“And the greatest consolation he used to receive was to look at the sky and the stars, which he did often and for a long time.”
— “A Pilgrim’s Testament: The Memoirs of Saint Ignatius of Loyola”
One of my favorite details from St. Ignatius’ life is that he loved to gaze at the stars. His friends reported finding him on rooftops or high places, looking up at the sky, often with tears in his eyes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this stargazing lately because, well, astronomy is always on the brain in my household. My husband is an astrophysicist at the University of Washington; he’s part of the team working on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which just released its first stunning images of the cosmos this summer.
Decades of imagination, engineering, construction and problem-solving went into this project, which is the largest and most comprehensive all-sky study ever, just beginning its 10-year time-lapse survey of the cosmos. What began as a napkin sketch in 1998 has finally come to fruition.
Rubin’s huge camera will, quite plainly, allow us to see things we have never seen before, including brief supernovae bursts and near-earth asteroids. It will allow us to learn more than we’ve ever known about dark matter and the formation of the solar system. It’s a discovery machine, and I’m lucky enough to hear the news in real time. Last week my husband was late coming to the dinner table. “Sorry,” he said, “interstellar comet.”
The images released so far are breathtaking. The brightly colored one of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae made me feel like I was like looking inside the mystery of a womb. For how many millennia have these sacred hidden treasures been developing and changing, each according to their own logic, set in motion by the Creator of all things?
Actually, it turns out that my favorite image of the nebulae is only a small part of the image Rubin captured. In order to see the entirety of it, we’d need over 400 of the largest TV screens available, laid out on a surface as big as a football field. There are moments, I think, when we can catch a small glimpse of something so beautiful, so far beyond our ability to create, that the only possible response is awe. And — I’m with Ignatius — also tears.
Although Ignatius himself wasn’t an astronomer, the spiritual life and the life of the cosmos have always been intertwined in the Jesuit tradition.
Ignatius had a much better view of the stars with his naked eye five centuries ago than most of us do now, in cities where light pollution dims their brilliance. But he didn’t have any concept of the expanding, ever-changing universe. How fitting, though, that when I think of the constant development of the cosmos and of the decades’ worth of dedication that led to Rubin’s incredible discoveries, it is another Jesuit I think of, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his words made famous in a beloved prayer: “Trust in the slow work of God.”
Although Ignatius himself wasn’t an astronomer, the spiritual life and the life of the cosmos have always been intertwined in the Jesuit tradition. Many Jesuits have been astronomers over the last 500 years, making discoveries, mapping the paths of the comets, the surface of the moon, and the spectra of the gases that make up the stars.
The Vatican Observatory, active since 1582, is run by Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, who has written extensively about Jesuit contributions to astronomy. Pope Leo visited just recently to greet students and researchers — and to gaze through a telescope himself.
I can’t speak for the long chain of Jesuit astronomers throughout history, but maybe they were driven by something I’ve found to be true in my own life: The more we understand creation, the more we understand God. And the better equipped we are to understand ourselves.
Maybe Ignatius understood, even without our high-definition close-up images of the stars we have now thanks to Rubin, that he was also in a long, beautiful process of becoming. The greatest comfort I’ve found in my spiritual life is that I am too.
Ignatius and the Stars
By Cameron Bellm
Before the vigil at Montserrat,
Before the pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
Before the foundation of the Society,
There was a man, on a castle balcony,
Gazing up in wonder at the stars.
St. Ignatius, awed by mystery,
Draw our eyes ever upward to the heavens,
Our hearts to the holy adventures that await us,
And our spirits to the grandeur that surrounds us.
May we, too, see all things within us and beyond us
As sacred galaxies, formed and held,
From age to age, by loving hands.
Amen.
