Joy, wonder, science, and Pope Francis

I always underestimate how much of an emotional rollercoaster the Triduum will be for me. Most years Easter Monday finds me back in the classroom, exhausted but having to climb on the next rollercoaster ride — the end of semester — after a week of working full time and long liturgies. Once, thirty eight years ago I climbed the steps of my parish church behind my young husband's coffin on a blindingly sunny Easter Monday.

So this year, on sabbatical leave, I thought I could take it easy on Monday. I'd catch up on the household chores that went undone on the weekend. Wash a load of towels, make an appointment to get my hair cut, pick up a prescription. Take a walk. Read a book. Perhaps even write a bit about water and Easter and burbling fonts. 

Instead I woke up to texts telling me Pope Francis had died. And I shortly joined the thousands of journalists and pundits scrambling to write against very tight deadlines, writing an op-ed on Pope Francis from the perspective of a scientist who has a Vatican appointment. Two hours and 800-ish words later, I dispatched it, along with photos from my own stash. Another couple of hours and it was live at the Philadelphia Inquirer. I never did get to the towels.

You can read what I wrote here, but the writing of it reminded me how wide the view Francis had of things, including science, from the very start. A few bits follow:

From his very first encyclical, written less than 4 months after his election in 2013:

“Nor is the light of faith, joined to the truth of love, extraneous to the material world, for love is always lived out in body and spirit; the light of faith is an incarnate light radiating from the luminous life of Jesus. It also illumines the material world, trusts its inherent order, and knows that it calls us to an ever widening path of harmony and understanding. The gaze of science thus benefits from faith: faith encourages the scientist to remain constantly open to reality in all its inexhaustible richness. Faith awakens the critical sense by preventing research from being satisfied with its own formulae and helps it to realize that nature is always greater. By stimulating wonder before the profound mystery of creation, faith broadens the horizons of reason to shed greater light on the world which discloses itself to scientific investigation”. Lumen Fidei  [34]

From the words he offered at the private audience where I got a chance to meet him:

"Dear brothers and sisters, scientific research demands great commitment, yet can sometimes prove lengthy and tiresome. At the same time, it can, and should be, a source of deep joy. I pray that you will be able to cultivate that interior joy and allow it to inspire your work. Share it with your friends, your families and your nations, as well as with the international community of scientists with whom you work. May you always find joy in your research and share the fruit of your studies with humility and fraternity."  Address to VOSS in Summer 2016

It's this tiny blessing from a message sent to the 2023 Vatican Observatory Summer School when he was recovering from surgery that sits over my desk at home that I treasure as much as the rosary I have that he blessed.

"May you never lose this sense of wonder, in your research and in your lives. May you be inspired always by the love for truth and awestruck by all that each fragment of the universe sets before you."

I hope to never be less than awestruck at each and every fragment of the universe, and pray that I always have the courage to speak the truth. 

 

Aspergillum/Aspergillus: where science and faith collide

Today I learned that Aspergillus niger - the fungus (mostly) responsible for the fermentation of pu'erh teas - was named for the aspergillum used liturgically to sprinkle holy water, which it (vaguely) resembles. No surprise, the botanist was a priest (Pier Micheli).

I haven't been writing much on the blog of late, because I have been writing another book (#6). This one is on the chemistry of tea, titled Steeped. After a day of writing, or a day of teaching and tucking writing into the corners, I've been loath to get on the keyboard in the evening and blog. I may not be out of ideas of things to write about, but I am definitely out of energy and words at the end of the day.

I am very much at the end of the process, finishing writing the last bits, and doing a big edit on the book as a whole. The goal is to have the whole thing submitted by the end of July, so watch this space!

Lodging in Wisdom's branches

Happy those who meditate on Wisdom,
and fix their gaze on knowledge;
Who ponder her ways in their heart,
and understand her paths;

Who pursue her like a scout,
and watch at her entry way;
Who peep through her windows,
and listen at her doors;

Who encamp near her house
and fasten their tent pegs next to her walls;
Who pitch their tent beside her,
and dwell in a good place;

Who build their nest in her leaves,
and lodge in her branches;
Who take refuge from the heat in her shade
and dwell in her home. - Sirach 14:21-27

Yesterday was the feast of Our Mother of Good Counsel, the titular feast of my parish and the patroness of the Vatican Observatory. And by some miracle, perhaps the intervention of our Lady, my early morning meeting was canceled and so I found myself at the 8 AM mass, where the scent of the pastor's homemade sticky buns was creeping in the door.  There was breakfast for all comers afterwards!

The readings were taken from the Augustinian lectionary for the feast, rather than the Easter season, for we are an Augustinian parish. The first reading was this pericope from Sirach. Though I have heard it before, I was struck yesterday by this description of those who seek Wisdom, the Holy Spirit. So like the scientist that I am and the scientists who are my colleagues at the Observatory. We pursue the mysteries of the universe like scouts, we peep through the windows and listen at the doors. We encamp, settle in, willing to take our time dwelling with God's created world.

As I write this, I'm sitting in my study. The green leaves of the oak trees that surround the house have come out and I truly feel as if I have a nest in Wisdom's leaves and am firmly lodged in her branches.

---

Photo is of a painting of Our Mother of Good Counsel (the original is a fresco at Genazzano, Italy) in the entryway of the Vatican Observatory outside Rome.

But what about Galileo?

The Vatican Observatory foundation has a newly redesigned website. There is an ever growing set of resources on the intersection of science and faith (including a ton on the whole Galileo affair), and NPR did an interview did an interview with Guy Consolmagno SJ about it, which included a description of a drive through the gardens at Castelgandolfo and a shout out to the papal cows. I have enjoyed yogurt from those cows’ milk! I caught the last lines of the interview in the car, fun to unexpectedly hear a friend’s voice coming out of the speakers.

Predictably, NPR’s tweet about the piece attracted a number of people saying, “But what about Galileo?”  Which led me to have an exchange of the following sort:

Troll: Galileo. Therefore the Church has always ignored and denigrated scientists.

Me: Aquinas. No.

Troll: One counterexample is not enough.

Me: (List of five Catholic scientists and mathematicians, mostly women.)

Troll: That’s not enough either.

Me: I recorded a 12 part audio series covering a 1000 years of Catholic science. Mostly the Church is an enthusiastic supporter of science and scientists, Galileo notwithstanding.  

Troll: “A completely unverifiable claim based on conjecture and blind faith in the righteousness of your own position…’

Me: 

I did wonder what claim he thought was unverifiable. That I’d recorded the series? That you can’t take an inventory of Catholic scientists and see how many have had their science suppressed by the Catholic Church? I don’t merely have a conjecture, I have a spreadsheet of data. Also, an audio series. 

---

Want to know more about the Galileo affair? The Observatory has a two part series here.

The Thomas Aquinas quote: “The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule…if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.” 

Mystery of science in the sacred

In my last post I noted there are two Catholic scientists who are honored in virtually every Catholic church in the United States.  And for that matter, many other worship spaces across the world.

Who are they?  Not Galileo.  Or Luke, the physician.  You aren't likely to find them in the stained glass windows, and you might have to open a cupboard or a drawer to find them.

One French, one Italian. Both men. Working at the turn of the 18th century to the 19th.  A mathematician turned physicist and a chemist.

Ready for the answer?

Andre-Marie Ampère and Alessandro Volta.  Both have units named after them, to honor their work, the ampere (amp) and the volt respectively.  Both these memorials are in evidence on the power supply shown in the first photo, e.g. 12V, 12 volts; 2.5A, 2.5 amperes.  Photo taken in the sacristy at my parish!

Talking Catholic Scientists

What do Catholic scientists talk about?  Well, I spent the last several days in Washington DC at the studios of Now You Know Media, recording a dozen conversations about the lives and faith of Catholic Scientists with my boss at the Vatican Observatory, Br. Guy.  I’ve been working on material for this series on the lives of Catholic Scientists since September: “spend an hour working on the Catholic Scientists project” has been a regularly scheduled item on my to-do list, an often welcome respite from grading and administrative tasks.

Since there are literally hundreds of scientists who are Catholic and who made significant contributions to their fields (check out the @catholiclab Twitter stream with daily tweets about Catholic scientists), it was both easy and difficult to come up with a set of interesting people to talk about. And once you realize there is no way you can do justice to the history of science over the last 1000 years even if we spent all 12 episodes on it, you’re free to pick a thread for a setting.

We ended up talking about 40 some odd scientists, who lived over a thousand year period on 5 different continents, all Catholic:

11 women
2 saints (and a “Servant of God”)
2 doctors of the Church
2 popes
11 Jesuits
1 Augustinian
4 mathematicians
9 chemists
8 botanists

Fun question:  There are two Catholic scientists that are honored in virtually every church in the US.  Neither of them are saints. Who are they? [[Update:  Answer is here.]]

Our big point?  Catholics have been, are, and will continue to be scientists.  Not in spite of the Church, not separate from their faith, but because of their faith.  It’s a delightful and joyful way to seek the face of God, to play not just with creation, but with the Creator — to pray.  And all these scientists are people, just like the rest of us, with their faults and failings as well as their strengths.

The project has been a delight so far, from doing the research and writing the biographical sketches and brief settings we worked from to finding our rhythm during the recording sessions.  The give and take of a conversation takes a different type of preparation than a straight lecture.  And I suspect for both the scientists in this conversation, working without visuals was another sort of challenge.

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."

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.

Galactic language for the liturgy?

Stairs up to the Vatican Observatory's

Zeiss Double Astrograph in 

Castelgandolfo 

"With joy we give you thanks and praise.
Where once was nothing, your love
brought matter into being and motion,
thus creating time itself,
and countless galaxies, each with its countless stars,
and, to prepare a home for us,
delicately circling round one single star,
this one small globe, our mother earth." — John Daly, SJ

Recently on PrayTell there has been a discussion about a draft of a Eucharistic prayer by John Daly, SJ, that uses language and imagery drawn from modern science — a prayer for the 21st century.  [UPDATE: Kimberly Belcher of Notre Dame now has a post up at PrayTell extending the conversation.]The post grabbed my attention both because of the science and because I'm currently writing prayers for a book that is nearing completion. What should go in them?

There's a lot to critique in the draft (which you can read here, along with Thomas Reese, SJ's commentary here) but Fritz Bauerschmidt posed the question which interests me: "But a more general question might be whether we want eucharistic prayers that are so thoroughly invested in a particular scientific worldview that they are likely to sound outdated before too long."

That said, I would suggest Bauerschmidt's question is moot.  To my eye, the science in this Eucharistic prayer is isn't going to get outdated period, let alone next week.  It's all pretty settled at the level of the broad strokes used to describe in the text, and despite the title of the PrayTell post none of it is from the 21st century, some of it dates back hundreds of years.  For example, the universe is indeed billions of years old, as the prayer implies. we've known the age of the universe is on the order of billions of years for almost a century.  Whether that's 13.81 billion years or 13.77 billion years might still be up for grabs in the cosmology community, but it's immaterial in this context, Daly didn't get into that level of detail.

David Brown, SJ observing using the Zeiss
refractor at the Vatican Observatory in
Castelgandolfo

The rest of the science is similarly situated: baryogenesis did happen (i.e. matter came into being) even if the details are yet a bit murky, the earth circles the sun and is not flat. Evolution is a biological process, life on earth began at single cell level, humans evolved much later. The word chaos is used several times, but not in its technical mathematical sense.  Primal chaos is a pretty reasonable word to use to describe the universe as it existed in its earliest second, so tangled and so dense even light could not escape its clutches.

But I sense in the conversation something of the notion that scientific imagery and language just isn't sacred enough, perhaps a subtext of 'doesn't it sound silly to be thanking God for having discovered the Higgs-Bosun [sic]?' in one of the first comments.¹ The serious question I'd like to raise is,  is it really laughable to be grateful to God for scientific discoveries in general?  If not in general, then for specific ones?  May we pray for "scientists," but not for "computational chemists," or for "galaxies" but not "Bose-Einstein condensates"?  On the telescope domes atop the old papal summer palace are inscribed the words, Deum creatorem venite adoremus, come adore God the Creator.  The laws of physics are as much God's creation as the dewfall.  Dew and rain, bless the Lord.  Bosons and fermions, bless the Lord, too.

Science is not a merely secular pursuit, I would argue it's very much a dialog with God about creation.  In that sense, it's prayer.  Contemplative prayer.

It's a more than a bit ironic to deprive our liturgical spaces of any mention of "science", bearing in mind that science has always made these spaces possible, from the engineering and math that ensures the buildings stay up, to the vinter's chemistry, to the dyes used on the vestments, and these days, made those albs resist wrinkles in ways linen ones never would.

When the book is done, perhaps I'll try my hand at a litany of praise for science, galactic and otherwise.

---

1.  Well, yes it does sound silly, because there is no Higgs-Bosun, it's the Higgs boson that got discovered; bosons are a particle type, not a person's name, but I know that because I deal in bosons and fermions on a daily basis!)

And while we are on the subject of science imagery in the liturgy, I remain distracted by dewfall (which doesn't fall, it condenses), and the bath of regeneration in the blessing over the way, which also distract me, but freely admit the failing is with me.  I'm certain everyone encounters language in the liturgy that abruptly bumps them out of the prayer and into something else.  Prevenient, anyone?

Column: Advent 4: The dawn from on high

A winter's dawn at Wernersville's Jesuit Center.

I am still clinging to Advent, to the minor keys and clear tones, to the short days and the sun that reaches deep into the shadows.

I was struck by how much energy the sun puts out — 10²⁶ joules per second — and how little of it reaches my sunroom floor...

This column appeared in at CatholicPhilly.com on 21 December 2016.


In the tender compassion of our God
the dawn from on high shall break upon us,
to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace. — From the Benedictus, Luke 1:78-79

It’s still Advent in my house. The only signs of the impending Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord are the small Holy Family on the mantle, bought by my youngest for me this summer on a trip to Iceland, and the Nutcracker half hidden on a bookshelf, forgotten since last Christmas.

It’s still Advent in part because it’s the end of the semester, a time when I think it a miracle if I manage to get the laundry not only washed, but folded and put away. But even if it weren’t the most wild and crazy time of the year for me, it would still be Advent, because I am loathe to let go of these precious few days of lingering light.

The dawn breaks late these last Advent mornings, washing over my shoulder at Morning Prayer. Midmorning, the light leans in through the windows, stretching out its rays deep into my office, its warmth defying the cold outside. From almost 100 million miles away, this light seems gentle, comfortable, wrapping around me like a cloak, turning the steam above my tea into smoky whirls, like incense, rising in prayer.

Yet this tender light pooled on the floor by my feet is but a tiny fraction of the power residing in that single star. A million billion billion times more energy pours forth each second, streaming out into the universe. Untouchable, unthinkable power, the merest tendrils of which are enough to let forests flourish and people in darkness find their way.

It’s still Advent in my house, because it will always be Advent, until the end of time.  Every morning, the church raises her voice in the Benedictus, Zachariah’s hymn upon the birth of John the Baptist. At each celebration of Morning Prayer proclaiming again and again the dawn that will come, in power and glory, radiant with joy, resplendent in majesty, full of mercy and compassion.

It’s always Advent, for we are ever awaiting the coming of God among us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

---

From Jesuit Father Karl Rahner’s reflection, “God who is to come” in Encounters in Silence.

O God who is to come,
grant me the grace to live now,
in the hour of your Advent,
in such a way that I may merit to live in you forever,
in the blissful hours of your eternity.

Column: Mary Magdalene and talking to the Pope

St. Mary Magdalene - scientist?
Domenico Fetti, Maddalena penitente

About that time I made Pope Francis laugh, and why the feast of Mary Magdalene is so important to me.

This column appeared at CatholicPhilly.com on 22 July 2016.

What would you say if you met the pope? I had a chance to think about that question last fall when I was asked to write an account of an imaginary conversation between myself and Pope Francis about science and faith. It was tough to write, not only because it was hard to imagine any circumstances where I would speak with the Holy Father, but because, well, what would you say?

Little did I know that less than a year later, I would be standing in a garden in Vatican City, waiting for an audience with Pope Francis, once again wondering what I would say if I had the extraordinary privilege of speaking with him.

How did I end up here? In March of this year, I was honored to be appointed an adjunct scholar of the Vatican Observatory, to be in this way a part of the Church’s mission to seek God in the created universe, and to be witness to the ways in which science and faith can work together to help us grapple with the ultimate mysteries of creation.

Fast forward to June, when the students and faculty of who were attending Vatican Observatory’s biannual summer school and those members of the Observatory staff who could, had a private audience with Pope Francis.

So what did I say to Pope Francis? “¡Gracias!” Thank you for elevating St. Mary Magdalene’s day to be a feast. He looked puzzled for a moment, in part because I had so badly mangled the Spanish for Magdalene, and just perhaps because this wasn’t quite what he was expecting someone from the Observatory to say after his remarks to us about science. Then he laughed aloud, grasped my hands and said, “Bueno.” It is a good thing.

Why was I so grateful for this change to the Church’s liturgical calendar that that’s the one thing I would choose to say to the pope? Timing, they say, is everything, and the official announcement of the elevation of Mary Magdalene’s feast to be of the same import as the 12 apostles she had been sent to, had been made the day before.

But in truth it was because this feast is to me a potent reminder that nature is a place to encounter God, not only as the creator, but as the risen Christ. Mary Magdalene met Jesus after the resurrection in the garden, a space hollowed out within a city to let people come closer to nature.

I can meet God, and indeed Christ, in my scientific research, in the depths of the atoms as well as in the breadth of the stars. Science, too, is sacred ground, a meeting place for the everyday and the extraordinary.

Christ sent Mary Magdalene as the first witness to his resurrection, a reminder that anyone and everyone is called to announce the Gospel’s good news. The new preface written for Mary Magdalene’s feast reminds us it is our duty “to preach the Gospel to everyone.” It nudges me, too, to remember to listen for Christ in the unexpected corners, in the ordinary people I meet as well as in the extraordinary. It’s a good thing.

Column: Stammering about God

Look closely and you can read the inscription:
Deum creatorem venite adoremus

A version of this reflection appeared at CatholicPhilly on 8 July 2016.

The heavens proclaim the glory of God,
and the firmament shows forth the work of his hands. — Psalm 19:2

I stayed up far too late last night, watching the Juno space probe as it entered orbit around Jupiter, whirling 77,000 kilometers over the planet’s surface. I cheered when the craft signaled it had successfully slipped into orbit, to the amusement of the soggy 20-somethings returning from the Philly fireworks.

Of course, I couldn’t really see Juno plunging toward Jupiter, it was just a beautifully done simulation. But last month, I had an incredible view of Jupiter’s stripes and four of its moons — all in a tidy row —  through a telescope at the Vatican Observatory outside Rome.

Just after sunset on an early June night, a group from the Vatican Observatory Summer School went observing with David Brown, SJ an astrophysicist who studies stellar evolution and the caretaker of the telescopes.

We entered through the big wooden doors that open from the piazza into the courtyard of the Apostolic Palace where Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI spent their summers, packed into the miniature elevator, and rode up to the roof where the domes housing two of the observatory’s telescopes sit.

We saw Jupiter and Mars, its canals faintly visible. But it was the last planet that took my breath away. I bent to the eyepiece and adjusted the focus, suddenly floating in front of my eyes was Saturn, its rings clearly visible along with two jewel-like moons.

“Oh, my God!” I spit out. And I meant that in all seriousness. Reflecting on the relationship between science and faith, Jesuit Father Karl Rahner, an eminent theologian of the 20th century, noted that, “To be able to stammer about God is after all more important than to speak exactly about the world.”

I had questions, about the rings, about how the telescope functioned, but in that moment, all I could do was stammer about God.

The Vatican Observatory’s motto, inscribed on the walls of one of the telescope domes, is Deum creatorem venite adoremus. It’s an imperative: Come, adore God the creator. But it’s also an expression of hope, that those who come here might enter into the work of science and in doing so not only deepen their awareness of God who created the heavens and the earth, but fall on their knees and adore the one who set the stars in motion.

Tolle lege — take and read — are the words that heralded St. Augustine’s conversion. Later, in a sermon, Augustine urges his congregation to pick up and read the book of the universe, “… there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, he set before your eyes the things he had made.”

Last week, on a late evening walk with my husband, I pointed out Jupiter, Mars and Saturn, bright balls of light hanging in the sky, and once again felt that flash of inexpressible awe at what has been created, and Who created it.

In the depths of these summer days, I am taking St. Augustine’s advice to heart. Look up, read God’s book written in the stars strewn across the skies. Look out to the sun that burns with such intensity that we can feel its heat millions of miles away. Look below at the dew fallen on the grass, or the waves lapping at your ankles.

Come and adore the God whose hands made it all, take up and read the book of creation, stammer your thanks to the Spirit who breathed upon the chaos and brought order and beauty to the universe.

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.

---

You can read about the Zeiss telescope here.

The Jesuit Thermometer

Diagram of a thermometer similar to

the one describe by Leurechon, c. 1638.

Note that  hotter temperatures have 

smaller magnitudes degrees associated with 

them. Image from Wellcome collection, 

used under CC license.

This is a version of a post from my Culture of Chemistry blog.

This post is in part inspired by my current location (the Vatican Observatory outside Rome, staffed by Jesuit scientists) and in part by a piece I wrote earlier this year for Nature Chemistry (Changing chemistry by degrees).

---

The word thermometer was first coined (in French) in a book of mathematical recreations written in 1626 by Hendrik van Etten, the pen name of Jesuit Jean Leurechon.  It's also an early example of adding a scale to a thermometer, though there's a long way to go before anyone will have a reproducible scale such as those we take for granted today.
Such thermometers, he (correctly) predicts will be practical instruments, as they might be used to monitor the temperature of a room or a furnace, to record the weather and to measure fevers in the ill.

One oddity about the thermometer described is that a reading of 9 degrees was colder than that of 2 degrees, the liquid dropped in the tube as things warmed up.

A century later, Anders Celsius constructed a temperature scale based on water's phase changes which ran in the same direction.  Water on Celsius' scale boiled at 0 degrees and froze at 100 degrees. This reverse run didn't last long, two years later Carl Linnaeus (of taxonomic fame) used the scale to describe conditions in a greenhouse, but flipped it to the form in which we know it today, where 100 is the boiling point of water.

It is tempting to think that Celsius' scale ran in the direction it did because it mimicked the scale used by Father Leurechon. But Fahrenheit's scale, which preceded Celsius' by two decades, runs in the modern direction, higher temperatures are hotter.

This also parallels the classic notions of degrees of heat in play during the medieval period. There were four (or eight or six, depending on the source) degrees of heat, the first being more or less physiological temperature, the fourth being a blazing hot furnace.

---

Read the version for science-sorts at Culture of Chemistry.

Chrism on my hands: science and faith

Practical theology.
In the library of the Convent of San Marco, Florence.

More than thirty years ago, I moved to the East Coast from California.  We registered in our local parish, where I was surprised to find that women could not be lectors or cantors or Eucharistic Ministers.  "The only time a woman should be on the altar," the pastor told me when I asked, "is to clean it."  Ah.  He had many gifts to share, not the least the ways in which he modeled a deep and abiding life of prayer, but this was a mindset he couldn't shake.

Last week, our associate pastor caught me after Morning Prayer, with a question about cleaning.  The question came, not because he thinks that the only role women have to play in the liturgies of Holy Week is cleaning the altar and vessels (which he most certainly does not!), but because I'm a chemist.  One of the chrismaria, the glass vessels used to store the parish's stock of oils for anointing, hadn't come clean with a first round of soap or with a second round of bleach.  It had held the chrism.  What might I suggest?

I looked at the glass container and noticed it was coated in a fluffy, waxy substance.  I rubbed some of it between my fingers.  (Yes, yes, I know, chemists shouldn't touch their stuff; buried somewhere in here is a reflection about humeral veils and gloves in the lab.)  Bleach is an oxidizing agent.  Fats, like olive oil, which form the base of chrism, when oxidized can give you esters — and alcohols.  The chemical mantra when it comes to dissolving things is "like dissolves like." So....

"Try some rubbing alcohol." I offered.

With this I went off to teach quantum mechanics, to find an email when I was done that the alcohol had done the trick.  Science in the service of the faith.

My hands smelled of chrism all morning, each time I raised my hands to write on the board, this reminder of my own baptismal anointing brushed my senses.  As priest, as prophet.  The catechism of the Catholic Church notes that service is intrinsically linked to the sacramental priesthood [CCC 876], and I see its traces in Ignatius' Suscipe, "Whatsoever I have or hold, You have given me; I give it all back to You and surrender it wholly to be governed by your will."  What do I return?  What do I turn toward God?  Toward service?

I thought, too, of Kathleen Norris' short book, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and 'Women's Work,' in which she writes, "But laundry and worship are repetitive activities with a potential for tedium, and I hate to admit it, but laundry often seems like the more useful of the tasks. But both are the work that God has given us to do."  The laundry and the dishes are inextricably entwined with worship.  We learn to do one by doing the other.

---

Chrismaria that look like they belong in the lab!