Archive for March, 2019

In Awesome Wonder

Tuesday, March 19th, 2019

In 2016 I discovered Nick Knisely’s book, Lent is Not Rocket Science, a daily trip through Lent with a focus on scientific information. I thought it was a good book at the time, but I wasn’t ready for its seasonal significance.

This year, I’ve gone back to it with a different mindset. In part, I owe my new attention to an online course I signed up for just after reading Knisely’s reflections called “Astronomy: State of the Art,” offered by Prof. Chris Impey of Arizona State University.

I was pretty slow with the readings and assignments for this online course, more of a lurker, I suppose, but it awakened my latent curiosity about physics, astronomy, meteorology, etc., and had me investigating telescopes, binoculars, and online skywatching software.

And, of course, the journalist still lurking in my retirement consciousness had me exploring popular magazines such as Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, and several more science newsletters.

The course brought me back to Bishop Knisely’s 2013 meditations for Lent.

Knisely, I should mention, before being ordained an Episcopal priest and eventually consecrated as Bishop of Rhode Island, taught astrophysics at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University.

An important aside to my interest in astronomy occurred when during my on-off attentions, I stumbled across the YouTube record of a memorial service for gospel singer George Beverly Shea.

Reading about Shea, who died in 2013 at 104, and with my mind already re-enthralled with astronomy, I couldn’t help but meditate with a new awareness on the words of the hymn that Shea popularized at the New York City Billy Graham Crusades, “How Great Thou Art.” The song’s opening stanza provides, I think, an astronomer’s prayerful meditation:

O, Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder

consider all the worlds thy hands have made;

I see the stars; I hear the rolling thunder:

thy power throughout the universe displayed;

 

Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee,

How great thou art, how great thou art.

 

References:
Knisely, W. Nicholas. Lent is Not Rocket Science: An Exploration of God, Creation, and the Universe. Cincinnati, OH (Morehouse Publishing Co.) 2013.
Jason Soroski. The Story You Don’t Know Behind “How Great Thou Art,” (www.crosswalk.com). Originally a nine-stanza poem written in 1885 by Carl Boberg, a Swedish ex-sailor and lay-minister who went on to serve in the Swedish Parliament. Boberg died in 1940 before his hymn became popular. It was selected in a Christianity Today survey as readers’ second favorite hymn behind John Newton’s “Amazing Grace.”

A City Boy’s Memory of Magical Sanctuaries

Saturday, March 2nd, 2019

A chance mention by someone that a James Taylor concert was coming to town sent me to Amazon’s Alexa to listen to Taylor once again.

The first song I heard proved a memory awakener: Taylor sang “Up On the Roof,” the singer’s mellow cover of the Drifters hit from the ’60s, written by Carole King (who played piano on the Drifters’ recording) and Gerry Goffin (King’s first husband who once called this song the most satisfying he’d ever written). King’s suggested title for the song was “My Secret Place,” but Goffin, inspired by the haven imagery of rooftop culture in the musical West Side Story, settled with “Up On the Roof.”

One of my cherished childhood memories is gatherings of family and relatives atop the four-story apartment building where my Aunt Eva and Uncle Nat occupied fourth-floor rooms. Just one flight of stairs above them the roof provided a plaza-like lookout over Park Slope in Brooklyn. In the days before home air-conditioning was ubiquitous, roofs provided an escape from summer heat and expansive space for sitting and snacking among the tiny grove of television antennas sprouting from the roofs of the city. My aunt made almost daily climbs to the roof to hang laundry on the clotheslines woven atop the roofs in the neighborhood.

My only memory of another uncle, then the bachelor Mason, during his visit from Newfoundland, is captured in a photograph of a family together on this roof. The picture shows me as a toddler alongside my uncle. I believe this was his only visit to Brooklyn, and he was dead before I made my first visit to Newfoundland four decades after that photograph had been taken. My parents named my older brother after Uncle Mason, my mother’s younger brother, and my wife and I named our youngest son Mason after my oldest brother and my uncle.

As a late teenager, I had the joy of spending time with Uncle Mason’s daughter, a teenager like me, during her maiden visit to the States. As if carrying on a family tradition, she had been named Sylvia after my older sister.

Unfortunately, I don’t recall any gathering up on the roof with my cousin, but we spent delightful time visiting the New York World’s Fair on a rainy day, a magical excursion when the Fair became a quiet and nearly empty playground and refuge of joy for us.

So many of the rides at the fair that day made me feel that the Flushing Meadow fairgrounds had become our private shrine embracing us in friendship and joy. She later married a U.S. airman stationed in Newfoundland and eventually settled to raise her own family in Minnesota.

James Taylor’s recording always takes me to my memories of rooftops and the strange quietude and joy of the rainy World’s Fair grounds, lifting my spirit “when this old world starts getting me down.”

How we enjoyed those family times up on the roof; it was an urban sanctuary of love and peace. So too, the World’s Fair on that wet, empty, magical day of pure joy and peace.

I’ve never used any rooftop as a getaway, but my memory of relatives up on the roof keeps me wishing I had. James Taylor awakens my need for reflective sanctuary.

Over the years, I have sought periodically to find my spiritual sanctuary.

From Thoreau to John Muir, from St. Simeon Stylites to St. Benedict of Nursia, I have read of many who sought meditative sanctuary for personal growth and spiritual instruction, often in odd or challenging places, and at times characterized as “the dark night of the soul.”

For me, Jesus stands as a supreme earthbound model. He frequently “went apart” from the crowds, be they disciples or seekers, to commune with the One who sent him.

Christians are encouraged similarly to follow their Master, be it in daily devotions, “quiet” time, meditation, contemplation, Lectio Divina, intense Bible reading, or meaningful silence.

I have struggled with such admonitions and exercises of faith. I’ve tried praying in empty chapels and empty classrooms; sitting in gardens; seeking “away” places such as a belfry stairway; purposely eating in crowded restaurants or cafeterias away from home, where I was alone with the white noise of dishes and clinking silverware; finding dark places where the stars are visible (city boys hardly notice stars); parking at beaches or on piers to view the vast ocean; walking beaches or forest paths or climbing small hills; riding in trains and subways where the din of travel and noisy commuters provides a muting background; or sitting alone in my most comfortable chair at home (with or without a book or a laptop).

How I yearn for that sanctuary “up on the roof.”