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!

Principle and foundation redux

“In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance before all created gifts insofar as we have a choice and are not bound by some responsibility.   We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one.  For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a more loving response to our life forever with God.

Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening life in me.” — David A. Fleming, S.J.

As much as the Exercises are structured linearly, each week building on the next, ultimately we find ourselves revisiting them out of order in various moments of our lives. It’s Easter season, but I am floundering in the Third Week, scrambling to find my balance.

Ignatius’ First Principle and Foundation animates his Spiritual Exercise. If you have not acceded to this, you are not ready to immerse yourself in the work of the Exercises. I may have accepted the Principle and Foundation long ago, but I cannot say that I have always managed to live in such perfect indifference. It’s a process, it’s the little things. I still do not suffer wet socks well.

Or, it’s not the little things…A few weeks back I woke up with much of the vision in my left eye gone. Light and darkness, color and movement remained, but the world to my left rippled and wavered in a disconcerting way. Shortly I was sitting in a chair in a darkened room as my ophthalmologist ran through a series of possibilities — none of them particularly comforting. When I could not read the letters on the eye chart with my right eye covered, a line from Fleming’s paraphrase of Ignatius flashed through my head: “We should not fix our desires on health or sickness…” I wondered if I had the courage to keep from fixing my desires on sight.  "Pray for the desire for the desire, then," I hear a long ago spiritual director advise.

Within an hour some of the worst diagnoses were off the table, but more tests and a visit to the sub-specialist had to follow before there would be any clarity, metaphorical or literal. I sought the anointing of the sick. I sank into the Gospel stories that wound closer and closer to the Passion. I assiduously avoided the stories in which the blind regained their sight. My sight certainly had not returned.

The specialist had a diagnosis, for which I am grateful. The prognosis is mixed. This will not progress. But I will not entirely regain what I have lost. On the left, I am like the blind man in Mark’s Gospel (Mk 8:22-25), who when only partially healed sees people walking about like trees. The right remains clear. This is the First Principle and Foundation embodied, the two desires compassing me about.

So I struggle to find that indifference, the desire not for any particular path, except that which leaves me closer to God. I find comfort in Rilke, believing that somehow in the ebb and flow of event, God is cutting deeper channels into my soul.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for 

may for once spring clear
without my contriving. 

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.  -- Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours I, 12

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.

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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.

Do this in memory of me

(This is an edited and expanded version of a very brief reflection I gave at my parish's mission a few weeks ago. The movie is wrenching, and a difficult watch, but also beautiful.)

A few weeks ago I watched a movie on PBS. My oldest son had worked on the production, stage managing the play and then the film  and I wanted to see what he had done. The film, Remember This, was about listening, about listening deeply, and about seeing and what happens when we are deliberately blind to those around us. It told the story of Jan Karski, a Catholic and who worked with the Jewish Polish resistance during World War II, who told of the horrors they were enduring even before the US entered the war. Warning the world, warnings that went unheard. We could have stopped it, but we refused to hear. Forty years after the war, Karski said that he was still haunted by what he saw, and moreover that he wanted to be haunted by it. 

I want to tell you about a time when I saw something, and then chose to be blind to it. The experience haunts me, and I think, as Karski did, that I want it to haunt me. It was a bitterly cold December day and I was in a taxi outside Union Station in Washington DC on my way to give a talk. I looked out the window to see a man in a beige wool coat with a cup of coffee in one hand and a bagel in the other. As he crossed the street he tossed the half eaten bagel into the trashcan on the corner. I can still see the arc it made as it sailed through the air. And then I saw a man in a thin sweatshirt get off a nearby bench and reach into the trashcan, pick up the bagel and take a bite.

I was horror-struck. How hungry do you have to be to fish a half-eaten bagel out of the trashcan? I knew what I should've done, gotten out of that taxicab, and given him my hat, my gloves and my jacket — though in retrospect it was unlikely to fit — and taken him for breakfast. But I did none of these things. The traffic eased, the taxi drove on. If I saw Jesus on the street corner, how fast would I have bounded out of the car and said come have breakfast with me? The trouble is, I did see Jesus on the street corner, and chose to be blind. I still cringe when I think of it, and have mentally dubbed this experience the parable of the two men and the bagel.

When Karski walked the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, his companion kept repeating to him, “Remember this. Remember this." I want to hear as I walk the world Jesus repeating in my ear, "Remember this, remember me." I want to be haunted, so that in the end when Jesus asks me when I saw him, when I fed him and clothed him and cared for him, I can say, “on every street corner.”

In his homily last night for Holy Thursday our pastor asked us what we thought Jesus meant when he said, "do this in memory of me." Do we think he meant solely the celebration of the Eucharist? Or perhaps this yearly washing of the feet? Or is Jesus asking us to shape our whole lives in memory of everything that we have seen and heard of his life. So yes to the Eucharist, and yes to the washing of the feet. But also yes to the feeding of the hungry, and yes to the healing of the sick, and yes to the welcoming of those who the world pushes to the edges, unheard and unseen. And I thought again of Jan Karski, and those whispered words "remember this, remember this."

Op-ed redux: thoughts and prayers

The op-ed below appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer last May after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas. There's been another shooting, so many other shootings. We throw up our hands and say there are too many guns but what's to be done? If we had the will, if we cared about the lives of our children and our young people, perhaps we could see to it that there were fewer guns. We may never stop all of the violence, but to say that we can stop none of it is untrue.

We have gun toting congresspeople, but I wish someone would ask Marjorie Green Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert every time they speak, why do you need to carry a people-killing machine in your purse?

I wondered what image to put with this post, a photo of the original article, or some religious image, perhaps Christ bent under the weight of a cross. But part of me really thinks that what should go with these articles are pictures of the carnage. Detailed, up close, many, pictures of the carnage, the physical as well as the emotional. I spent time many years ago in Ignatian contemplation of the crucifixion, and wonder if we need a national contemplation of these tragedies in much the same way. Not to experience the horror of it, but to viscerally experience the weight our sins and know how we must change and live from that reality. To truly see what we have chosen as a nation. It surely isn't life.

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Ted Cruz is “fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families.” Mitch McConnell is praying fervently, too. My Twitter feed is full of thoughts and prayers for Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two adults on Tuesday afternoon.

Prayer.

We keep using that word, but what do we mean?

As someone who writes regularly about prayer, every time I see “thoughts and prayers” in my Twitter feed or hear it uttered by a politician on the news, I wonder what we think we’re praying for.

Are we offering to make some vague noise in the direction of God’s ear and then move on? Or do we have something specific in mind that we expect God to come down and take care of? Perhaps a miracle that restores the lives lost, or some divine assurance that something this horrific will never happen again — or at least not to us.

C.S. Lewis once said, “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless … It doesn’t change God — it changes me.” Are we willing to pray fiercely — even desperately — to change the way we approach guns, as individuals and as a nation?

Remington claims its version of an AR-15 rifle will give you “the confidence and firepower to get the job done.” Are we willing to pray to change the conversation, to dispense with euphemisms and say aloud what the job of a gun is: “This AR-15 will allow you to kill or maim another human being. Many human beings. Quickly.”

In Buffalo, N.Y., 10 in two minutes.

Can we pray for the vision to see how guns change us? To grasp that we might secretly relish holding the power of life and death in our hands, to consider we sometimes buy guns because they make us feel a little like gods ourselves, or if not gods, at least like a superhero. Or a patriot.

Are we willing to pray that we can change — that we could imagine ways to reduce, if not eliminate the carnage, as other countries have done? Or perhaps should we be praying for forgiveness from the families of the next classroom full of terrified children who will die in a hail of bullets? And we won’t have long to wait. On average, one child is shot every hour of the day in America.

We say now is not the time, in the wake of a tragedy, to think about the solutions. Instead, we should focus on thoughts and prayers for the dead, the dying, and those who loved them. But what are the prayers for, if not to change things? We must go beyond issuing vague petitions in the wake of a tragedy. Instead, we can offer ongoing, concrete prayers for our own change of heart, and for the hard, realistic thinking and respectful dialogue it will take to change a nation.

Perhaps the next time our leaders are offering their thoughts and prayers in the wake of a mass shooting, they might take the lead and say what those prayers and thoughts are.

That would be a miracle worth praying for.