Finding God in a Technical Memo

    In his talk, Bidden or Unbidden, God is Present (audio CD) Gregory Pierce tells a story about finding God. He took his family to an Easter sunrise service in the Grand Canyon. As he says, while it was easy to find God in the Grand Canyon, he doesn’t live there. He lives in Chicago, managing a publishing company, caring for three daughters and a little league team. While he values the teachings of monastic spirituality, he calls for a spirituality that helps us to find God in the midst of noise and at work.

    Physics professor Aileen A. O’Donoghue gives us an excellent example of workplace spirituality in her March 5 America article God in Machines.

To focus my search for God, I traveled to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, N.M. There I chanted Vigils before dawn from psalters lit by oil lamps and watched the stars through the high windows of the adobe chapel. God’s presence seemed to cascade down from those windows and pool in the folds of the monks’ cowls and blue jeans like the cold night air flooding down the canyon walls. I rested in this presence and wondered why it had eluded me in the pre-dawn hours at observatories. Did God shy away from machines? Slowly, I recognized in myself a “bucolic idolatry,” which associated spirituality and holiness with the simple, low-tech life of home-grown vegetables and hand-split wood. But integrating spirituality into my life would require that I learn to recognize God in telescopes and computers as fully as I recognized God in the monastery garden.
…
In the reverence for my job that suddenly welled up, I recognized the God of the oil-lamp-lit monastery mornings. God was indeed as present at the observatory as at the monastery. God was present in the wonder of the metals forged in the explosions of giant stars, in the creative genius of those who had discovered radio waves and built and refined receivers, in the labor of those who mined the metals, constructed the antennas, soldered the wires and scrubbed the floors. And God was present in me, bending to the task of writing V.L.A. Technical Memo No. 155 to make my small contribution to our understanding of our own creation.

Exactly. Thank you professor O’Donoghue for your excellent example.

Please read her article (republished on her  website  by permission from America). It tells a dramatic story of healing as a result of the work done by un-named electrical and mechanical engineers, many of whom may not see their work as spiritual.

Comments

[Mark Alves]

Very inspiring reminder to look for the Creator in our creative works.

[Christina Martin]

Thank you for sharing this -- it was well worth reading.