Convergence of Knowledge on the Western Flyer

Two years ago, at about this time, there was a change in St. Joseph’s Chapel.  A change so subtle that many didn’t notice it.  Because of the change, whenever there is any seismic activity in Kent, here in Northwestern Connecticut, scientists at Columbia University can study the earth directly because of St. Joseph’s Chapel.  How is this possible?  We have a state of the art seismometer.  Where is it located?  You ask.  Wonderfully, it is located in our bell tower.  I say wonderfully because I love it when forms of knowledge intersect, especially science and theology.  When I was your age, an idealistic and bright-eyed scholar, one of my favorite parts of the educational experience was when knowledge of one class flowed into another, and when knowledge from two or more different directions converged to mutually inform each field. 

I thought about the seismometer in the chapel last week when Dr. Green and Mr. McDonough shared their thoughts on the strange lives and extraordinary thinking of Isaac Newton and Athanasius Kircher.  After those talks, my pensive and neurotic hunchback intern—his name is I-gor…he lives secretly in the bell tower…I-gor and I spent hours meditating in front of the seismometer.  We were on fire with the consilience of knowledge; and I could almost hear the seismometer join us by saying “Om” in the darkness of the tower.  I-gor had a hard life growing up in the Carpathian Mountains of eastern Romania, but he loves it here at Kent.  Despite the fact that he grew up in a family with twenty-six children and assorted livestock and reptiles, he still gets very skittish around Kent students.  Most students have never seen him.  Ok, I don’t really have a hunchback intern living secretly in the bell tower (or do I?).  But no bell tower is complete without a hunchback and a seismometer.  So I’m half way there, maybe all the way.                      

Several years ago, I accidentally discovered a hidden gem of a book at the Monterey Aquarium on a visit there with my daughter Beatrice and my brother Kevin.  All three of us get very excited—positively giddy--about aquariums, and Monterey is our favorite.  Zoos make me sad, especially the gorillas, but I become theological at aquariums, almost instantly.  Just the sight of the Leafy Sea Dragon—a creature that appears to be part sea horse, part plant (species Phycodurus eques)—can send me into a religious trance.  On this particular visit, the gift shop had a large display section on the novelist John Steinbeck, the most famous person to ever come from Monterey, California, which is just a few hours from the small boring town where I grew up in California.  The Steinbeck book that caught my eye was The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  Steinbeck is one of my all time favorite writers, but I had never heard of this non-fiction book--an account of Steinbeck’s participation on a science research ship visiting the Sea of Cortez, otherwise known as the Gulf of California, on the western coast of Mexico.   My brother said it was definitely worth reading, which was a change in our usual relationship--with me recommending books to him.  So I left the Monterey Aquarium with a book to read.

My brother Kevin and I look and sound alike to many people; some describe him as a stretched out version of me, pulled by invisible forces, or secret knots—or I am a compressed and much more handsome version of him.  Either way is fine.  Kevin is a scientist who spends his day in a laboratory on the coast of California.  His specialty is environmental toxicology.  What does he do all day?  He spends a lot of time on his invectively coupled plasma mass spectrometer.  He also has his ion chromatograph, a gas chromatograph, and don’t forget the always necessary ammonia analyzer.  I can’t get through a day without an ammonia analyzer either.  You should see what it did to my copy of Hamlet.  Kevin also has an i.c.p. without mass spectrometry, which makes it faster, along with the carbon nitrogen analyzer where samples are combusted at 1000 degrees. 

Wow, that is hot as hell.  Which brings us back to theology. 

On other hand, I am a priest of Jesus Christ who spends his time teaching theology and humanities, religion and literature.  I analyze and interpret ancient texts.  I teach modern literature as well.  I perform rituals that are 2000 years old, with today’s teenagers present.  I think the Roman Empire is recent history, and Jesus of Nazareth and I spend a lot of time together.  He is my home slice, after all.  Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are also old friends.  I don’t moodle or skype.  I waited out moodle, and now it’s gone.  It disappeared.  Victory is mine, once more.  No one moodles anymore, just like me.  When a student asked me this fall about my Haiku page for my class, I explained, with a straight face and a stern voice: I don’t speak Japanese.  The student backed away from me slowly.  I don’t have an i-phone or a droid.  I do have a seven year old Nokia cell phone, with a cracked screen, which is perfect because I can’t read texts or tell if I have any messages.  People laugh at me when they see it.  They rejected Jesus too.  Unlike you, I am not itching to get at my phone as soon as chapel is over.  (Pause to show physical signs of addiction to technology).  I prefer this: the dialectical space between us.  Give or take the pulpit.  Give or take.  The closest I come to being interested in technology is that I watch every episode of “Ancient Aliens” that I can find on the History channel.  I-gor and I take copious notes in the bell tower.  Makes perfect sense to us, especially Machu Picchu and the pyramids.  Oh by the way, I think there’s a 50-50 chance that both Dr. Green and Mr. McDonough are modern aliens doing research here for their home planets.  With their advanced technologies, the cross country team’s recent success isn’t so mysterious.  I like to run too.  But only when I’m being chased.

To honor Mr. McDonough and Dr. Green, I will now don safety goggles, which I will wear for the duration of this chapel talk.  Ideas are powerful…and dangerous.          

I talk to people, my species, Homo sapiens, all day long, preferably face to face, or thereabouts.  There are many days when Kevin the scientist talks to almost no one, except for his fantasy football friends.  We are worlds apart.  Yet I love bouncing ideas, both scientific and artistic, historical and psychological and mathematical, off my brother; and he does the same with me.  However, we never discuss economics because the field makes him very sad.  We both have to be a little slow at the beginning with the jargon and terminology, from our respective disciplines, until the other one catches on, and then we can really fly.  But there once was a time when we both did science and the humanities; which is exactly where you are as students today.  You shouldn’t be in a hurry to specialize; so please slow down and enjoy all of your subjects, and the different parts of the mind they open. 

So what do my brother the scientist and I the priest have to do with the author John Steinbeck?  Yes, back to him.  The Log from the Sea of Cortez was written by two people, not one.  One of the writers was John Steinbeck, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.  But the other was Edward Ricketts, a biologist from Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, right next to Steinbeck in Monterey.  In the book the novelist and the scientist collaborated on the written log of the science voyage.  Ricketts was a scientist who studied at the University of Chicago.  He specialized in animal behavior: the group vs. the individual in the animal world.  Steinbeck was fascinated by the very same question in human beings.  How do we behave when we are alone?  How do we behave when we are around others?  How should we behave in both situations?  Both Ricketts and Steinbeck were critical, and often pessimistic, about the future of our species.  They were worried about the environment long before it was fashionable to do so, and both men were skeptical of American society.  Among the many odd pastimes of Ricketts was his personal interest and medical care for local prostitutes in the Monterey area.  He gave them free medical treatment right from his lab in Monterey.  Locals in Monterey referred to him as being “half goat, and half Christ.”

What inspired me about the book was my inability, as reader, while reading, to discover where Steinbeck’s thinking stopped and Ricketts’ started, and vice versa, as they charted their scientific oceanic journey.  This is how Steinbeck described the intellectual friendship he found with Ricketts.  Their rapport he referred to as “speculative metaphysics.”  According to Steinbeck, speculative metaphysics was a kind of sport, a deep intellectual bonding between them.  In the novelist’s words:  “It was a sport of lopping off a piece of observed reality and letting it move up through the speculative process like a tree growing tall and bushy.  We observed with pleasure how the branches of thought grew away from the trunk of external reality…we worked together so closely that I do not know in some cases who started which line of speculation since the end thought was the product of both minds.  I do not know whose thought it was.”  In the book, the scientific mind and the literary mind are wed in one mind: the mind of the naturalist.  The observer and lover of nature.  Think Mr. Klingebiel, or Hunter White (he’s probably out foraging for grubs right now in Maine--that lovable hobbit). 

So what does this have to do with us?  I think the experience aboard the science ship The Western Flyer is an apt one for thinking about Kent School, and for thinking about your purpose here.  For Ricketts and Steinbeck, no question was out of bounds.  Nothing was sacred, and everything was.  Both men actively questioned common sense and group think, the human tendency to continue to think ridiculous ideas only because lots of other people think them too around you.  Both men were fascinated by religion, and when they were ashore they went to churches and religious festivals in Mexico.  They were touched by poor people who shared their incredible food and their beautiful customs with the crew without demanding anything in return.  The Mexican people were likewise amazed by a ship that wasn’t buying or selling anything at all, but was simply gathering knowledge wherever it could be found.  If you do this in the world, people will find you strange, and they will be drawn to you. 

What was the synthetic thread of the diverse experience of the voyage?  What was the deepest shared assumption between Ricketts the biologist and Steinbeck the novelist?  Perhaps it is the same shared assumption between my brother the environmental scientist and me the priest of an ancient religion.  Ricketts and Steinbeck both fundamentally agreed on a line from the poet William Blake to explain their shared passion.  The line is this:  “All that lives is holy.”  All that lives is holy.  Holiness is not simply a category for the faithful.  It is a quality that is everywhere you look, in all living things.  It grows and branches from the smallest living creatures to the animals of greater complexity, and we are all connected to the same holy source of life. 

All that lives is holy. 

I encourage you to kindle in yourself an active spirit and intellect that seeks knowledge in many fields, and also seeks to synthesize that knowledge into your own philosophy of life.  And your own theology of God.  The universe is too beautiful for only one way of seeing it.  I hope you will combine the many branches of knowledge and discovery into your own vision of the holiness of all creation, and then protect it with all your heart and strength and mind.  These are the sacred places of knowledge where truth and beauty, the physical and the spiritual, have kissed each other.  These are the places that give hope for humanity and our common future.  I hope you have a good evening.  Your technology awaits you.  But so does Mother Earth, dear Mother Nature.  This planet is a jewel.  Take care of her always.  

Parenthood and God: The Gravity of Gratitude

Parents’ Weekend

Kent School, St. Joseph’s Chapel

Several years ago, a magazine called Yankee magazine ranked Kent, Connecticut, as the #1 place for autumn in New England.  Of all the places to experience this golden season, this community came out on top.  Now I had never heard of Yankee magazine, and I haven’t seen a copy of it since that fall when this small community in northwest Connecticut graced its cover.  But the ranking did change us for a time.  Busloads of tourists came to Kent.  There were suddenly traffic problems down Route 7, both north and south.  Local residents complained about the crowds who had read the magazine, but they did not complain about the business they generated.  The irony of magazines—any magazine, that dying medium--trying to raise their own stature by ranking others has never been lost on me; U.S. News and World Report has made this an industry with their college rankings.  But consider, for a moment, that Yankee magazine might have been right.  It was hard to argue during this Parents’ Weekend.  There was golden perfection all around us.  Could it be possible that this river valley was the very best place to be?      

Yes, it is a stretch, a potentially preposterous idea.  But it is just the kind of spiritual stretch we need at the end of a busy but joyful Parents’ Weekend.  It makes you want to slow down, to savor each moment unfolding in your life; to remember carefully the words exchanged between parent and child, teacher and family, before we rush off to the next chapter of our busy lives.  These moments, if we look at them just right, might really be the best ones—as good as it gets, if we see them correctly, perhaps as God sees them, and us living them.   

The gospel this morning is about the fullness of gratitude changing one life pretty significantly.  In the gospel from Luke, ten lepers are cleansed by Jesus.  This is a big time miracle, healing on a wide scale.  But only one of them praises God afterwards.  Only one is filled with gratitude—an outsider, a Samaritan.  Samaritans were cut off from the ritual observances of Jews in Jerusalem; they were not even allowed to enter the temple; you weren’t even supposed to talk to them in public.  But the Samaritan is the one who praises God in a loud voice.  Jesus observes: “’Were not ten made clean?  But the other nine, where are they?  Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’”  The extraordinary miracle is forgotten, or taken for granted, except by one person.  So Jesus says to the Samaritan: “’Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’” 

Hundreds—even thousands of people—have come to Kent, Connecticut, this very weekend.  But how many of them made it to chapel this morning?  How many of them saw the turning, falling, golden leaves and praised God with a loud voice?  Luke would also highlight the outcast behaving the best in his beloved parable of the Good Samaritan.  In this gospel, the power of faith and the feeling of gratitude are deeply, powerfully related.  They are two sides of the same coin.  Luke portrays the outcast of the ten lepers as the one who is most grateful, and therefore most faithful, to God.   What kind of outcast Samaritan do you have to be to see the miracle of our being with open eyes? 

I will never forget the moment when my first daughter Beatrice was born, or the events of labor that led up to it.  The details are indelible to me.  We had an authoritative, very talkative nurse in the delivery room.  And I still cherish the moment when my wife told her to shut up for a change—it would make things a whole lot easier.  We all laughed, in the moments before birth, and she did shut up.  But the experience of witnessing the miracle of the birth of your child changes you forever.  More love is pulled out of you—literally, physically, spiritually, naturally—than you ever knew was inside of you.  But every moment from that point on, you forget a little, you lose a little.  You lose track of the golden lessons of how powerful the gift of life really is.  Yet in moments at school for your child—at soccer games and musical performances—you remember snatches—you get glimpses of the miracle that you once possessed in completeness.  With the faith and swelling gratitude that makes us well.  Sadly, it often in loss and grief that we learn not to take any of what we have for granted.  But we forget how to see with the eyes of faith, and how to live with a debt of gratitude to God: the origin of our being and also our ultimate destination.      

As Parents’ Weekend approached this past week, I thought of how to reclaim this gratitude, the full memory of the miracle of life.  Of the gift of parenthood and childhood that makes us, for some precious moments, glimpse the divine love that formed each of us in the womb.  Full memory of the love around every life, a cloud of witnesses.  The Church in its early formation called the recollection of this love anamnesis—the polar opposite of amnesia.  Anamnesis was present for the early Church in the Eucharist that we celebrate this morning.  Eucharist is a strange word, but it only means, simply, “thanksgiving.” 

As I thought about how to recover this anamnesis as your preacher, I did the only reasonable thing: I went to the movies to escape the burden.  Fortunately, my wife Amy and I did not go to see an ordinary Hollywood movie.  We went to see a film that, even now after a few days, is hard to describe; it’s a movie called, simply, Gravity.  The movie is not really about gravity because gravity is precisely what is missing for 99% of the film.  The film is about two astronauts, Ryan and Matt, played wonderfully by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, who lose their space shuttle and their fellow astronauts.  They are the only survivors of a freak space emergency.  I don’t want to give away any of the movie’s plot, but, in some ways, I’ve told you everything.  The two astronauts have to survive in space together, and they don’t even particularly like each other at the beginning.  The movie is shot in real time, and we don’t know anything about the characters except what we find about them during their conversations with each other. 

Gravity is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen.  The direction by Alfonso Cuaron is absolutely courageous.  The eye candy of the space scenes is extraordinary, and yet every scene from space also reminds the viewer of the peril of these two individuals.  The movie is quite frightening at times.  Even with the technology that allows human beings to exist in space, the movie is a slow, meditative study of the ordinary things people do to stay alive, high above the nation states that don’t really have borders from space.  They are far from the civilization that we often place in the role of God.  What begins to rise above the scale of the planet, and the universe, and the improbability of their survival, is the spiritual power of human connectedness.  It is simple and powerful, this human bonding that we do on this planet, and above it.  George Clooney’s character is a bit of a clown—a chatterbox of stories that Sandra Bullock’s character Ryan doesn’t want to hear (just like our delivery nurse).  Clooney’s Matt reminded me of Buzz Lightyear with his cheerful attention to space duty despite the extraordinary dangers all around them.  Their bonding is profound, and yet simple and straightforward.  Matt is able to draw forth the event that changed Ryan forever: the loss of her only child.  The most profound loss that any human being can experience.  Because it hits us at the deepest place of being human.  We eventually find out the child’s name is Sarah.  Matt handles the story gently, simply, lovingly, and the memory or presence of a child seems to guide them in their attempt to stay alive together. 

Gravity is a profoundly theological movie, without trying to be.  It is effortless, floating close to questions of God without ever naming that divine reality directly.  Yet the movie is existentialist as well, harsh and bleak, out beyond the sheltering sky of our atmosphere.  The movie provides a study of the human body in the act of survival—Sandra Bullock’s in particular.  But there is nothing remotely gratuitous about it.  Focusing on the biological needs of her body to survive in space, we remember the little things we all do every day to stay alive.  You feel gratitude for the life we live on land.  You want to kiss the ground we walk on.  You feel thanksgiving for the air we breathe, the oxygen that enters our body and feeds every one of our cells to stay alive.  Upon entering an air duct at a space station, after breathing carbon dioxide for several minutes, Sandra Bullock curls up in a fetal position, floating, like a child in her mother’s womb.  You remember the love that planted us in the universe, each of us children of our universal mother and father. 

As mentioned, Ryan and Matt are mismatched, an odd couple in space.  They reminded me of the recent story of the fawn and the baby bobcat.  These two sweet creatures survived the fires in Southern California.  The fawn was three days old and the bobcat three weeks old.  They both lost their parents, and yet they bonded immediately when they saw each other, snuggling together, becoming litter mates—becoming family, almost immediately.  The pictures of them are unbelievable--inseparable together.  Like the Samaritan, the outcast practices the greatest devotion, freshly remembering the gift of water, food, shelter, and the physical comfort of a fellow creature, snuggled up.  These are the moments when you really do love your neighbor as yourself.  Astronauts and animals remember what we have forgotten.  The connectedness, the bonding that makes us human, is alive, but not awake; the deep gratitude that feeds our faith slips away.  Maybe out in space it’s natural to remember, but even right now, in this beautiful chapel, we too are floating in space, if we could but remember the wonder and beauty and peril of our being alive.  Perhaps it’s easier for the outcast bobcat and fawn to really love each other, like it was for the Samaritan who was healed by Jesus to remember God.  And for our two astronauts just trying not to die today.  There is one moment of the film Gravity that might be described as supernatural (don’t worry, I won’t give it away).  But the movie subtly doesn’t name the miracle as God, though the intervention is certainly miraculous, connecting the living to the dead.  Scientists and existentialists might explain it away—as a dream sequence, or a hallucination.  But the person whose life is touched, in this case an astronaut in space, will never forget it.  She will praise God with a loud voice because her faith has made her well.       

There are a few moments still left of Parents’ Weekend and this Eucharist, the great thanksgiving, where all are welcome at God’s table: Embrace them and each other.  The weekend isn’t over yet.  Maybe there is one more sacred, ordinary meal before goodbyes.  There is healing in these moments as they pass, and as they linger in our minds and memories.  Take the time to be present to each other, with every breath you take; like astronauts without a ship, and small confused animals bonding without their parents.  Yet all of us children of God.  God loves each of you if you were the only person on the face of the earth, and floating in space as well.  That is the gravity that binds us, one to another.  When we know this presence and return love to it, the voice of Jesus can be heard in our time as well when we slow down, and give thanks to God, the Master of the Universe: You’re back on Planet Earth.  Get up and go on your way.  Your faith has made you well.