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.)