Lord of the Rings

Fr. David Brown, SJ adjusting the telescope to
observe Jupiter.

Deum creatorem Venite adoremus  — Come adore God the Creator — is the Vatican Observatory's motto, inscribed on the wall of the dome of one of the two telescopes on top of the Apostolic Palace in Castel Gandolfo.

Last night a group of eight students and faculty from the Vatican Observatory Summer School went observing with Fr. David Brown, SJ (a specialist in stellar evolution and the caretaker of the telescopes here).

We went through the big wooden doors that open from the piazza into the courtyard of the Apostolic Palace, packed into the miniature elevator and rode up to the roof. The view at sunset was astounding, the crater splayed out before us on one side, Rome and the far distant Mediterranean on the other.  That view is a gift.

Students at the VOSS observing Mars.

David had opened the dome as we were taking in the view, and we climbed the steps up and in.  First target Jupiter. Three at a time, we rode the platform, which groaned and creaked and shook its way high enough up for us to reach the eyepiece.  My turn came and I put my eye to the lens and there it was, a soft blue-green orb, striped (no red dot) and four moons in a tidy row. Whoa.  The Galilean moons.

Mars was lower in the sky, which meant the platform needed to get higher, and higher still to see Saturn.  I rode the platform up and up, and when I looked through the lens, the first words out of my mouth were, "Oh, my God!"  followed by "I mean that in the very best way. " Floating in front of my eyes was Saturn, its rings clearly visible, the Cassini division a dark stripe running down the middle. And two jewel like moons.

I loved the slice of sky you could see through the dome, and the view from the windows.  And the way the dome closed, by pulling on a rope.

It was not the same as seeing the pictures.  Not at all.

Oh, my God, indeed.

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You can read about the Zeiss telescope here.

Column: Before dawn - Mary of Magdala

I generally prefer the night hours for prayer, perhaps as a hold over from the days when I wrote papers on the dining room table after the rest of the family had retired for the night, perhaps because even now it's a time when I'm unlikely to be interrupted by anyone but the Holy Spirit and the cat. When I made the Spiritual Exercises, I was such a night owl that I was sometimes turning in just as my spiritual director was headed to the dining room to make the first pot of coffee for the morning.

The description is of the Easter vigil at which my first husband, Tom, converted to Roman Catholicism. It was a holy and graced time.

Photo is of an early dawn on Eastern Point, taken on retreat in 2010.

This column appeared in the April edition of the Catholic Standard & Times

It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark, when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb. — Jn. 20:1

Twenty-nine years ago, near midnight, I walked out the door of my campus apartment. One by one, we gathered on a windswept hillside. The moon had not yet risen, far below us wisps of light wound through the parking lots and puddled around the campus buildings.

Under a vast shower of stars, rank upon rank of darkling hills arrayed before us, we tramped in a thin, almost invisible line, up to the top of the ridge. There, shivering in the cold breeze, we kindled a fire and we prayed, “The light of Christ. Thanks be to God.” The great vigil of Easter had begun, as that first Easter, in the still, dark hours before the dawn.

Easter is a feast of light. A festival of dancing fire, sparkling water and dazzling white garments. Yet it begins not under the blazing midday sun, or even amid the crimson and gold fury of a sunset, but in the stumbling murkiness of a night not quite spent, in a dim, cold cavern hewn of rock.

It was still dark. I hear in St. John’s account of Mary Magdalene’s discovery of the empty tomb echoes of Jesus’ own prayer. St. Mark’s Gospel tells of Jesus going off to pray, alone, “in the morning, long before dawn.” I think, too, of my own preference for prayer in these still and mysterious hours before the sun bursts over the horizon.

Why these night hours? Anthony Horneck, a chaplain at Oxford College in the 17th century, thought “midnight prayers strangely incline God’s favor.” For then, he said, was the soul “nimbler, subtler, quicker, fitter to behold things sublime and great.” In his Spiritual Exercise, St. Ignatius, too, advised prayer after midnight, when body and soul were rested and receptive.

In was in this liminal time, when the regular demands of the day had not yet crept from their beds, that Jesus met Mary in the quiet of the garden, and opened her eyes to see Him as He is, risen and glorified. He came, not striding down the streets of Jerusalem accompanied by a chorus of seraphim, but in the midnight hours when Mary Magdalene’s soul was better able to grasp the mystery of our salvation.

Seeds are planted and nourished in the darkness, reaching toward the light as they grow. Though St. John reports that Mary thought Jesus at first to be the gardener, St. Gregory the Great suggested in a homily on this Gospel, that she was not perhaps as confused as we might think: “Was He not a spiritual gardener for her?” The seeds planted in this long-ago encounter in the darkness of the garden have grown over the centuries to encompass the whole world.

We sing in the Exsultet, the great Proclamation of Easter, “This is the night of which it is written: The night shall be as bright as day, dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness.” We learn that night is not a time to fear, or one that obscures the truth, but the place from which joy and salvation erupt.

As I watch the Easter fire kindled again this year, not in the bleak darkness of a California hillside, but as night edges into being a block from Lancaster Avenue, I will wonder what seeds the Gardener will plant within my soul, within the souls of His faithful, that will be nourished in the Eucharist, and bear fruit in our churches and communities. What favors will God shower upon us in these midnight prayers? What will erupt with joy from this holiest of nights?

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Redeeming God, source of life and light, bless this new fire, and grant that we who are warmed by the celebration of this Easter feast, may share in the everlasting festival of your radiance, through Jesus Christ, the light of the world. Amen.

— A blessing for the Easter fire (1985 edition of the US Sacramentary)

Column: What if night were a place and not a time?

I watched the night descend sitting on a bench at Eastern Point on retreat this summer. The sense of being intentionally and inexorably turned away from the sun to look into the depths of the universe was strong. A bit from Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast ran through my mind as I sat there: "There is a mysterious woundedness that somehow goes with great blessing. When we truly encounter the night in all its beauty and terror, we have no assurance whatsoever that we are going to come out unscathed."

If I could write fiction, I'd write a short story about visiting the night....

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times 8 July 2010.

By day the Lord ordains His kindness and by night His song is with me — prayer to the God of my life. Ps 42:9

What if the night were a place and not a time? What if you wanted to see the stars you had to walk to the night side of the earth? Would we ever go? Could we ever look? Would we stay very long? Or would we peek over the edge and depart as quickly as we could?

I had gone out to sit on the beach as the sun set. The bench faced east, not west, so instead of watching the fiery exuberant swirls of red and gold over the bay, my view was one of an impending darkness extending further than I could see. The blue of the clear sky slowly deepened, the stars came into focus.

As I sat, I could sense the earth spinning in space, the planet’s face — and ours — turned once a day toward the vastness of space. We look out into the universe each night whether we wish it or not. It reminded me of when Chris was young and wanted to be certain of my full attention. He would take my face in his hands and turn it toward his.

Does God turn us to face the immense once each day so that we will have to look into the depths of eternity? Did he touch the earth and set it spinning like a top so that we must see where we came from, where we are going? To be assured of my full attention? What does He want me to see?

Suddenly the sunset feels like a distractingly noisy party, the rise of the night, like walking out the door into a quiet and still street, where you can hear the cicadas and the breeze in the trees. In his commentary on the translation of Psalm 42, biblical scholar Robert Alter notes that while this verset is often read as our response to God for His goodness, our song to Him in the night, the Hebrew implies that God also sings to us in the night. What do I hear in the quiet streets of night, where God sings to me?

In the stars whose light is so strong we can see it at inconceivable distances, I hear of my powerlessness and God’s strength. No light that I can kindle will ever compare. There is a taste of eternity in these photons first sent streaking across the universe years ago that touch me only now. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever now shall be. I feel God’s timeless hands on my face, seeking my attention, seeking me.

I wonder if this is what God wants to sing to me this night, of a poverty of spirit, of an emptiness into which he can set His works afire? Is this the place that Johannes Baptist Metz calls “the meeting point of heaven and earth, the mysterious place where God and humanity encounter each other, the point where infinite mystery meets concrete existence.”?

In my world, night is perhaps more of a place, and less of a time. I could back away from that spot on the edge of the night where I could begin to see and hear and touch my poverty in the face of God’s infinite richness by flipping on the light, or by walking back into the house. What do I risk by staying?

An emptiness into which God can set His works aflame in me, like the stars of the sky? Will I go?

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May God shield me;
May God fill me;
May God keep me;
May God watch me;
May God bring me this night to the nearness of His love…the peace of all peace be mine this night in the Name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

— Closing prayer for St. Patrick’s Compline, Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings From the Northumbria Community