A Little Light — But What a Light!

It seems like such a little act:  lighting a candle.  But I have discovered in that act much to meditate upon.

As the year heads into its last few months, more tiny flames are lit around the world as particular religious festivals arrive:  Diwali, Hanukah, Christmas, even the newcomer Kwanza.  All these celebrations light candles in some form as part of their ceremonies.  Sometimes the wicks being lit are at the tip of hard candles; sometimes in a tiny cup of liquid.  But the visual effect is the same.  And it is beautiful.

In the northern hemisphere, the lighting of candles on those holidays late in the year carries an added spiritual meaning through the warmth the candles bring in cold weather.  But even when those religious holidays are practiced in the southern hemisphere, with days getting longer, candle lights can bring a soft yellow glow to what was darkness.  Although I am not a Roman Catholic, I have (as long as I can remember) found pleasing any pictures of Catholics lighting candles in a sometimes dim sanctuary, often accompanied by private prayers.

Before electricity came to our modern world, candles were used where today we use tiny light bulbs.  I feel nervous when I see pictures of some Europeans lighting candles on the branches of evergreen Christmas trees.  And I know the firefighters at my local fire-department can sleep easier knowing that electric lights decorate our trees in the U.S.  But we still desire to light candles in other ways during these festive months.

Before our petroleum age, the material for candles was wax from bees or tallow from sheep or cattle.  We might do well to recognize the flame as also being a gift from Nature.

Scientists who work in the area of evolutionary psychology try to project their thoughts back upon the path of human evolution.  Certainly a significant step in that story would have been being able to start a fire.  The European cultural heritage expresses how momentous that discovery was with its mythological story of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods.  In the playwright Aeschylus's adaptation Prometheus Bound, Prometheus is also viewed as being the bringer of civilization.  But the god Zeus knew all too well how dangerous humans could be without bounds.  And so, Prometheus is bound to a rocky mountain as punishment.

That danger of possessing fire is why my reflections upon candle-lighting have led me to see it as an example of behaving in a restrained, respectful manner.  In humankind's use of candles, we have found a way to handle fire in a controlled way. If in mythology fire brings civilization, can lighting a candle be a civilizing act today?  In our religious and spiritual lighting of candles, can we—instead of fanning the flames of anger in ourselves and others—turn our hearts toward worship?

The commonality across faith-traditions of lighting candles (whether in sticks or cups of liquid) might enable us to share in the emotions of Howard Thurman, even if our faith-tradition is non-Christian, or if we have none.  He writes in part:

"I Will Light Candles This Christmas.

Candles of joy despite all sadness,

Candles of hope where despair keeps watch,

Candles of courage for fears ever present,

Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days,

Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens."

~ ~ ~

Do you light candles on particular occasions?  When?  What feelings does it bring?

(The lines from "Candles for Christmas" by Howard Thurman are from Meditations of the Heart, © 1953, used under Fair Use.)
(The painting of Prometheus by Jan Cossiers is in the Public Domain.)

Obliging Animals

As I drove home, I was debating in my head what I was going to do to resolve a problem I had encountered upon leaving home a few hours earlier.  Quite soon after exiting my driveway in the morning, I had noticed a dead opossum in the middle of the street.  It had most likely been struck by a car the night before, because its lifeless body was still intact even though surrounded by a swarm of flies.  And so, as I drove back home after running my errands, I wondered what I was going to do about that unpleasant dead animal on my suburban street. Trying to shovel it up to put it in the trash would be difficult by myself, especially given all the flies.  I had a vague recollection that one of the city's many phone numbers was listed as "Dead Animals," but in a sprawling city of a few million people, how long would it take for the overburdened city servants to respond to one small, dead animal?  What was I going to do?

As I turned the corner onto the street where I live, I was pleased to see that the problem had been taken care of by some obliging, non-human animals: Four vultures were by the street's curb, two of them picking at what little was left of the corpse.  The nicely-designed hooks on the tips of their beaks enabled them to easily tear off bite-sized pieces of meat.

I was struck by the contrast between my previously anxious mind about how to solve a problem and the relaxed casualness of the vultures.  They reminded me of a group of human diners at a Chinese restaurant who, after sharing a large meal, are in no hurry to leave, and so enjoy lingering together.  Two of them were still nibbling, while the other two lingered with the nibblers.

I do not know where the four vultures had been residing before they spotted the dead opossum.  But my appreciating how obliging they were in solving my clean-up problem led to my recalling the mob of flies that had been swarming around the corpse a few hours earlier.  Although distasteful to me, they too had been beginning Nature's disposal of the dead animal, even if in a much slower fashion.

How numerous are the species of animals that obligingly help us humans! (And here I am thinking of animals other than those who are coerced into becoming meat on our dinner plates.)  Such animals as bees that make honey, some of which we snitch.  And the many kinds of other insects that pollinate our fruit and nut trees.  Also, the earthworms that help rejuvenate the life-giving soil.  The list goes on at length.

Flies.  Vultures.  Bees.  Insects.  Worms.  These are all among the "Living Things We Love to Hate," as Des Kennedy expresses it in his book's title.  Nevertheless, such obliging animals, going about their own business, make our human work, recreation, and even lives possible.  We can be thankful for that.

~ ~ ~

Can you think of any other animals that help us in easily overlooked ways?

(The book mentioned is Living Things We Love to Hate: Facts, Fantasies & Fallacies by Des Kennedy, © 1992, 2002.)

When the “Lightning” Strikes

"Lightning, a kite, and an almanac by Dick."  It almost sounds like a Jeopardy clue under the category-heading of "Founding Fathers."  And the contestant who can hit their button first and say "Who was Benjamin Franklin?" gets the points.

So frequently repeated are the story of Franklin flying a kite in the lightning storm and the title of Poor Richard's Almanack that we rarely get a chance to learn about the other contributions of Franklin. (Whose face and build are also widely recognized from the many portraits of him, some with the illumination of a lightning strike.).  Some people in the general public might know a bit about his having lived in France for awhile as part of his public service for his countrymen back in America.  Or maybe know about his fiddling with science even beyond that kite.  But we hear little about his religious habits or his spirituality.

That omission is why I was struck by one page in the book Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment by Tom Shachtman. That author emphasizes that:

"The Founding Fathers' science was in no way opposite to their religion. 
The notion that science and religion were antithetical
is a nineteenth-century construct."

And in regard to Franklin, Shachtman writes:

"By the age of fifteen, Franklin wrote in his Autobiography, he had become
a doubter of organized religion...until he chanced upon printed lectures that
tried to debunk Deism: [Franklin wrote:] ' They wrought an effect on me quite contrary
to what was intended by them, for the arguments of the Deists...appeared to me
much stronger than the refutations; in short I soon became a thorough Deist.' 
In his twenties, he set out his religious beliefs
in a ten-page liturgy, complete with a hymn."

Benjamin Franklin's explanation of his newly found religious orientation continues:

"I think it seems required of me, and my Duty, as a Man,
to pay Divine Regards to SOMETHING....
When I stretch my Imagination thro' and beyond...the visible fix'd Stars themselves,
into that Space that is every Way infinite, and conceive it fill'd with Suns like ours...,
then this little Ball on which we move, seems, even in my narrow Imagination,
to be almost Nothing, and my self less than nothing."

There were two things I liked in these passages.  The first was Franklin's ability to remain sufficiently open to change his mind.  He had apparently began reading the arguments trying to refute the existence of God because they aligned with his doubts about organized religion; but he turned in a different direction when he found the refutations lacking.  That turn in direction put him on a course where, several years later, he could put to pen his own majestic expression of religious belief.

The second thing I liked was Franklin's expression of his need to feel reverence (the paying of "Divine Regards," as he interestingly put it). Our media today are so quickly drawn towards brash voices and dominating personalities that it is easy to forget that we are often better served by humility.  And in religious and spiritual lives, humility is cultivated through following a path of reverence.

~ ~ ~

How do you think we can find a good midpoint between the extremes of brashness and timidity?

(Quotations are taken from Shachtman's Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries, © 2014, pp. xii-xiv.)
(Both pictures are details from the originals, both of which are in the public domain.)

Yearning for Something Better

"We pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful,
even though the false, the nasty, and the messy 

might have been just as useful to our genes."

What was it that attracted me to this statement by the contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton?  In part, it was my knowing that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty have been held by Christianity to be the three classic avenues through which we come to know God.  But something more immediate influenced me, something about human society today.  In a world in which we are told by some people not that there are additional facts but that there are "alternative facts," and told by still others that "truth isn't truth," it can be hard to find our bearings.  Hard to restore our grounding.  Scruton's statement reminded me that there is something within us that yearns for something better.

My responses to Scruton's words began to resonate with the picture on the cover of Scruton's book The Soul of the World.  It was a painting by the great 17th-century master Nicolas Poussin titled "Landscape with a Calm."  That painting (see below) does indeed convey an air of calm, with a herder and animals in the foreground, still water and sheep in mid-ground, and a gentle slope and stable architecture in the background.  A diffused sunlight bonds all the elements together.

Researching in an art book, I found out that although Poussin lived in the era of effusive baroque art, there was in Poussin a "conscious attempt to suppress feeling....[Nevertheless,] his paintings are hardly ever cold or lifeless."  That is because there is in them, even if it is subtle, "an emotional tension -- a tension developed between the imaginative force of the informing idea and the strict discipline of the means used to control and express it."  Poussin sought with his landscape paintings to convey more than a landscape.  He sought to convey not the surface complexity (or possible chaos) of the world but to hint at enduring truths obscured by our human disorders.  Even in his twenties, he had written:

"My nature leads me to seek out and cherish things that are well ordered,
shunning confusion which is as contrary and menacing to me
as dark shadows are to the light of day."

There it was: Echoing down from centuries ago, a statement of Poussin that there was also in his nature a yearning for an orderly, truthful dimension that lies beneath the visible surface of this too-often darkened world.

Moreover, isn't the yearning within us for some stable ground a yearning for more than truth? Isn't it also a yearning for something we can trust?  And for people we can trust?  (The chief cause of broken friendships is betrayal.)  If the yearning is for more than truth, it would be a yearning also for goodness in our relationships to the world.  And a yearning for a kind of beauty that is not always visible to our physical eyes.  Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

~ ~ ~

Is there a way you try to restore your bearings in a world in which, it seems, "anything goes"?

(The quotes by Scruton are from The Soul of the World, © 2014, pp. 5 & 6.)

(The quotes by and about Poussin are from The Age of Baroque by Michael Kitson
in the series Landmarks of the World’s Art, © 1966 p. 73.)

Beauty: To Capture or to Create?

It's so easy to do now -- to take a photograph.  Just pull out the cellphone, aim, and press a button.  What you saw is instantly preserved.

I am old enough to remember when Polaroid demonstrated on live TV the then remarkable accomplishment of having its new camera eject a printed picture in only 60 seconds.  No more waiting until the 24 or 46 exposures were finished, taking the exposed roll of film to a store, and returning some days later after professionals had turned it into prints or slides.  Polaroid's 60-second do-it-yourself camera was so remarkable that they had to have hosts of TV shows with live audiences demonstrate the camera so viewers at home would know there was no editing or other TV trickery.

Traveling back further in the history of cameras, we would find further evidence of how comparatively easy photography can be today.  Such as the chemically treated glass plates and bottles of caustic chemicals that were once required.

Behind all these efforts, however, lies the same desire: to preserve something one has seen.  To capture it so that one might see it again.  We even once referred to "snapshots," to "shooting" a roll of film, and to "photoshoots," unconsciously preserving in our language the similarity between capturing an image and capturing a wild animal to preserve it or even try to possess it.

Most photos in the world (I think I can safely guess) are of family or friends.  Such photos help us preserve our memories.  They allow us to see (and with prints, touch) even when the faces thus preserved are far way or no longer alive.

"Orpheus and the Beasts"
by Sebastiaan Brancx

But there is another photographic urge, which was brought to my mind by a statement by a contemporary philosopher Elaine Scarry.  It is the urge to photograph something because we are struck by its beauty.  In her book On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry writes:

"[Beauty] seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication.... Beauty brings copies of itself into being.
It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.  Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances....
Beauty prompts a copy of itself."

What struck me about Scarry's statement is that she did not use that word "capture" that has been so much a part of the lexicon of photography. Instead, she employed words that suggest that beauty can inspire us to become creative ourselves.

A photograph is, in a way, an imitation of part of what was before our eye when we clicked the camera's shutter -- but often only a pale imitation of the real thing.  A photograph of a mountain is hardly the mountain itself. Scarry's statement suggests something more.  It suggests the desire not to capture just an image, nor to capture the thing itself, but the desire to create in our own life something that bears some of the same good qualities of what we have perceived as being beautiful.

Moreover, some of the qualities we can perceive as being beautiful are known not by the eye but by the heart.  The grateful heart.

It's amazingly easy to pull out the cellphone and push a button.  It's much harder to creatively imitate the caring and helpfulness and kindness we have received from other people. But that we can sometimes do so is also a remarkable thing.

~ ~

Who has inspired you with their caring, helpfulness, or kindness?

(The quotation is from On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry, © 2011, p. 3.)

The Cute, the Cuddly, and the Colossal

nine-banded armadillo

Contemporary psychologists have been able to figure out why human beings are drawn affectionately to certain animals.  The secret lies primarily in our emotions being easily captured by the round, big-eyed face of a baby, an instinct that has helped the human race protect its fragile offspring and thus endure.  This instinct is also revealed in our hearts' being easily tugged by paintings of big-eyed children, and by dogs bred to look more baby-faced.  That human instinct cannot explain, however, the seeming proclivity of Texans and other southerners to find armadillos cute. Those animals, with their long pointed noises and tiny eyes, have heads the very opposite of human babies.  There is a bit of a mystery here.  Behind armadillos also lies a story about how Darwin unraveled what was once called the "mystery of mysteries."  Namely, how new species evolve.

depction of
ancient armadillo (Glyptodon)

When Charles Darwin was on his groundbreaking trip on the Beagle around South America, he stopped many times to travel inland, studying the life-forms in that foreign land.  Darwin had a keen scientific eye for the similarities and dissimilarities between various species, both living and extinct.  Scientists at that time had been trying to piece together the puzzle of the fossil remains of some colossal species that no longer existed.  Darwin found the fossilized armor-plate of an extinct nine-foot cousin of today's armadillos (which in the U.S. are about one-and-a-half feet long).

Even though most of us today might be repulsed by the idea of eating an armadillo (either because of its possible taste or its cuteness), Darwin and his companions dined on a species of armadillo.  The preparation of that meal would have helped Darwin see the similarities and dissimilarities between the armor-like coverings of existing and extinct species of armadillos.  As he explained later in his autobiographical reflections:  "During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos...."

The relationships between the complex skeletons of existing and colossal extinct species (such as sloths) was challenging even to scientists.  Here is where the simpler armor of armadillos was something Darwin could take advantage of in Origin of Species, writing that a "relationship is manifest, even to the uneducated eye, in the gigantic pieces of armour like those of the [extinct] armadillo found in several parts of la Plata."

Now that Darwin and evolutionary biologists have done so much work on the background of these creatures, we are left with trying to understand ourselves:  Why are people so easily fascinated by armadillos, even finding them cute?  With their hard covering, they do not fit into the category of "soft, cute, and cuddly," which would latch in with our mammalian tactile affection.  Some of our delight in armadillos seems to come from their very oddness.  Also, when one is spotted in the wild, there can be the excitement and fun of trying to chase the small animal as it scurries in the underbrush.  We are just lucky those colossal nine- footers are no longer around!

~~~

Have you ever seen an armadillo or other peculiar-looking animal in the wild?  When?

(The Darwin quotes are, respectively, from

 The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow, © 1958.  p. 118.

and from The Origin of Species [1959] by Charles Darwin.  Chap. 10.)

(The photo of a contemporary armadillo is by Jerry Segraves.

The artwork of extinct armadillo by Pavel Riha is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Our Life from a Dog’s Life

For several years now, I have been writing biweekly articles for this website knowing full well that I have not devoted an article to one very important topic:  Namely, dogs.  That omission has not been due to any disrespect for the canine race.  Quite to the contrary, it has been because of my great appreciation for all they have given to the human race.  How can any writer do justice to those contributions in only 500 to 600 words?

If I were to write an article worthy of dogs' contributions, I would have to mention that the canine trail stretches back into prehistoric times, where it intersects with early humans, thus keeping today's evolutionary biologists speculating about different scenarios.  I might list the variety of occupations dogs have specialized in:  watchdogs, hunting assistants, bloodhounds, rescue dogs, seeing-eye dogs, visitors to the lonely in hospitals and retirement homes, and plain old house companions.  But if I made such a list, someone would know of yet another role and catch my omission.

Because the articles on this website try to touch upon matters related to reading, any dog-article would need to mention some of the countless occasions on which dog-lovers have set pen to paper.  Would I mention the modern classic by animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz titled Man Meets Dog?  Or the noteworthy but almost forgotten essays of E. B. White?  Or would I instead mention some more popular fare adaptable into a movie, such as Marley & Me, the humorous adventures of one dog owner?  There's even a book by a Nobel Prize winner, John Steinbeck's light fare Travels with Charley.

I would also need to mention the cartoons that have apparently been inspired by dogs' instinctive love of play.  Such as the never-ending stream of talking dogs in The New Yorker's cartoons.  Or the very durable ones by James Thurber -- simple but expressive line-drawings.

With so much to give me pause, why have I now at last set pen to paper with this article?  It is because I stumbled upon what is perhaps the highest compliment ever paid to dogs (even if there is a bit of irony about this particular dog virtue).  The spiritual writer Karen Armstrong, contrasting humans to dogs, wrote:  "While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don't find some significance in our lives."

Her statement goes even deeper than the common observation that dogs do not stew over the day's events or worry about tomorrow.  (What a relief for a dog owner who returns home exhausted from a hard day!)  Armstrong's observation goes to the matter of the meaning of life, something humans very much need to search for but can never be absolutely certain about. Ironically, it is because dogs do not possess that human need that they can lightheartedly give meaning to our own lives.

~~~

Have you or your family ever had a dog?  Name something it contributed to your life.

(The Armstrong quote is from her article "Think Again: God" in Foreign Policy, Nov./Dec. 2009.)
(The photo of two dogs is by José Carlos Cortizo Pérez from Fuenlabrada, Spain.  That of the dog with sunglasses
 is by Chiniman123. Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licenses.)

A Rocky History Read Backwards

Writers in Western culture have long employed the metaphor of a "book" for depicting the natural world, with we being "readers" of that "book."  Theologians in both Christianity and Islam have said that the "Book of Nature" might even speak to us something about God.  It was a famous scientist, however, who in 1859 drew upon the "book" metaphor to explain an aspect of the geological record.  In Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wrote:

"I look at the natural geological record... as a history of the world imperfectly kept,

 and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone....

 Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved;

 and of each page, only here and there a few lines."

Darwin was having to explain why -- unlike, other books that we haven't finished reading -- we know more about the last pages of the book of the Earth's geology than about the first.  Today, geologists have succeeded in reading more and more of those pages, going further and further back, despite the fragility of many fossils, and the fact that fossils were created only under special circumstances.  This geological "history book" is being read from the back towards the front.

It was not along a book-like, historical narrative that I first encountered the science of geology.  Instead, I first experienced the identity of rocks in compartmentalized categories. When I was of upper elementary-school age, I was given a boxed set of rocks.  It consisted of a white, plastic tray of 15 thumb-size rocks, each one in its open-topped compartment.  The makers of the set, knowing that children would want to take the rocks out of their cubbyholes, wisely managed to adhere a small, identifying nametag to each rock.

 I found the differences between those unpolished rocks fascinating.  White gypsum.  Yellow sulfur.  Black coal.  Even the feel of each one was different.  Despite that childhood enjoyment, when I had some brief encounters with geology books in high-school and college, I could never get the rocks to "speak" to me.  When those books tried to explain geological history, I could not create a powerful enough mental picture because those geological layers were out of sight, underground.

That changed one day when my wife and I were driving slowly through a mostly desert area of Big Bend Natl. Park in southwest Texas.  When our car turned around the corner of  a small projecting mass of rock that had been hiding part of our view, my wife exclaimed, "That field's growing boulders!"  And how striking indeed was that area of desert beside our car.  It was a flat, tan area of desert, on which it looked as if a giant had been playing with a set of dark-brown marbles ranging from one foot to several feet in diameter.  It was if the surface of the Earth had been turned inside out, with those out-of-place boulders shouting a message about how their lives that had once been underground.  Yet they now stood there before us, unmoving, like a moment frozen in time. A book held open to one page so that we might read it more carefully

~~~

Have you ever seen rocks or geological structures that were fascinating to you?

(The Darwin quote is from the last paragraph of

 Chapter IX of Origin of Species [orig. 1859].)

The Mathematics of Miracles

Although most people have never read Walt Whitman's long poem "Song of Myself" in its entirety, many people have heard or read stanzas taken from it.  One such stanza concerns a mouse.  The poem as a whole is Whitman's celebration of all people and all of the natural world as they resonate through Whitman's experience of himself in the world.  The mouse appears in these lines:

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,

... And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

Whitman has, of course, chosen a mouse in part because of its small size -- in contrast to many Christians of his day citing grand events as miracles. But when I first read that line in college, I was able to appreciate his choice of a mouse because I had for awhile had a pet white mouse when I was in high-school.  My mouse was part of a science project.  (The mouse was not going to be harmed in any way -- I was too soft-hearted for that.  I was just going to try to measure its output of carbon dioxide.)

Whitman's statement "a mouse is miracle" evoked my memory of my little white mouse's miraculous features when observed up close:  The slender flexibility of its tail.  The softness of its body despite so much energy.  Its countless white hairs.  Its small round eyes. (Can they really see like mine, although being so tiny?).  Its pointed nose, always seemingly sniffing.  The way it bent its body slightly from side to side as it explored its world.

John Donne

Whitman's line about the mouse came back to me recently when I read a quotation by a poet who lived two centuries before Whitman.  It was an observation by the poet and church minister John Donne, which struck me as being insightful:  "There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of Nature, and which is therefore done every day, but would seem a miracle and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once;... The ordinary thing in Nature would be greater miracles than the extraordinary, which we admire most, if they were done but once... and only the daily doing takes off the admiration."  Donne points us toward everyday miracles.

Today, most mainstream Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theologians would join John Donne in cautioning against searching for the miraculous in some rare interruption of the working of natural laws that science has discovered.  As I go about my day, from getting out of bed to going back to sleep at night, everything going on about me can on some level be described as being natural processes.  I might never find God if I expect to find the Divine only in some interruptions of natural laws.

Donne's theological observation, coupled with my memory of Whitman's mentioning a mouse, made me think about the sextillions of little mice throughout the world, sometimes labeled "pests," but each a little miracle in its own right if seen up close.

~~~

Is there something in Nature you encounter everyday that you think is marvelous?

(The Whitman line is from "Song of Myself,"

 originally in his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass.)

(The Donne line is from a March 25, 1627 sermon, as quoted in Rebuilding the Matrix by Denis Alexander, © 2001, p. 426.)

Among Friends, Books, and Plants

It is the midsummer of 1866.  Five-thousand Prussian troops move into the city of Brünn (in the present-day Czech Republic) as one step in their invasion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Forcing themselves upon the civilian community, sixteen army officers house themselves at the Abbey of St. Thomas, where ninety-four horses of the military are also moved onto the grounds.  The abbey is required to feed everybody at its own expense.  With the city's sanitation pushed to its limits, cholera breaks out, spreading through the terrified city.  Over six weeks, three-thousand civilians and soldiers die.  And on one of those dark days, observing it all from his window at the abbey, would have been a friar with a now famous name: Gregor Mendel.

This is not the setting in which most books place Mendel.  Almost invariably, they put him in the abbey's seemingly idyllic garden in which Mendel grew his now famous pea plants -- leading to his scientific discovery of the basic patterns of inheritance.  Placing him in that idyllic garden cultivates a contrast between science and stereotyped religion, especially given our modern myth that science and religion have usually been in conflict.  I still remember my own surprise in middle school upon reading in my biology textbook that a "monk" made one of the pivotal discoveries of modern science.


More precisely, the religious order Mendel was part of was a Roman Catholic order of friars (the Augustinian order). That classification meant that its members were more integrated into the surrounding secular community, primarily as teachers, even though in this case living in an abbey.  And the friars of the Abbey of St. Thomas were especially engaged.  The Abbey had a 30,000 volume library with books on botany, horticulture, agriculture, physics, and, of course, theology.  Among Gregor's friar-colleagues were a musical maestro, a Goethe scholar, and a noted philosopher. The head abbot, Cyrill Franz Napp, was current on the latest scientific discoveries. It was in this abbey setting -- more conducive to enlightenment than being surrounded by occupying troops -- that "Mendel found a supportive scientific community," as the contemporary biographer Simon Mawer puts it.

Gregor Mendel was fond of logging statistics on many things, not just his famous pea-plant hybrids.  He also kept data on the weather and astronomy.  His being educated in probability and combinational mathematics doubtlessly encouraged his applying those types of skills to the study of plants.  The data led him to discovery.

Despite the temporary distraction of an occupying army, Mendel's now famous scientific paper on plant hybridization was published that same year of 1866.  It was the culmination of eight years of work, hand-pollinating and logging seven pairs of traits in 28,000 pea plants, their 40,000 flowers, and nearly 400,000 seeds.

May we in our own small ways show determination in wanting to observe and appreciate the world of Nature, even when human conflict and chaos might dishearten us.

~ ~ ~

Have there been friends who have been part of your learning or your appreciating more the world of Nature?

(The quotation by Simon Mawer is taken from 

Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics, © 2006. p. 30.)
(The drawing of pea plants, Pisum sativum, is from the book Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, 1885,
 by Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé, and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Stepping In... to Step Out into the World

I have met more than one person who very much likes StoryCorps stories, a brief weekly spot on Public Radio's Friday news programs.  The StoryCorps project traveled around the U.S. for years, recording ordinary Americans as they told about pivotal events in their life journeys. Many of what is shared is poignant.  When I take pen to paper to write my own thoughts about a wider world and reading, there is one particular StoryCorps spot that comes to mind.  As I imagine the experience in my mind, it also has to do with Nature.

A woman explained to StoryCorps how a bookmobile became a life-changing experience for her.  As a little girl, she lived with her family in Native American migrant-worker camp.  Traveling so frequently, the girl was not allowed to have books, because they would have been too heavy to move.  But then one day, when the girl was 12, a traveling library (a bookmobile) stopped on its periodic rounds where the family was currently living.  And the girl was invited to step in.

As the now grown woman explained her childhood experience, when first told she could take home a book from the mobile, she wondered what was the catch.  Being told there was none other than returning the book in two weeks, she began to devour books.  And her having stepped (at first hesitantly) into the bookmobile made it possible for her to step into a whole new world. Or perhaps I should say "worlds," because the girl's selections ranged from volcanoes to dinosaurs.

"The Journey" (1903)
by
Elizabeth Shippen Green

The child's stepping into that vehicle filled with books reminded me how each book can become for us a vehicle by which we step into the mind, and maybe the emotions of the author of that book. By so doing, we expand our world, even bringing hope to some corner of our lives where it previously could not be seen.  As the woman explained to StoryCorps, because of those books, "By the time I was 15, I knew there was a world outside of the camps.... I believed I could find a place in it.  And I did."

I am humbled by this story.  Although the family I grew up in was decidedly middle-class, we had a couple of filled bookcases in our house; and my mother periodically purchased an additional book so that our home library might grow as I grew.  I am also humbled because I know that it is upon the often hard lives of migrant workers that I depend for life when I purchase fruits or vegetables at the grocery store.

The StoryCorps project is a radio broadcast, and so I have to provide pictures for the stories with my imagination.  To complete this moving human story, I must picture two things in the background to that bookmobile:  The countless people who wrote those traveling books.  And rows and rows of growing fruits and vegetables -- a hard-earned gift from Nature.

~~~

How have books widened your world?  Has there been a critical experience in your life that has made your life richer than it otherwise would have been?

(The quotation is from "Once Forbidden, Books Become A Lifeline

 For A Young Migrant Worker," by NPR Staff, May 30, 2014, and is used here under Fair Use.)
(The illustration by Green is in the Public 'Domain.)

The Beauty of Grace,and the Grace of Beauty

Most of us have known someone who stood out for having a special ease and courtesy in interacting with people.  Whereas most of us are uneven in our interactions, such people have a wonderful, graceful steadiness.  When we are in the presence of such people, we can feel the beauty of such grace.

There is also a grace in beauty itself.  Encountering something beautiful can allay our anxious spirits, and give us a boost in facing our next step in life.  We can encounter such beauty in a painting or a piece of music. But our experiencing grace can be even greater if the beauty is something in Nature itself.  Such as a sunset.  Or a field of wildflowers.  Such natural beauty can be more powerful because we know, at least subconsciously, that it was not constructed by human hands.  We experience such natural beauty as a gift -- something that need not have been.

However, there is an old debate:  Is what we experience as beauty really a part of the natural world itself, or is it something merely in the eye of the beholder?  Traditionally most Christian preachers have treated the beauty experienced in Nature as really being there, and as a reason for praising God the Creator.  But skeptics who insist that the beauty we sense only seems to be in Nature have as a spokesperson the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who wrote, "Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them."

That debate seems to be critical -- a debate over whether beauty is a gift from God or just an illusion.  However, could it be that such a contrast is too starkly drawn?  Instead of framing the matter as an either-or choice, could it perhaps be more insightful to explore a both-and answer?  That is to say, to explore how the grace of beauty is both in the external world and in my perception.  Beauty is experienced where the two intersect.

Even though we people are variable in our capacity for perceiving beauty, we can name recurring kinds of features in beauty.  Such as when a contrast -- such as of colors or sizes -- which could be felt as discordant is instead experienced as creating a harmony.  If such colors or objects were not really in the world, we would not exclaim, "How beautiful!"

True, my experience of beauty does depend upon an internal act of perception.  But that does not make it any less an example of grace.  Just as there is order within the external world, there is remarkable order within my sensory organs and brain, which makes possible my perception of beauty, even if it is culturally nurtured.  That such order exists in human makeup is also a grace, a gift.

The transcendent aspect of beauty has led religious thinkers to see beauty as one window into God.  The great medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas depicted God as being Ultimate Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.  And one of the sayings of Islam is:

"God is beautiful and loves beauty."

~~~

What are the effects of beauty upon you?  Where do you encounter beauty in Nature?

(The Hume quote is from Essays, "Of Human Tragedy," and is taken from

 Bloomsbury Treasury of Quotations, ed. John Daintith, © 1994, p. 54.)

(The Islamic saying is from the Hadith of Muslim, and is taken from
 World Scripture:  A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts.  © 1991.  p. 88.)

Not Lowlife but the Lowly

Stamp from
Faroe Islands with
 agriculture in background

It is delightful how children can be fascinated with animals -- even those animals most of us adults believe to be due little attention.  When I was growing up, a group of us neighborhood kids "adopted" an earthworm, naming it, trying to keep it in a small box with leaves, and even giving it a funeral after its demise (which, I now confess, we probably inadvertently contributed to).  Perhaps that experience is part of why I now have an adult fascination with the countless earthworms working behind the scenes at every moment, helping sustain life on this planet.  And I am fascinated by our attitudes toward them.

Although the Bible generally has a respectful attitude toward animals, the author of one psalm captured with this exclamation the lament of a person whose spirits were low:

"But I am a worm, and not human!" (Psalm 22:6)

In the 16th century, Great Britain's greatest playwright, William Shakespeare, often spoke to humans' limited, mortal condition, sometimes in humorously macabre ways. Here again, worms served the writer's purpose:  In Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo's friend Mercutio is accidentally wounded during a playful sword match, he announces his fatal condition by saying, "They have made worm's meat of me."

In contrast to the Bible’s and Shakespeare's reminders about the commonality of humans and other mortal animals, most of Western Christian culture came to think of the human moral consciousness as something in a quite different category than the brain itself. And Western scientific thought following the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century became strongly influenced by the philosopher René Descartes, who had drawn an absolute contrast between soul and body. At one point, Descartes had written that:

"It is more probable that worms and flies and caterpillars move mechanically
than that they all have immortal souls."

Even though Descartes treated animals as if they were robots, in the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson -- picking up on the idea of evolution that was already in the air even before Darwin -- made an evolutionary connection between worms and humans. Emerson wrote:

"Striving to be man, the worm 

Mounts through all the spires of form."

From a modern scientific vantage point, however, we can see the flaw in Emerson's thinking:  Worms are not aiming to be humans. Life on this planet is possible only when worms retain their roles as worms (and we humans serve better in our roles as humans).

Darwin's taking
a liking to earthworms
(Punch, 1881)

It took Charles Darwin to discover scientifically the true operations of earthworms in detail.  His small book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Actions of Worms turned out to be his most popular book during his lifetime. It was something of a publishing marvel, selling 3,500 copies in only the first two months -- and even evoked Punch magazine's satire. The hardworking earthworms as Charles Darwin described them seemed to be models of the Protestant work ethic. Darwin uncovered how burrowing earthworms ingested and excreted material in the soil as they progressed forward, thus serving as one of the major aerators of soil and as one of its main fertilizers.  Decades earlier, in Origin of Species (Chap. VII), Darwin had explicitly made a comparison between human labor and that of worms. He wrote:

"The plough [plow] is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man’s inventions;
but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed,
and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms.
It may be doubted whether there are many other animals
which have played so important a part in the history of the world,
as have these lowly organized creatures." 

~ ~ ~

Can you think of any animals "working behind the scenes," as it were?

(Shakespeare quotation is from Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 1.)

(Descartes quotation taken from Animal Consciousness by Daisie & Michael Radner, © 1996, p. 80.)

(Emerson quotation is from his Nature,  1849 edition; originally published 1836, frontis.)
(The postage stamp art by Bárður Jákupsson is in the public domain. Detail from Punch cartoon used by Fair Use.)

A Church and a Novel

Say “the hunchback of Notre Dame,” and many people will think of that hulky character in one of the movie versions of the novel. Maybe the mental image evoked will include some sense of the height of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, from which the hunchbacked character looks down upon the jeering mob below. Rarely has there been such a famous intersection of a church and a novel; in this case, Paris's largest cathedral and the novel by Victor Hugo.

Paris's second largest church building, the much less famous Church of Saint-Sulpice, has had an interesting intersection with a novel, but in a quite different way.  And that intersection may say something about our human struggles to bring the illumination of both science and religion to our world.

Now on display in Saint-Sulpice is this note about the long, straight line in the 17th-century church's floor:

"Contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent best-selling novel,
 this [line] is not a vestige of a pagan temple.
 No such temple ever existed in this place.
It was never called a "Rose-Line'."

The "best-selling novel" discreetly referred to is the 2003 book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

The inlaid brass line is in fact part of a device (a "gnomon") for knowing when the spring equinox occurs, based on where during the course of a year a noon-time shaft of light falls along that line, or on the obelisk at the far end of it. The word "gnomon" has its root in the Greek word for "to know." But there is much that Brown does not appear to know (or desire to convey) about the true history of this gnomon. The religious reason for discerning the spring equinox is explained by an inscription on the obelisk's base: "Ad Certam Paschalis," or "for the determination of Easter." That religious task, as the 20th-century scientist Stephen Jay Gould explained, "requires considerable astronomical sophistication, for lunar and seasonal cycles must both be known with precision."

The sun-calculating device in the Church of Saint-Sulpice is not an exotic oddity, as one might think reading Brown's book.  In fact, other similar installations (sometimes called "meridian lines") can be found in cathedrals in Rome, Florence, and Bologna, Italy -- all demonstrating conjunctions of the Church and astronomy. Even beyond those other installations, there is additional evidence that Saint-Sulpice's gnomon has real Christian roots, and is not a pagan import: The Christian practice of scientifically calculating solar equinoxes was mastered notably by an English monk living in the 700's, the Venerable Bede. He developed tables for calculating Easter for the three centuries yet to come. His manual for that scientific field called "computus" continued to be used into the Middle Ages.

And what about the letters "P" and "S" in two of Saint-Sulpice's windows? Here again, the notice posted in the cathedral brings illumination:

"Please also note that the letters "P" and "S" in the small round windows
 at both ends of the transept refer to Peter and Sulpice, the patron saints of the church,
 and not an imaginary "Priory of Sion" [a secret society in Brown's novel ]."

The architecture of the Church of Saint-Sulpice is not to my personal taste. Nevertheless, I can admire the openness not only of the people who built Saint-Sulpice, but also the other Christian minds stretching back to the Venerable Bede and even beyond -- bringing together knowledge and inspiration from both science and religion.

~ ~ ~

Is there knowledge about the natural world from contemporary science that expands your spirit?

(The quotation by Stephen Jay Gould is from his Dinosaur in a Haystack, © 1995, p. 39.)

Can the Earth Heal?

"Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal...."

With that succinct declaration, the late 19th-century nature-writer John Muir put his own spin on what had become a conventional aphorism.  Specifically, the saying that "Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal," which had come from a poem by the Irish romantic poet Thomas Moore writing over half a century earlier.  Grammatically, Muir's substitution of the word "earth" for Moore's word "Heaven" was a simple matter.  But spiritually and theologically, that substitution leads us into complexities:  Does the Earth heal, and if so, how?

I remember as a child being shocked upon first hearing a particular Bible story about Jesus healing a blind man.  Having grown up in a church, I was accustomed to hearing stories about Jesus compassionately healing people, but this story was different.  As the narrative goes, Jesus "spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes."  (John 9:6).  Jesus's then telling the man to go wash his eyes with water from a pool did not reduce my shock, because I thought Jesus should be smarter than to put such an unsanitary substance as saliva mixed with dirt in a person's eyes.  Even as a child, I had learned not to touch my eyes when my hands were dirty.

Having now more knowledge about symbols in the culture the Bible comes from, I know that earth -- the ground -- was associated with the source of existence itself.  In one of the creation accounts in Genesis, "God formed man from the dust of the ground." (Gen. 2:7)  There is, therefore, the suggestion in the story of the blind man that Jesus's healing is also a creative act -- giving new life to the blind man!

Calypso orchid

John Muir's declaration that the earth can heal all our earthly sorrows gains added significance within his late 19th-century context.  Muir felt that too much of the Christianity of his time had become otherworldly and human-centered.  It often focused on the assurance that a person's individual soul would have a place in the afterlife, instead of rejoicing in the wonder and beauty of the natural world all around.  Muir himself had often experienced how his own spirit could be healed by immersing himself in Nature. One of those occasions occurred during an unsettled time in his life, when he had been traveling on foot for months across part of Canada, meeting very few people.  One day, after wading for hours through a swamp, exhausted and discouraged, he suddenly came upon, as he described it, "the rarest and most beautiful of the flowering plants... a Calypso borealis."  The flower's beauty broke in upon him so unexpectedly that he sat down beside it and wept, relieving a greater burden than just that one day's exhaustion.

Today, there are many people who have also experienced how turning their attention to something in Nature can be restorative, even healing.  And it doesn't require wandering for days in wilderness.  Sometimes it comes in more ordinary settings.

~~~

Has there been, or is there, an occasion on which you are restored by Nature?

(The quote by Muir about the earth, written in 1872, is from John of the Mountains, 1938. p. 99.
The quote about the flower is from his letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr in 1866)

(The quote by Thomas Moore [1779-1852] is from his "Come, Ye Disconsolate.")

(The flower photo, by Walter Siegmund, is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

The Up-Flight of Birds

English translation
of Le Petit Prince

"... for his escape he took advantage of

  the migration of a flock of wild birds."

With that imaginative explanation, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tells how his title character in The Little Prince made his escape from the isolation of his own tiny planet to come to the planet Earth. That 1943 children's book weds that statement with Saint-Exupéry's charming drawing in which the little prince grips a cluster of strings that shoot up to eleven birds flying upward, lifting him off the ground -- in the way a cluster of helium-filled balloons might.  Even though the tiny planet and tethered birds are fanciful, the author's imagery takes advantage of something many people have seen in the real world:  The instant and virtually simultaneous flight up from the ground of a small flock of birds.

Birds in flight are not easy to capture convincingly with a camera.  Capturing a virtually simultaneous liftoff from the ground effectively is even harder.   If the shutter speed is too slow, the birds in the photograph will be only a blur, obscuring the gracefulness of their wings.  If the shutter is clicked prematurely, the birds will appear too close to the ground, seemingly leaden, as if they were having a hard time getting aloft.  The camera will not have captured that exhilarating burst of energy in which birds spray upward and outward.

So critical to many birds has been this ability to take to flight instantly as a group that it has been reinforced in some species with instinctive alarm cries.  In the case of white-winged doves, evolution has taken such group-protection to a higher level in two ways. First, white patches on the doves' wings flash when they take flight, thus adding a visual alarm.  Moreover, the white-winged doves need not cry vocally, because the doves' sudden flight upward causes their very wings to give off a sharp, twittering warning-sound made by the air passing through the feathers.

Some mornings on which I was driving to work, following my routine path that some days felt like a rut, I would occasionally see such a liftoff of social birds such as pigeons or grackles. Their sudden energy would give my own spirit a lift.

In a mysterious way, the up-flight of birds intersects with something that seems to be instinctive about our human nature.  Namely, that our own facial expressions and bodily bearings droop when we are discouraged, but then lift up when our spirits become encouraged.

There is something deeper here than individual human psychology. There is something here about being able to open ourselves to greater possibilities that lie unseen in this world.  This deeper level, for example, is evidenced by the way the facial and bodily bearings of "down" and "up" are employed in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament).  When Cain is discouraged by the inequalities of human fortune, God intervenes as if to try to prevent vengeance, asking Cain, "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen?" (Genesis 4:6, NRSV).  In many of the Biblical books, people are exhorted to lift up their heads.  And lift up their eyes.

~~~

Are there any ways birds lift your spirit?  How does looking up and about restore you?

(The Saint-Exupéry quote is from his The Little Prince, trans. from the French by Katherine Woods, © 1943.  p. 2.)

(The photo of the cover of The Little Prince is used under Fair Use.)

(The photo Pigeons is by Danko Durbić.)

Fathers of Biology, and of Children

Describing an often overlooked characteristic of 19th-century biologists, Joseph Kastner writes:  "Naturalists who never laid eyes on each other became intimate friends by virtue of the long and faithful letters they wrote to each other, year in and year out...."  Early British biologists' use of correspondence for research accelerated after the 1840 creation of the Penny Post within England, which set a fixed rate for a letter regardless of the distance it had to travel.  No biologist took greater advantage of the postal service for gathering scientific data than Charles Darwin, who penned over 14,000 letters.  But there is more than science in those early biologists' letters. There are also matters of the heart.

from Hooker's
Himalayan Journals

Appreciating the poignancy of some letters requires knowing about the state of 19th-century medicine.  Because there were virtually no vaccinations nor oral or injected antibiotics, a child was twenty-five times more likely to die before reaching early adolescence than is a child in Britain today.  Despite 19th-century biologists' accelerating knowledge about the natural world, they were not exempt from that statistic.

After the death of Darwin's beloved daughter Annie at the age of ten, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who helped Darwin study plant species, offered his condolences to Darwin.  Several years later, only an hour after Hooker's daughter died, Hooker was writing to Darwin to tell of his own grief.  Darwin wrote back at once.

Thomas Henry Huxley
   

The leading British advocate for Darwin's theory of evolution for natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley, also lost a child.  After Huxley's son Noel died at the age of three, Darwin drew upon his own experience of grief with Annie to reassure Huxley that grief could soften with time, writing, "I was indeed grieved to receive your news this morning....  I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief.  Yet believe me, that time, and time alone, acts wonderfully....  I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer and I can even call up the smile of our lost darling...."

statue of
Jean Henri Fabre

Such personal expressions of grief and condolence, sometimes traveling in envelopes as part of scientific study, also crossed the English Channel.  The most difficult of emotions were sometimes even revealed in the pages of scientific books.  The eminent French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre closed his first volume on insects with a dedication to the memory of his own son, who had died when Fabre was working on the book. Charles Darwin, despite scientific disagreements,  wrote a cordial letter to Fabre, saying,  "Permit me to add, that when I read the last sentence in your book, I sympathised deeply with you."

I am struck by the tenderness and cordiality of these condolences mingled among the scientific facts.  I cannot begin to comprehend all the research of these early naturalists. But I can hope that some of my emails and "snail-mail" notes might express a similar warmth.

~~~

How do you think we today might make our correspondence spiritually supportive?

(The Kastner quote is from A Species of Eternity by Joseph Kastner, © 1977,

and is taken from The Naturalist's Path by Cathy Johnson, © 1991.  p. ix.)

(The Darwin quotes are taken from Annie's Box by Randal Keynes, © 2001.  pp. 221 & 285.)