Podcast
Culture
S&U interviews
3 min read

My conversation with... Jennifer Wiseman

Re-enchanting podcast guest Jennifer Wiseman shared an infectious wonder at the universe. Podcast co-host Belle Tindall reflects on their conversation.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Four stars scintilate above a spiral galaxy viewed from the side.
Hubble Space Telescope captures a side-on view of NGC 3568, a barred spiral galaxy roughly 57 million light-years from the Milky Way.
European Space Agency, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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The details of astronomy, the workings of astrophysics, the enormity of space, the fact that the universe is still expanding by the moment, the mystery of what lies beyond what we can see and even predict – those are things that do not sit comfortably in the confines of my brain.  

It’s as if my brain is allergic to the sheer enormity of the subject. My mind does deep, it does not take lightly to vast.  

And that is precisely why I so thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with astronomer, author and speaker, Dr Jennifer Wiseman for the Re-Enchanting podcast. Jennifer is Director Emeritus of the programme of Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre. Science is a means by which Jennifer is able to live a wonderfully curious life, marvelling at the natural world and what lies beyond it.  

When the narrative of science and religion being ultimately and inevitably at war with each other is the narrative that gets (by far) the most amplification, it was really interesting to hear how they coincide so powerfully for Jennifer. When talking with her, it becomes clear that they co-exist, they are the symbiotic forces that fuel her wonder at the universe. A wonder that is undeniably infectious. As she pointed out, the very fact that we have a curiosity about the universe we find ourselves in is, in itself, something to marvel at. 

‘We are here, we’ve come through this 13.8 billion year development of the universe to the point where we can have this self-contemplating life that recognises a bit of where we’ve come from and how we connect to the universe.’ 

These are surely the thoughts that existential crises are made of.  

Speaking with Jennifer made me feel small. Small in time, and small in place. I suppose dwelling on the enormity of an ever-expanding universe will do that to a person. Afterall, there are around one hundred billion stars in our galaxy (that we know of), the closest of which is four lightyears away. The vast majority of these stars have their own solar systems, hosting their own planets that orbit around them. And that’s still only within the confines of our own cosmic neighbourhood; there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our (observable) universe, and infinite mystery that sits far beyond these numbers.  

Since our conversation, I’ve been left with this simple, but salient thought – we’re incredibly small. But further to that, I’ve been pondering the notion that there’s a good kind of small, and perhaps we are it. We may be just one of the eight-billion inhabitants of a ‘pale blue dot’ in a universe that stretches far beyond the capacities of human understanding and measurement, but there’s a profound beauty in that. It does not equate to a feeling of non-consequentialism or oblivion, on the contrary, it is deeply empowering. It is, after all, the powerful reality upon which much of the twelve steps of recovery offered by AA/NA is built. There is a mysterious, and yet obviously tangible, power in coming face-to-face with our own small-ness, and surrendering to that which is deeper, higher, bigger than us.   

Learning a little about Jennifer’s childhood living among the Ozark Mountains, with evenings spent gazing up at a canopy of stars that stretched from ‘horizon to horizon’, it was enchanting to hear about how her career has been an out-living of a childhood appreciation for the things that are so much bigger than us mere humans.  

If you have a pull towards all things astronomy, this episode is undoubtedly for you. If you’ve ever pondered what science and faith look like when they’re not entering the ring from different corners, readying themselves for a show-down, this episode is also for you. If you’re craving enchantment of the most cosmic kind, this episode is for you too.  

This conversation with Dr Jennifer Wiseman will be a refreshing antidote to the disillusion that comes with assuming we are the centre of our universe.  

Article
Culture
Holidays/vacations
Mental Health
Wildness
5 min read

This is why we must go down to the sea

Stepping off the shore restores more than our sanity

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A sunset over an island casts golden light on the sea and a beach.
An Argyll beach.
Nick Jones.

It’s that time of year again. Much of Britain has been enjoying (or possibly enduring) a heatwave, the summer holidays are approaching, and our thoughts naturally turn toward an escape from our ordinary, often urban, landlocked, lives. And for many of us that escape will be to the sea. It’s true, we really do like to be beside the seaside. As a nation our souls seem to suffer from an annual experience like that described in John Masefield’s poem Sea-Fever as we head coastwards muttering ‘I must go down to the sea again...’  

We want to holiday by the sea – as the market for second homes in places like Cornwall will confirm. We also want to live permanently by the sea, or at the very least by the water. Some experts estimate that properties by the water have an average increased value of around 48 per cent. Water sells. It does so perhaps because proximity to it provides something of a mental escape from the overwhelming rigidity and linearity of our predominantly urban environments.  

Iain MacGilchrist has argued that our modern lives suffer from the triumph of the left-brain hemisphere’s attention to the world. This is a focussed attention that is all about controlling and getting. It leads to the creation of a self-contained and ordered world with little attention to context. And so little attention to the natural, complex, fluid reality of creation. MacGilchrist goes on to correlate the rise in a variety of mental illnesses characterised by what he calls ‘right hemisphere deficits’ with industrialisation and the development of our culture of modernity.  

In his book Blue Mind Wallace Nichols explores the evidence for the positive effect of water on the brain. He highlights how a proximity to water can heal, restore, give us a sense of connection and promote calm. He argues that water can shift our minds into what he calls ‘drift’, the kind of mental attention which generates calm. Being with, on, better still in water, is undoubtedly good for us. No wonder we are drawn to it.  

Yet at the same time water, and particularly the sea, has been a source of terror. A no-go area ‘where there be dragons’, OK, lobsters for sure, probably sharks, and whales like Moby Dick. The sea remains one of the last places of mystery, an unfathomed, unfathomable place of endless dark water. We know more about the far reaches of the universe than we do about the truly deep ocean. Mythical creatures of the deep, whether Nessie, or one of various giant specimens hauled unsuspectingly from the ocean, continue to populate the diminishing space of our wonder and fear of the unknown.  

So whilst elucidating the psychological benefits of water is certainly helpful, it’s all a bit…tame. Is it just another way of humans turning the wild and numinous into something we now think we understand? Something we can now control and apply in our lives for our own benefit and comfort? Have we demystified the sea? Reducing its mysteries to little more than a balm for our troubled modern minds? A lure for our attention and our debt in an overheated housing market? 

In the Christian tradition the sea is a place of profound paradox. Creation begins with God’s Spirit hovering over the water. However, the Hebrew scriptures also present the sea as a place of God’s absence. The sea is the place of monsters and mystery, and death. It’s also the place of perhaps the most famous whale in all literature. The whale that swallows the hapless Jonah. Jonah’s story expresses the deep paradox of the sea as a place of death and yet also a place of divine encounter. It is in the depths of the sea, and the digestive system of the whale, that Jonah’s epiphany takes place and his journey starts anew. 

Stories of Jesus also deal with this paradox of wildness and encounter in the chaos of the sea. In the story of the calming of the storm the wild threat of the sea is not rendered as simply something to be avoided. Jesus is not a fixer making all daily dangers obsolete. Rather the story says that it is precisely in such moments of wildness, fury and terror that his powerful presence can be encountered.  

To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life.

It’s for these reasons perhaps that, John Good, a friend of mine, has formed a Christian community that’s based around encounter with the sea. Located as it is in an area almost surrounded by the sea, it started as a social enterprise helping people access the water who otherwise lacked the equipment or resource to do so. Pretty soon it became clear that this was transformational for people. Enabling families otherwise excluded from a life-giving resource to enjoy it as much as anyone else was powerful. One person referred to the experience by saying that on that day the sea had been ‘her saviour.’ Ocean Church began with a gathering on three large, tethered paddleboards some metres offshore. They now run retreats and pilgrimages on the sea, practice centering prayer (a form of Christian meditation or contemplative prayer) on the sea and continue to explore what it means to meet God on the water.  

We yearn for the sea, and the water, for more than a balm for the mind. The sea remains that place, in our mechanised, technological world with its constant lure of control and mastery, where an immersion in dangerous mystery can still be experienced. To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life. To be held buoyant by the sea and look to the horizon is to get it touch with our finitude in the context of the vastness of the seas. It is to engage with our utter dependency on the creation which we inhabit and to connect with the presence that holds that creation together.  

To step into the sea is even therefore a step of faith. A step in the direction of our own vulnerability. A brave step away from the world in which our technology, our algorithms, our machines and our skyscrapers dupe us into a faith in our own control, our own supremacy. A step into the depths. ‘Deep calls to deep’ says the psalmist as ‘all your waves and breakers have swept over me.’ As many of us step into the sea this summer it may certainly be a step toward a restored sanity, but it might also be a step toward a restored soul.   

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