parking lots, too." — from a post by The Unvirtuous Abbey

In the midst of the end of the semester chaos, I wouldn't mind finding a group of monks (or anyone for that matter) at Lancaster and Pennswood praying for the tired and weary souls trying to find a parking space at Acme and grab the half gallon of milk they forgot and get home in time to make dinner before the kid's concert tonight. What would happen if the Augustinians moved Morning Prayer outside occasionally, setting up the choir on either side of the street instead of on either side of the chapel, pitching the psalms back and forth over the traffic?

I am also certain that the Holy Spirit hovers over chaos by preference, breathing on it and trying to coax it into shape. This post reminds me of a line in Wendell Berry's How to be a poet: "There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places." Or maybe of the story of the desert father Abba Bessarion walking by the sea with his thirsty young companion: "God is here, God is everywhere."

I sometimes think we pull too many punches when we pray. I confess I am guilty of writing glossy but vague prayers. I pray for "the leaders of nations, that they might govern with justice and mercy" when I really mean, "Dear God, please send an angelic horde down to remind the leaders of my government that making children go hungry is a grievous sin; that mercy is due to immigrants as much as to citizens, for we are all children of God, images of the Divine; and that we should be distributing plowshares, not weapons of mass destruction. Amen?" I realize God knows far better than I just what is going on, so in that sense it doesn't matter, but the point of these intercessory prayers isn't to get onto God's to-do list. The point is, as Tomáš Halík notes in his book, Touch the Wounds, to open a dialog with God to discover just what we can (and cannot) do to address the problem.

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The Unvirtuous Abbey has been manifesting hope and humor on social media for many years. As a sometimes writing of intercessions for my parish, I appreciate their incisive and slightly sarcastic prayers —"For those who claim to know “what God intends” when most of us can’t figure out what our cat wants, we pray. " (Unvirtuous Abbey (@UnvirtuousAbbey) October 24, 2012).

Want to know more about the Unvirtuous Abbey? Here are a couple of interviews from years past. If you are still on social media (and I completely understand if you are not), you can catch them on Bluesky and Facebook.

Jesuit Post interview

Practical Catholic interview

Heavy metal band: tea edition

"Though we might conceive of scientific language as objective, rather than sensual or poetic, in fact phonesthemic considerations play an important role. We know a science word when we hear it, even if we don't know what it means." Nature Chemistry 3, 417–418 (2011)

About 15 years ago I wrote an essay for Nature Chemistry titled "Neolexia," about how new science words get birthed. What should they sound like, what languages should they draw from, should there be humor. (You can read the whole essay here.) In it, I noted that zoologist Lancelot Hogben (Lancelot?!) had very firm ideas on how new science terms should be built.

Heavy metals and tea have been in the news this week, which made me wonder if I should start a tea-themed heavy metal band. Which of course needs a name. And like science words, we know a heavy metal band name when we hear one: Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Anthrax. There should be some hard consonants, and perhaps a whiff of danger. Herewith....

The Katekins (cat-eh-kins, for the catechin molecules that act as antioxidants)

Agonized Leaves (for the agony of the leaves, the way that the dried tea leaves writhe as they unfurl in hot water)

Redox (so much of tea chemistry is redox)

Tea Scum (IYKYN)

Thoughts?

Pandemic pasta proofs

There is a fabulous investigative piece on the bucatini shortage (did you notice?) by Rachel Handler in Grub Street. It's a great read.

Bucatini gets its name from the Italian for hole, buco. It's basically spaghetti with a hole drilled through it. (That's not actually how it's made, I realize. It's extruded with the hole built in, but I am enjoying the image of special drill bits hollowing out thick spaghetti and given the pandemic, I'm letting my imagination run rampant, since I can't.) Anyway, Handler suggests the appeal of bucatini is how much sauce each strand can take up, about 200% more she asserts than its thinner, topological genus zero counterpart, "due to math."

I wondered about that math, so I did it. The surface area of a cylinder is π x d x h. Where π  is π  (3.1415928....) and d is the diameter of the cylinder and h the height (not Planck's constant, the first thing. I think of when I see h in an equation). For a 260 mm length of bucatini with an outer diameter of 2.9 mm and an inner diameter of 0,8 mm, the surface area of the outside is 2370 mm² and inside is 650 mm². For the same length of spaghetti, it's 1570 mm². So assuming the sauce penetrates to the center of the tube, the bucatini has 192% of the spaghetti's surface for sauce. Or about only about 100% more. Math!

Now, of course, I want to know how much the sauce does penetrate down the center shaft. Will there be bucatini at the grocery store tomorrow? Stay tuned for further pandemic pasta proofs.

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Photo is from Wikimedia by Popo le Chien and is used under a Creative Commons license.

Objects with a topological genus of zero have no holes in them, e.g. a solid sphere. Objects with one hole — bucatini, donuts and coffee mugs — are genus one. This is the source of the mathematical joke that to a topologist, a donut and a coffee mug are the same.

Cat-astrophe

If you look closely, you'll notice that the Delft mug on my desk features not pastoral images of the Netherlands but robots and pterodactyls and aliens invading. Catastrophes. It seems like an apt choice for these pandemic days. Besides, it holds heat nicely and it works with the splints holding my finger joints in place. 

The other day I brought up a mug of hot tea to start the day. Fluffy decided to join me. Afraid she'd knock over the tea and hurt herself, I opted to remove her bodily from the desk. 

This worked. She didn't knock over the tea. I did. With such vigor I sent the tea flying a full six feet and left my phone in a puddle of (alas) sweet tea. I grabbed the phone and rinsed it. Washed the floor. Thrice. Because sugar. 

But I didn't break the mug and the phone still works.

So how's quarantine going for you?

 

Mathematical Morning Musings

It's not yet 8 a.m. I'm in the bathroom washing my face, Math Man is getting ready to get in the shower. He turns to me and says, "So if you take the partial derivative of r with respect to x...well, actually the second partial derivative..." 

"Where r is the square root of x squared plus y squared plus z squared?" wondering if he is really talking to me, or just thinking aloud.

"No, no, just x and y," he clarifies.

Unbidden the chain rule flowers in my brain, 2x times a half...divided by the square root, right and then we'll need the product rule. We don't keep a white board marker in the bathroom, despite its inviting plethora of glass surfaces. I'm not sure why, there's one in the kitchen and in the downstairs bathroom, where math gets inscribed on the panes of glass in the door and on the mirror. We have a glass sheet screwed to the wall in the downstairs hallway for the purpose. But I digress...

"Does it surprise you that it blows up?" wonders Math Man.

"Oh, no...that derivative shows up in some operators."

Sweet talk between lovers in the morning.

Only the trees work...

The dies for the cookie press in the handy stand my father

made to hold them.

Spritz cookies have been a Christmas tradition in my house as long as I can remember, pressed out of a bronze-colored cookie press. I loved looking at the dies when I was young, wondering what shapes each would make. My mother always made Christmas trees and wreaths, but what I wanted to try was the camel.

"No," she would say, "the camel doesn't work. Trees and wreaths." And so we made wreaths with cinnamon holly berries and  trees sprinkled with green sugar and colorful nonpareils as ornaments. (In those days a silver dragée star was placed on top of the trees, but the combination of  my more minimalist Christmas tendencies and the end of the semester exhaustion has led me to abandon that part of the tradition.)

Before we sold my parents' house this summer, we packed up what people wanted from the kitchen. What did I want? Not the Kitchen Aid mixer, but the camel die for the cookie press!  Because I was going to make those camels I'd desired all these years. So I put the handy stand my dad had made to hold the dies (a miniature version of what he used to hold his radial arm saw blades) in one of the boxes I was shipping home

Fast forward to Christmas Eve morning. Crash was arriving from DC and was down for cookie baking, spritz on the list. I made the dough and dug out the cookie press, put the camel die in and...a shapeless blob of dough appeared on the sheet. Three tries later... Ok, maybe using my mother's press was sweet and nostalgic, but not practical. Switched the die and loaded my cookie press. Nope, nope nope. Maybe I should chill the dough. No go. Different cookie sheet? No. Cookie sheet too warm? too cold? Is this sounding like a Bon Appetit video? Finally, I tried the tree. Boom, two dozen trees appeared on the tray.

The camel doesn't work.

Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Johnny Mathis' cover of "It's the most wonderful time of the year!" was playing and I was trying so hard not to laugh lest I bite the poor dentist filling my mouth with local anesthetic.

"It's the most wonderful time of the year
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you be of good cheer
It's the most wonderful time of the year..."

The irony of an emergency root canal (the result of a cracked tooth) on the day before Christmas Eve juxtaposed against that song made us all crack up. I wasn't particularly cheery about it all.

So I'm eating yogurt and pudding and swallowing antibiotics and lots of ibuprofen. Still, jingle belling seems right out.

I'm grateful that not only was the dental office open, but my dentist and his top team were in. I'll take that as a Christmas gift!

Schrödinger's email

Not Schrödinger's cat. Not in a box. But you get the idea.

“I feel like my email is Schrödinger’s cat in the box,” I told Math Man. “I open my email never knowing what's inside and there’s always a crisis in it.”

“No, it’s not,” he reassured me. “In Schrödinger’s thought experiment, it’s only a disaster for the cat half the time. There’s no uncertainty about what's in your inbox at all.”

#truth #quantumHumor

Vocations.com

"Vocatus — for the discerning." read the door. The "t," he noticed, was a discrete crucifix.

He'd gotten the email asking him to make an appointment almost a month ago. The woman who'd taken his call wouldn't answer any of his questions, saying only, "Our certified spiritual genomicist will walk you through your results."

The softly lit waiting room was unremarkable, stock chairs and table lamps, blue industrial carpet. 

By Brian0918 

Or it was until you noticed the bowls of branded rosaries on the side tables, "Vocatus ™" on one side of the center medal, an image of Our Lady of Graces on the other. Virginal white plastic beads. High grade, but plastic nonetheless.

Click, click. The guy next to him was nervously fingering a rosary in his pocket. Definitely not a candidate for the Trappists, he thought. And what about that guy in the corner, in a leather jacket and jeans so black he nearly vanished into the shadows. Goth or Jesuit?

"Xavier," called the receptionist and he followed her down the hall. A thin man in a Benedictine habit stood up behind a desk and reached across to shake his hand and introduce himself with a word, "John."  A bar chart was up on the monitor, he saw.

"Sit, please," John gestured to the chair across from him.

"We appreciate your interest in discernment, and let me start by saying that your results indicate you have a strong vocation." He turned toward the monitor. "As you see, the markers for mysticism are clear, you carry all three of the known genes: NUM3, XTC9 and NEF1. These, in combination with the ascetic gene, at 7q31.2," he touched a pad and a gene map appeared, marked up in red, "suggest the Carthusians could be a fit for you.  Now, here we see..."

_____________
I went to a talk last week by an anthropologist who mentioned genomic markers for experiencing the numinous, which has me musing about  a world in which vocations directors would use gene maps.

Holy kicks

I need new walking shoes, and Keen no longer makes the ones that have taken me more than a thousand miles (yes, they should have been replaced at half that, but....). Searching the interwebs for something suitable, these shoes came up. INRI shoes, Nikes with 60 ml of water from the Jordan (holy water, blessed by a priest). Complete with red wool insoles (to remind you of the previous Pope's Pradas and sorry, I couldn't resist the alliteration), a "papal" seal and a crucifix. Cost? $1425 because the verse in which Jesus walks on the water is Matthew 14:25. (I think they missed a connection when they made 24 pairs, not 12.) They sold out in 1 minute, but you can get them on the resale market.

You could argue the shoes are reliquaries, holding water from the Jordan in which Jesus was baptized, though the actual water poured over his head is long flowed to the sea. Still, over two millennia and assuming good mixing, the probability is high that some of those molecules (perhaps a hundred) are once again in the Jordan and now in the INRI shoes that once poured over Jesus' head. By the same arguments, there might be a thousand molecules of water in my tea that once poured over Jesus's head.  Does this make the shoes a first class relic? My tea?

It's all holy ground we walk on, $1425 holy kicks or not. And I still need to find new walking shoes.

Rom-com at the Rite Aid

Math Man took in the expanse of wood floor, the waltz-y music and reached for me. "It seems the perfect spot to dance." I laughed and said, "There's a scene from a movie!" We were on an exciting Saturday morning date to get our flu shots.

I spent the 15 minutes we had to wait imagining the movie, scribbling bits on an old flyer from the Edinburg Fringe stuffed at the bottom of my bag. (Because I'd left my trusty 3x5" black notebook in my other bag.) Surely a rom-com? Or just maybe a Bond knock-off? Nope, definitely a rom-com. How would I have written this scene? Were we the main characters or are we having a cameo in someone else's film? Was this a prologue, the epilog, a set-up for a flashback? Would we dance, or not quite touch and head to the chairs at the edge?

We are the main characters. The pharmacist is a cameo by Awkwafina. It's the prologue, which is the set-up for a flashback, to Princeton University in the fall. It's October 1987, the main characters are crossing campus, the crisp leaves swirling around our feet. Each of us is deep in conversation with a colleague. We brush pass by each other as strangers would. Next scene shows a handsome mathematician in a light blue oxford shirt, his sleeves rolled up past his wrists, standing in front of a blackboard covered in arcane symbols. The phone rings. Flip to a woman standing in front of a set of mailboxes, unfolding a stiff piece of stationery....

Meted out

From Wikimedia. 

We enjoy family board games, where each of has strengths. Math Man never loses at Azul, and when it comes to Bananagrams I rule (though I'm not quite as dominant as Math Man at Azul). Math Man, our youngest and I played last month on a short holiday "down the shore" (as they say in Philly). 

As we walked through my layout on one game, my youngest questioned "mete." Which I cheerfully defined, noting a typical usage is "meted out."  I admitted I didn't think of it as particularly odd word, but a quick web search not only confirmed it was indeed a word, but that its "use has been falling since 1890..." I fear this describes too much of my vocabulary. There was lour.  And allochthonous.

Only the former is likely to be played in Bananagrams.

Release the penguins! A score for the start of classes

I am in my last year as chair of the chemistry department, I'm also chairing a major committee for the college. The last three weeks have been...packed? I ran across this music meme again last week and realized it's the perfect score to accompany the start of the semester for a department chair (or faculty member, or support staff, or student, or parent...the slope of the ramp from summer to fall is steep for us all!).

When the day gets chaotic (and they all have), I visualize the score, and find my spot on it. Before school began its advice to "keep both feet together" and to "cool the timpani with a small fan" reminded me to plant my feet, stand my ground and attend to self-care and care for my students and faculty. Of course, nothing goes as planned, as the "light explosives now....and.....now" portended.  But now the saxes have moved downstage (where hopefully they will calm down. Honestly, I didn't mean to double book their rehearsal room and I'm so sorry the piccolos drove them out with that shrill arpeggio. If your hearing doesn't return soon, do let me know.)

"Play ball!" and the first day of classes was upon us, even though I still needed a relief pitcher for Thursday afternoon organic lab, and yes, a tempo of 788 beats per minutes seems about how we usually play this section, why do you ask?  Of course, two measures later you can certainly understand why I've "gradually become agitated"given that metronome setting.

But here we are, at the end of the second week, and I'm relieved to say I've reached the measure where I'm instructed to "release the penguins." Watch out, they've gotten quite grumpy cooped up in my office these last two weeks, but once on the loose, not my problem any more.

Scottish tern signs

[Ed: No, the title is not misspelled.]

Math Man has spent the last three days chasing a small ball around the Scottish dunes, in the hopes of managing to put it in one of eighteen 4.25" diameter holes (or since we are, at least for the moment, in the EU, 108 mm holes). Meanwhile, I've walked many miles along the shorelines of the dunes. Yesterday, at Brora, the views and the walk were extraordinary. The day was spectacular, the beach perfect for walking, and the occasional bench perched on the dunes above the beach a perfect spot to sit and think, take in the view, or even write a bit.  All of which I did. It was a day I hope to return to in memory again and again. But what stands out almost as much as the day were the signs.

At the far end of the beach, there were signs on the dunes, warning of nesting arctic terns. Don't disturb the nests and keep your dogs under control.  I carefully avoided the fenced off dune areas. Not carefully enough, apparently, as a tern came swooping down, chirping wildly.  I moved quickly off the dunes and down to the water. Yeah, no. I am still too close. Now the tern is diving closer and closer, I can feel the air pushed down as she swoops across the back of my neck. I flash on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.  I pull my back pack over the back of my neck to protect it and head off the beach. I run into Math Man at the top of the dunes, and while telling him about the terns, get dive bombed again. He suggests — firmly — that I should depart and take the tetchy tern with me. I finally get far enough down the beach to reassure her that I'm not going to disturb her chicks. Promise.

There were signs on the road for: deer crossing, heavy plant crossing, elderly people crossing...and otters crossing. There is a robust population of river otters in Scotland and they occasionally cross the roads (for the same reason as the chicken — to get to the other side.) I note that the heavy plant sign is not warning of weighty plants stalking cars, but an industrial plant truck exit. I love how the language shifts make my brain turn sideways. I'm with the late Toni Morrison, perhaps the tower of Babel was not a loss, but a gain. A gain of perspective, a gain of narratives, a gain of joy.

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Read (or listen) to Toni Morrison's beautiful Nobel prize address. My favorite lines: "Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction."

Scottish turns

Math Man and I went to Edinburgh last week, to see the Fringe Festival (Crash Kid is the stage manager for Four Woke Baes which is on at the Fringe - go see it :). Also see comedian Tiff Stevenson and Kiinalik at the International Festival...or any of the literally thousands of other performances on right now).

On Sunday morning we undertook to meet Crash for breakfast on the other side of Edinburgh, he's got limited availability around rehearsals, performances and the need to pre-cook s'mores for those performances. Having more or less mastered the Lothian buses, we checked times on Google maps and saw we were just in time for the bus a short walk away. Fabulous!

We follow Google maps directions to the bus stop. Alas, Google left us 40 feet away from the bus stop. Why alas? That would be 40 vertical feet below the bus stop. Edinburgh, the birthplace of Harry Potter, is a city of multiple levels and tiny alleys and staircases that wind between them. We found steps up and dashed up them and around the corner to just make the bus, now dripping in sweat and hearts pounding. Whew. We had a lovely breakfast with Crash and an incredible ramble through the botanical gardens. A nice ending to our time in Edinburgh, Google maps notwithstanding.

Yesterday we drove up north of Inverness. (We are in the birth country of golf, and Math Man gets a bit excited about golf, so we are planted up for a few days while he indulges in some sea side walking chasing a ball and I indulge in walking, period). Math Man played a course on a spit out into a firth, I walked down to the point to (hopefully) see dolphins. No dolphins, but some amazing lighting bolts. Math Man gives up the game after 10 holes and we get in the car to head to where we are staying about an hour away.

I fire up Google maps, and we head off down the country roads. We go through a little town, turning every 50 feet it seems. "Go left," I say firmly. Math Man turns left and say, "Ferry?" I look down at Google maps and the next direction shown is a little ferry icon. Indeed, with no warning at all, Google maps has directed us to a ferry. Which is here. Which is ready to go. We drive on and they winch up the ramp most of the way and we're off. The timing was so smooth it was like a scene from a James Bond movie, where the bad guys chasing 007 are just a fraction of a second to catch him before he flies/sails/motors away.

Turns out we are on the smallest car ferry in the UK, it holds two cars (barely, the ramp won't go up the whole way with us on board) or one van.  And despite the joke when we asked where it was going, it was going to Nidd across the bay, not Norway. And it certainly did save us time. Slàinte mhath!

Plugged in

I showed up at the Vatican Observatory yesterday, wrung out and exhausted by jet lag and more. I'd spent part of a night sleeping on a plane between the US and Rome. The next night my sleep was broken by a fierce 3 am thunderstorm, the thunder echoing oddly in Lake Albano's crater. But last night I'd been awakened in the middle of the night by a text from a colleague's husband: She was dying. Please let my colleagues know.

It was still waking hours in the US, so I got up and sent emails and texts to those who would want to know. I crept back to bed about four in the morning, dragging myself out of bed four hours later, still bleary, but determined to make 10 am coffee at the Specola where I could plug in to electrons and wi-fi and restorative collegial conversation.

By late afternoon I was desperate for a nap, un riposo, but more desperate to pray. I went up to the small chapel with the tabernacle by mosaicist Marko Rupnik SJ to pray in the hour my colleague was being taken off life support 4400 miles and six time zones away.  A Jesuit chapel seemed the right spot to sit prayerfully present to the dying, to be pulled back into the meditations of the third week of the Exercises. Somewhere in the midst of this, I noticed an electrical outlet at the very bottom of the nearly floor to ceiling tabernacle. Not in the wall next to it, but in the base of the tabernacle itself.

What on earth was an outlet doing in this work of art? My mind wandered not to the pragmatic, but to the metaphorical. I could pray anywhere — at my desk, in the apartment, on a walk in the gardens, in any of the three churches within a five minute walk or the cathedral basilica across the piazza —but had been pulled here, to this tiny chapel where I could draw close to Christ crucified, Christ in truth. I wanted to be plugged in to Christ.

These days we look for outlets to pull electrons from for our phones, to bring them back to life. Do we equally have eyes for the places where we can recharge our spiritual life?

---

A day later, I realize that it is likely that when the tabernacle was installed, there was an outlet located in the wall that was rerouted to the base. Though why not to the wall next to it? There must be a reason.

All art is ephemeral, Mom

Not precisely a pancake. A crepe from an earlier day's breakfast.

Crash and I were getting ready to leave my brother The Reverend's house early in one morning last month and he was making us pancakes. Crash snagged one, picked up the maple syrup and carefully drew a face on his pancake with it.  He took a moment to appreciate the cute nose he'd made, then picked up his fork and used it to spread the syrup in an even layer over the flapjack — obliterating his artwork.

He looked up at my sharp intake of breath and remarked, "All art is ephemeral, Mom," and calmly returned to eating his breakfast.

The Cheerio Section

Daniel Schwen - Own work, CC BY 3.0

Periodically I hear rumblings about parents who bring their children to Mass. The children are noisy, they won't sit still. And the Cheerios. All those crumbs. If you are going to bring children and their Cheerios, better bring your dust buster and clean them up.

Sometimes I think the subtext is that these parents haven't taught their children how to behave at Mass. Can't they get through an hour without eating? Can't they sit still?

I sat in the Cheerio section for Mass on Sunday, a little one to the right of me, a little one in front of me. Each with their Cheerios. As I knelt after communion, a little face popped up in front of me, her bag of Cheerios in hand. She ate one and flashed a contented smile. Meanwhile, we are singing "I am the Bread of Life, you who come to me shall not hunger..."

It occurred to me that parents who bring Cheerios for their kids are teaching them that the Mass is a place where their hunger can be fed. And is that such a bad thing?

Saints in the broom closet

A few weeks ago I misplaced my breviary, the one that generally I keep in my work bag, wrapped up in a furoshiki so that it does not suffer the fate of its predecessor (which disintegrated after 30 years of prayer). There had been an epic house tidy, so I thought it had just been moved to a new spot in the house. Or perhaps I'd left it on my desk at the office. Or in the back of the car. Really, it's not in the back of the car? Not in my office?

Did I leave it in the chapel? in the sacristy? No way to check as I was on and off the road, in and out of early meetings, and not at the parish in the morning. I made do with the iPad breviary and my little travel breviary. And the four volume set. All right, yes, I have...five different breviaries: a UK travel version, a US travel version, the four volume set and the one volume Christian Prayer. And the electronic one. And a couple of psalters. Lack of monastic simplicity, or simply a hunger for the psalms? You pick.

Finally back at the parish, I checked the chapel and sacristy. No luck, but several of the Augustinians remarked it had been in the chapel, then disappeared. They helped me do a quick search of the sacristy drawers and closets. No luck. Not in the music cabinet (where my breviary had once landed after being mistaken for a choir book and "put away" by a helpful choir member). Not stashed in the meditation space behind the tabernacle. Not stripped of its cover and popped into the collection of breviaries kept in a basket in the chapel.

I joked that it would reappear once I ordered a new one, but inwardly I mourned that necessity. I could let go of the book itself and its wrapper, the furoshiki bought in a small town at the head of a pilgrimage route in Japan that each time I tie it reminds of all those on pilgrimage and of friends who have walked the Camino. The grace imparted by the blessings of the book did not vanish with the volume. Even the holy cards and notes that it has collected over the years could not truly be mourned, they are just physical talismans of prayers made and promised. What I mourned was the way the book had subtly molded itself to my hand, the softness of the ribbons, shifted multiple times a day to mark the passage of hours and days and seasons. The constant reminder of the ways in which prayer had adhered to my daily life.

Stoically, I ordered a new breviary. And on the way out of morning prayer last Friday, as a friend reminded me to pray to Pope St. John XXIII (a sure-fire finder of lost things), and as I responded that I should really pray to my mother, who even after she had lost much of her sight could find almost anything, the pastor appeared around the corner triumphantly holding up my wrapped breviary.  Until that moment none of us had thought to look in the closet behind the confessional where microphones and brooms are kept. And of course that everyday book of prayer would be stored not with music for feasts or linens to safeguard the holy of holies, but with the brooms.

Thanks, Mom (who I imagined having celestial coffee with that sainted Pope John and laughingly conspiring to send a brief dusting of grace my way.)

Hey Siri, will you take a memo?

Secretarial staff, circa 1930 Library of Congress

Siri. In my dreams, I can call out to the air and my personal virtual assistant will calmly do my bidding. Set a timer. Add something to my to-do list. Take note of an idea and file it where I (or she) can find it later. Check the traffic and remind me when to leave for the DC train station. She's the dream of some 1950s executive, minus the typewriter, steno pad, salary and corporeal existence.

Instead, I've got Siri. She's like a sulky secretary with a Brooklyn accent in a cheap private eye's office. I ask her to set a timer and get, "Hang on...I'll tap you when I'm ready." "Not now, boss..." she snaps her gum, "I'll let you know when I'm ready." Or this morning, when I had my hands full, but wanted her to add a few things to my to-do list. She cheerfully added the first errand to the list. When I asked her to add another one, "You'll have to continue in Things." I waited a couple of minutes and tried again. Yeah. No. I can hear her subtext, "Boss, if you've got more than one, find yer list on that desk and start addin' 'em yerself." She crosses her legs, and takes out her compact. Little puffs of powder dance in the early morning sun.

I think I'd be happier if Siri's subtext was just her text.