Sacred space

Yesterday I went down to Georgetown, to give a talk for the annual Vatican Observatory Foundation seminar. Before the talks, we got a tour of the old Georgetown astronomical observatory, which might be the oldest observatories in the US still in its original location and with its vintage equipment. (The Mt. Holyoke telescope is from 1881 which predates this scope from 1888, but this building is older).

The astronomy department was closed in 1972, one of my colleagues at the Observatory, Rich Boyle, SJ, was one of the last Ph.D.'s from that program.

Both building and telescope are in need of work: the dome moves, but not 360^o; the gears on the telescope mount are frozen (perhaps), so you can't change the angle of the scope; and the top of the stairwell, with no railing, is downright terrifying. But there is an active group of student astronomers who gather there, to see what can be seen past Washington DC's lights and to talk space and stars with each other. Given Crash Kid's experience at Georgetown working with the student theater group, I can see the same kind of enthusiasm in this group.

The observatory building is on the National Register of Historic Places and is surrounded by a conservation garden, replete with ponds and native flora and fauna, used by the biology department.

The photo to the left is of Br. Guy Consolmagno SJ, the current director of the Vatican Observatory. It looks to me like a set up for a 19th century painting (minus the camping chair!).

The evening went well, I enjoyed hearing Paul Mueller, SJ  talk about pastoral approaches to the perceived conflicts between science and religion, along with some background about the Catholic tradition vis a vis science. Both Paul and I quoted Thomas Aquinas. David Brown, SJ, talked about the collaboration between the Vatican Observatory and a group from Potsdam to get high resolution spectra of stars about which there may be planets. As he summed up his talk, "it's an exciting time to be an astronomer."

Why Aren't You Writing?

Story board for talk.

This was the subject of an email in my box on Sunday afternoon. It's from a series directed at young faculty that I subscribe to (because while I'm not a young faculty member any more, it's good to know what advice is floating around out there for my junior colleagues). I always find it somewhat ironic that these emails land on Sunday afternoons when their stated raison d'etre is to help academics stop working endlessly, while still getting tenured and promoted. But then again, there I am, looking at my email on a Sunday.

The email repeats the basic advice this group gives embedded in a cautionary tale: write at least 30 minutes every weekday, do not let anyone or anything keep you from your appointed task. Or else you will be the tearful and unaccomplished academic featured in the email.

Why am I not writing? I haven't posted anything on the blog since Easter, which is not to say I haven't written anything —I have. An essay for Nature Chemistry on chirality, three talks in the last two weeks, a reflection for a retreat. A stack of letters of recommendation (rec letters are a genre in their own right, so should count!). And a final exam. Which then generated a thousand pages of grading.

Why am I not writing? In large part because the pneumonia disrupted my regular writing habits, first literally taking the air from my lungs, and then stealing the metaphorical wind from my sails as I recovered from it, careful not to do too much even as the work I didn't manage while I was sick mocked me from the corners of my desk. As of yesterday, I seem to have finally caught my breath.

I have missed the rhythm of exploratory writing as well as the vastness that open up when I'm not pressed up hard against a deadline.  I opened up a blank screen this morning, intending to sketch out a piece, but founds myself pouring whole chunks into it, like water finally freed from the ice dams of late spring. Cool and clear and overflowing.

Amazing. Grace.

Last night, about 10 pm,  Math Man and I found ourselves surrounded on our own driveway by the young people who make up Pomona College's Glee Club. They are touring the East Coast and we had them to dinner.  And before they left, they gathered around the ping-pong table that The Egg had set up on the driveway and which moments before had been the scene of a madcap round robin game and sang. Their voices were so clear, so crystalline, I could hardly bear to listen. I loved watching their faces, the eyes that danced, the quirky smile on my own son's face as he took a spot in the ring for their second piece.

They sang Vaughn Williams "Rest" (from this Christina Rossetti poem)... and a setting of "Amazing Grace" that I first heard when they sang in Rome. It was amazing. It was grace. They were bright and shining like the sun.

I've been thinking today gratitude. The notes that students have left for me. The music last night. How gratitude perdures. How it is sweet and bracing both, like my tea.

...thank you what in us rackets glad
what gladrackets us...

From a Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

What a glad and wonderful racket. 

An unimaginable Easter imagined

It's the picture of the single shoe that haunts me. An overturned red shoe on the asphalt, and shattered glass, so much glass, glass like snow on the ground.  I woke on Easter not to photos of Mass at St. Peter's or to small children in their best romping on green lawns with Easter baskets in hand, but to scenes from the bombings in Sri Lanka. To visions of pews scattered about St. Sebastian's sanctuary and its roof blown open. And that one shoe.

Over the last week I've been correcting the proofs for a book of Lenten reflections. The last reflection in the book is not for Lent, but for Easter Sunday, and reads in part.

"Why do I not see everything overset? Why are the pews not scattered like matchsticks, the altar covered in dust from a dome broken open to the sky, a great wind whipping the trees about? And instead of children dressed in their best for Easter brunch, why are there not people milling about in confusion and fear, their clothes torn and shoes unmatched in their haste to come see what happened here last night?"

When I wrote it, I wasn't imagining a disaster, but mulling over this passage from Matthew

And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, approached, rolled back the stone, and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning and his clothing was white as snow. The guards were shaken with fear of him and became like dead men. (Mt 28:2-4) 

Which in turn reminded me of Annie Dillard's essay "An Expedition to the Pole" where she wonders at our inability to grasp the powers at work when we gather for liturgy, to truly grasp the resurrection.

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

My reflection goes on to imagine a reassuring angel sitting amidst the debris, gently shooing people back out into the world. I imagined it as if a storm had come and gone in the night and while people are bewildered and overset, they are not wounded or dying. Now I indeed see everything overset. I can't get the images of Sri Lanka out of my head, where the pews are scattered like matchsticks and the roof has been broken open so that you can see the sky through it. And that shoe.

I wonder how that reflection will read next Easter. Will we remember those who died this year?

---

The photos are #29 and #38 in this gallery at the Washington Post.

This reminded me, too, of the attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem and the power of images to drive my prayer.

Overflowing with glory

In the beginning there was God.  And there was chaos and confusion, a universe unshaped and restless, smoldering in the darkness.  The Spirit hovered over the waters, living and breathing above the abyss.  With a word, there was light, or so we read in the book of Genesis.

To hear the astrophysicists tell the tale, when the universe was one millionth of a second old, it was the size of a grapefruit. I could set it on my desk, cup it in my hands. Everything that would be was contained in that unimaginably hot, inconceivably dark, dense sphere. Matter was so tangled in its depths that even light could not wriggle its way out.  A quarter of a million years later, unable to bear the strain, the universe unfurls into the emptiness.  So now we have light.

Sometimes I imagine God cradling this rough-hewn and snarling mass of darkness in his hands, turning the inchoate universe over and around, pondering what will be.  Perhaps he set it on the desk for a while, leaning back in his chair with a creak to get a new perspective.  And when the time came, with a breath and a prayer—Spirit and Word— God’s hands opened and let what was within spill into the emptiness. God from God, Light from Light.

Humankind once held, all unknowing, the entirety of the universe, and more, in our hands. Inconceivable energy pushed into an impossibly small space.  The all-powerful, ever-living God contained in the body of a man, come to unravel the chaos. Perhaps the strain on the universe was again unbearable, for we hung God-become-man on a tree, and watched as he strained for breath and died. All that is, was and will be, pulled from the cross and cradled in his mother’s lap. We wrapped his body in linen, and set it aside. Only to have Light once more spill forth from the emptiness, washing out the darkness.

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” said T. S. Eliot. Certainly I cannot. I can contemplate with delight the small ball that was the universe in God’s hand. I will fall on my knees before Christ, who emptied himself out on that cross. But when again and again I cradle in my hands the Body of Christ, take the cup that bears God's very blood, I can’t bear to imagine the immensity of what is contained within.

I say, far too quickly, “Amen.”  I believe.  I assent.  But will I become? In receiving the Eucharistic, St. Augustine observed, “You are saying 'Amen' to what you are.” Can I stop, wait, and contemplate that in receiving this gift, those unimaginable forces have come to reside in me? What have I become?  And if I can bear that, can I imagine my neighbors holding such power in their hands, overflowing with God’s glory?

Perhaps what I really cannot bear is what this means I must do.  For what should come forth from my hands when I open them, if not light from Light.  What should I see in my neighbor, then, if not God? If I truly understood who I had become, would I not pour myself out for the kingdom of God?

Christus Resurrexit! 

Vere Resurrexit! 

Alleluia, Alleluia! 

From an essay in Give Us This Day, April 2017