I’m in the middle of writing my thesis so I can finally get my PhD and put an end to this long chapter of my life and the only thing I can think about is how it’s all been a prayer. It starts with a mystery, as all good prayers do. It is followed by doubt and misery. It ends with awe.
I remember the exact moment I realized I was built for worship. I lay on my back on the top of a mountain. The next day there would be fog, but that night was clear enough to see every star in the sky. You could hear the ocean far below, crashing. I was sixteen or seventeen years old. I remember thinking, I will never be able to fathom this. We are so small, and this majesty is so beautiful. I don’t remember saying anything out loud, but I must have, because last month my sister-in-law turned to me and told me, I will never forget what you said that night.
I was reading up on the Hungarian scientist Albert Szent-Györgyi, who discovered how muscles contract and first isolated Vitamin C, for which he was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. During World War II he had to operate a black market enterprise just to house and feed his laboratory staff. Coincidentally, he was philosophically against the idea of writing grants and asking for money, preferring to be funded by rich patrons instead, which he found when he started a lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He liked dividing scientists into two categories: The physiologist who “carefully preserves
structure and subtle qualities” and the biochemist who “willfully destroys them”. (Szent-Györgyi, 1949) In a letter to Science, he writes of two other categories: the Apollonian who “tends to develop established lines to perfection”, and the Dionysian who “relies on intuition and
is more likely to open new, unexpected alleys for research”. Of course, he identifies himself as both the destroying biochemist and the intuitive Dionysian (Szent-Györgyi, 1972). With apologies to Professor Szent-Györgyi, I identify very much as an Apollonian, though I’m very much not looking for perfection.
Part of writing a thesis is to place your meager findings within the context of decades of work. It’s a humbling and rewarding task. You sit on the shoulders of geneticists who knew nothing, not the names of genes, not the paths of their transduction, not the signals, not the receptors. They just had syringes and microscopes and dreams, and then forty years later, here I am, adding mystery to the mystery.
Rumi wrote: “Nothing I say can explain to you divine love, yet all of creation cannot seem to stop talking about it.” This is how I feel when I think about how small a fruit fly embryo is, and infinite the mystery it has inside it.
A. Helwa, in response to Rumi, writes: “Reflect up on the mysteries of life, travel into spaces with no familiar ground, venture into realms where worldly compasses fail to lead you, walk into the quantum world, where laws of science seemingly fail to work, and feel the vulnerability of your ignorance. Lean into the divinity that is hidden within everything. Break every wall of known knowledge; do not seek to know, seek to be in awe of the infinite nature of God.”
There’s a part of me that is afraid that after I turn in this manuscript, I won’t be able to find that awe anymore. As soon as I name this fear, my heart opens as if to tell me: Yes, there will be more. You are not done.
I’ve been reading Maurice Manning’s Bucolics which are just some of the most delightful poems to read out loud. This is his poem “XIII”:
are you ever in my chest Boss
are you ever in there with a hammer
tapping on my rib cage as if
you want to make a hum drum
right where I can feel it how big
is that little hammer anyway
does it have a silver head Boss
does it spark against my ribs
I know they’re made of iron
I’ve got a heap of horseshoes
nested in my chest like heavy birds
boss you make them sing you tap
away is one arm bigger than the other
from all that hammering you do
I wonder if you’re knocking for
a reason are you just fooling Boss
or have you found a little door
O if it’s really you I wish
you’d whistle through the keyhole Boss
I wish you’d lift my little latch
It’s such a good poem. Doesn’t it start with mystery and end in awe? It reminds me of verse 50:16 from the Qur’an: “We created man – We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein.”
As might be obvious from this post, I’ve been reading up on the Islamic mystics. It grounds me, it inspires me to find awe in creation, and to be a better scientist. It reminds me that our hearts are muscles that can still open after they close, open after they close.