The God of My Universe
The Sky Is Not a Ceiling
An Astronomer's Faith
Orbis Books. 180p $18 (paperback)
Astronomers love to
wander in the dark because it is often the darkest skies that radiate the
brightest stars. An award-winning astronomer and the Priest Professor of
Physics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., Aileen O'Donoghue has
spent years searching the heavens of the physical universe and the spiritual
labyrinth of her own life. Her book provides a healthy antidote to the popular
atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, whose books debunking
religion have topped the bestseller lists. Although O'Donoghue clearly has
struggled to make sense of her faith, vacillating at times between belief
and unbelief, she clings to faith as an existential anchor and displays
a deep love of the Christian tradition, despite the difficulties she finds
with the institutional church.
The Sky Is Not a Ceiling contains 18 short chapters, but the work
itself is defined more by themes, some of which recur repeatedly throughout
the book. Among them are the struggle between faith and reason, the quest
of meaning and purpose in the universe, divine transcendence and immanence,
patriarchy and sexism in the church, and the church as the Body of Christ.
O'Donoghue's reflections are colored by a traumatic experience of sexual
assault as a young girl, an experience that left her deeply lonely, frightened
and hating her own female body. She recounts the meaningless mechanics of
faith learned through the Baltimore Catechism of her childhood and
the years of atheism in graduate school before gradually discovering the
God of Jesus Christ. "This God that slipped into my universe is very
different than the one I banished," she writes. "The God that
did slip through seems to know nothing of rules, but continually casts me
adrift in my own freedom while stuffing wonders in the gaps between what
we expect the universe to contain and what we find." This is the language
of a mystic, one who has experienced God "in the vastness, the weirdness,
the abundance, the seeming nonsensicalness, and even the violence of this
incredible universe." Although she writes as one who has seen the face
of God in the heavens, at times she pauses to wonder if the face of God
can reveal itself in a burning star. O'Donoghue's book is a journey into love and back again. Her story shows
the tension between the rational mind and the human capacity for God, between
the mind that analyzes the data of science and the heart that longs for
spiritual freedom. The book’s recurring themes make it a spiral of self-knowledge
and discovery of God amid the fact-finding world of science. Although The
Sky Is Not a Ceiling bears a likeness to the work of the well-known
religious scientist John Polkinghorne, O'Donoghue distinguishes herself
as a mystic of light and darkness: "I see the path of my life as it
moves from light to darkness and back again, rising in every growing circle
toward the God of light who is also God of the darkness." The strength
of her book lies in its honest search for truth and integrity. The ebb and
flow of doubt and faith on the shores of her own inner soul remind us that
self-knowledge is the basis of truth or, as the medieval theologian Bonaventure
wrote: "Lack of self-knowledge and failure to appreciate one's own
worth make for faulty judgment in all other matters." O'Donoghue clearly
seeks to know herself as a beloved of God in this vast, unfolding universe.
In an age in which scientists are deified, one cannot help admire O'Donoghue's
humble integrity as a believer. But it is a struggle, as she writes: "Though
I choose to practice belief that there is a God, I recognize that it is
entirely possible that there is no God.... I practice my faith in full light
of the possibility that it's wrong because it helps me live better."
While honesty marks O'Donoghue's journey, she also has a real sense of what
it means to belong to the body of Christ. Perhaps from years of gazing on
the different galaxies of the universe, she knows that community is the
stuff of life. Her faith deepens as she discovers the life of Christian
community, in a small parish, among the Jesuit scientists at the Vatican
Observatory, and in the friendship of the late retreat director Father Tom
Clarke, S.J. To be a follower of Jesus, according to O'Donoghue, is to belong
to a community of faith. The church lives best when it is lived as a family
of life-giving relationships. But the author's search is colored at times by a tinge of anger, especially
about the church ("I think the structures of the church are human inventions,
not divine decrees"), and she gets caught on the hook of institutional
structure, power and control. Indeed, after an amazing exploration through
self-knowledge and discovery of the heavens, she devotes her final chapter
to the intransigent sexism of the church, concluding her story on a bittersweet
note of hurt and hope. While O'Donoghue's mind struggles to make sense of
her fidelity to the institutional church, her heart remains open to mystery
and grace. She does not adopt Pascal's wager, but faith gives her a reason
to live. The soul-searching of this woman astronomer is inspiring, refreshing and
at times deeply poetic. Anyone who seeks to make sense of science and religion
as two sides of the same conjugate will appreciate O'Donoghue's story.