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CALENDAR
Sunday 23 May:
PENTECOST SUNDAY
Monday 24 May:
Feria
Tuesday 25 May:
St Bede the Venerable, Priest and Doctor
Wednesday 26 May:
St Philip Neri, Priest
Thursday 27 May:
St Augustine of Canterbury, Bishop
Friday 28 May:
Feria
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Feria
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Most Holy Trinity
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Independently audited certified average circulation per issue of THE TABLET for issues distri buted between 1 July and
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Volume 264 No. 8845 ISSN: 0039 8837
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
Knowing and seeing
GUY CONSOLMAGNO
“ADOLESCENCE”, said my colleague, the father of two teenage boys, “is when you’re filled with self-consciousness and completely lack- ing in self-awareness.” We were watching the students on his campus, who were obsessed with how they looked while being utterly out of touch with how they actually came across to other people.
Of course, it is not just teenagers. We mar- vel at how politicians, whose business is selling themselves, can make themselves look so bad; or how often we hear advertising that provokes us to swear we’ll never buy that product. And then we end up buying the goods anyway. We all spend our days walking around in a fog, self-obsessed while never really aware of ourselves or the universe in which we live. (Well, that’s true of me, anyway.) Sometimes the fog is real. This past week,
I’ve been participating in the Texas Star Party, a gathering of 500 amateur astronomers at a ranch somewhere west of Pecos to take advantage of the dark desert skies. Under these conditions, you can’t help but be struck at how much of the universe we blind ourselves to with our self-inflicted haze of city lights. The ranch meadows are covered with all manner of astronomical equipment. Faint red lights among them make their own constel- lations as each of us checks a star chart, and then peers down into the plumbing of lenses and mirrors that make up modern amateur equipment. Overhead are so many stars that familiar constellations get lost in the crowd. Looking through my small telescope, I stumble across four clusters of stars I’d never noticed before. What looked like dim smudges of light back home become bright spirals of stars, galaxies that are themselves home to bil- lions of other planetary systems with, no doubt, stargazers of their own peering back at us.
Even the astronomers here are not immune to tunnel vision. “I am amazed at the num- ber of shooting stars I’ve seen,” one woman tells me. But then she adds, somewhat sheep- ishly: “Of course, most of the time when I am outdoors on a night like this, I am looking down into my telescope eyepiece instead of looking up at the sky.” It’s not only the dark night sky that makes this week of observing special. It is the com- munity of hundreds of other stargazers, all possessed by the same obsession to look deeper into space. “Here, try this eyepiece. It doesn’t just give you a brighter image; it’s like stick- ing your head through a hole in the sky and looking around.”
Stargazing is usually a solitary enterprise. Sharing it with others makes you feel odd, a bit self-conscious, a bit exposed. At the same time, we learn from each other, reassured that we’re not the only ones suddenly seeing things that most of us, most of the time, pre- tend don’t exist. One of my fellow stargazers here is a
Methodist minister in Texas. As we are chat- ting in the glow of the dim red lights around the midnight snack bar, the teenager serving us hot drinks suddenly breaks into our con- versation to ask him where he got his training. “I’m off to the seminary in the fall, myself,” she tells us delightedly, “To study youth ministry.” And for a moment we share another bit of
awareness, of the God whom all of us have experienced, each in our own ways, with our own eyepieces; even while we live in a civili- sation that blares advertisements and political slogans to try to distract us, and replace that awareness with self-consciousness.
■Guy Consolmagno SJ is the curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory.
Glimpses of Eden
UNABLE TO resist any
longer, we paddled into the beck and salvaged the half hoop of metal. What was it, a horseshoe perhaps,
some long-forgotten quoit? We were amazed to see that the object upon which we’d often speculated as we crossed the little bridge or sat on it eating our sandwiches was a sickle. Although rusty with age, the blade was still clearly serrated; its short handle intact. Superseded by the long-shafted scythes dur- ing the nineteenth century, sickles had been in use since the epi-Palaeolithic era up to 18,000 years ago. Experts credit them with the human “giant leap” of turning wild grasses into grain crops, and now here was one in front of
44 | THE TABLET | 22 May 2010
us, a living artefact. What was the story behind it: lost, stolen, a sudden death? All we knew for certain was that it had belonged to a left-handed reaper – the blade being cranked to facilitate the clockwise slash. As though holding the hand of history, we carried this water-find carefully home through a field of young corn; maybe the same field it used to reap. Far from the industrial process of combine harvesters, garnering such a crop with a sickle would bring the reaper face to face with every inch of ground, each cut stalk measured by drops of sweat and nicked fin- gers, each stone a bead told in a bitter rosary. Perhaps only a sickle harvester could truly understand the history of our human race.
Jonathan Tulloch
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