← The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.
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A
Body, mind and Spirit. We believe if one needs help, so do the others. As part of Catholic Healthcare's holistic approach to treating the whole person. Here, people are not viewed as symptoms or insurance claims and when we treat the body, mind and spirit, we believe the whole person will thrive. Catholic Healthcare Learn more at wecareyouflourish.org Sponsored by the Catholic Health association welcome to the Spiritual Life. I'm Fr. Jim Martin. On this podcast we reflect on how people experience God in their prayer and in their daily lives. And I am joined by my very talented producer, Maggie Van Doren, who I always love seeing. Maggie, good to be with you.
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B
It's always great to be with you too, Jim. We have an incredible guest on the Spiritual Life this week. We are talking to Guy Consolmagno. How did you first meet Guy Consolmagno? Or I should say Brother Guy Consolmagno?
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A
I met Guy when we were both in what's now called First Studies that was then called Philosophy Studies at Loyola University Chicago and we were in the same group, the same cohort. Just a great Guy. I've always really liked him. I'm sure he gets down, but to me he's always upbeat and fun and when I found out he was an astrophysicist, you know, with a PhD, it really blew me away. And so we've been friends ever since and I admire him and like him as a public figure as well. He's a great explicator, as you will find on Faith and Reason.
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B
Yeah, that's right. And a bit more Bio on Brother Guy. He is a Jesuit brother astronomer and the former Director of the Vatican Observatory, which is based at the Pope's summer residence, Castel Gandolfo in Italy. He is a native of Detroit, Michigan, and Brother Guy earned an undergraduate and a master's degree from MIT in Boston and a Ph.D. in planetary science from the University of Arizona. In 1989, Brother Guy entered the Jesuits as a brother, meaning he is a member of the Society of Jesus, but not as an ordained priest. He worked at the Vatican Observatory since 1993, and in 2015 Pope Francis appointed him Director, his 10 year mandate has just finished with a PhD in Planetary Science. Brother Guy has spent his career studying meteorites and asteroids, exploring the origins of the solar system, authoring more than 250 scientific publications, and making science accessible to the public. He's also a passionate voice for the dialogue between science and faith, and in 2014 he was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Communicating Planetary Science. Brother Guy has written several books exploring faith and science, including the Way to the Dwelling of Light, Brother Astronomer, God's Mechanics, and Would you'd baptize an extraterrestrial? His most recent book is A Jesuit's Guide to the Exploring Wonder, Beauty, and Science. So, Jim, I think that means that you and Brother Guy have both written some Jesuit guides to the stars and almost everything, right?
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C
Yes.
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A
Right. Both very expansive titles. I think if. If I recall correctly, he asked me permission, very kindly said, can I use that title, the Jesuit Guide to.
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C
I said, sure.
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A
I don't have a copyright on that. So no guides. That's right. It's a great book, too.
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B
Yeah. So we'll get to that conversation with Brother Guy in just a minute, but first we're going to take a question from our audience. And Jim, this one comes from Joanne, and she asked a really great question, which is, if God knows what is going to happen, what is the point of asking for things in prayer? In other words, why petition God in prayer?
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A
Well, Guy gives a great answer to that that I'm not going to steal. I'm going to take a little bit of a different tack, which is that we ask for things in prayer, good things, of course, we always want to say we're asking for good things, not bad things, because it's part of a relationship with God and it's part of being honest with God in prayer. And I always say to people, if there's something that you really want, like healing or a job or for a ruptured relation to heal and it's really on your mind, it would be strange not to ask God for help. Right. No matter what's going to happen and no matter whether or not God knows what's going to happen. Of course God knows all things. But if you start to sort of back off and say, well, I shouldn't ask for those things because God knows what's going to happen or because I should be more grateful for what I have in my life and I shouldn't ask for more, then the relationship starts to get a little stale, Right. Because it's like with any friend, if there's something that's sort of in between you that you don't feel you can talk about, the relationship can get cold and stale and a little formal. So I think asking for things is fine because it's part of being in a relationship with God and being honest with God.
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C
Right.
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A
And sort of developing that intimacy with God. You know, gosh, I mean, the times that I've struggled with illness or someone in my family has been sick, it would be almost unnatural not to ask for help. Right. And that would feel like I'm being dishonest with God. But by the same token, I think it's important to be honest with God about the good things that are happening in your life as well. So for me, it's about honesty, it's about the relationship, and it's about growing in intimacy with the Lord.
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B
Yeah. Thank you, Jim. That's very helpful. And I think it's a good question because for anyone who has offered a petitionary prayer, you probably have had that moment where you've thought, what is the point of me doing this or saying this if God already knows what's going to happen? Right.
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A
Yeah. I think some of it's a mystery. Right. How does God hear our prayers? And why are some prayers seemingly answered and some prayers not? But I think, you know, part of that is being also in a relationship with a God that maybe we don't understand from time to time. So, Joanne, thank you so much for that question. We really appreciate it.
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B
Yes. And if any of you would like to ask Father Jim a question, you can write to us at the Spiritual Life.
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A
And now a word from our sponsor. Looking for a simple way to deepen your own spiritual life? Give Us this Day is a superb resource that helps Catholics stay rooted in scripture and in prayer wherever you are, no matter how busy you are. It features reliable and relatable spiritual reflections, the daily Mass readings, essays on the lives of the saints, and, of course, prayers to accompany you throughout the day. I am honored to be an editorial advisor, and I've been writing a monthly essay called Teach Us to Pray from the very beginning. And I used it every single day. I used it today. And here's a great offer. Right now, listeners of the Spiritual Life can get 10% off their new print subscription. Just visit giveusthisday.org spirituallife and join this community of Catholics praying together again. That's giveusthisday.org spirituallife and now onto our conversation with Brother Guy Consolmagno. So, Guy Consolmagno, my good friend and Jesuit brother, welcome to the spiritual life.
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C
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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A
Of course. Where are you zooming in from?
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C
I'm actually in Tucson, Arizona. I spend half the year here, half the year in Rome, and half the year on the road. Keeps me very busy.
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A
Well, welcome to our virtual studio, Guy. Now, I obviously know the answer to these questions, but for our listeners, you are a Jesuit Brother, which means you belong to the Society of Jesus, and you have not chosen to be ordained. Can you talk a little bit about the vocation of a brother and what.
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C
It means to you, the difference between a priest and a brother? My joke is I can hear your confessions, but I can't forgive you. Actually, I don't even hear confessions. When I first thought about being a Jesuit many years ago, I was doing it mostly to get out of the freshmen dorms, which was not a good reason to do it. And the reason I wanted to get out of the freshman dorms was that I couldn't stand the goofy guys I was living with. When the Jesuits then said, son, have you prayed about this? I'm thinking, you know, prayer. I'm 18 years old. What do you think? When I prayed, God pointed out that if I can't stand being around goofy guys in the dorm, who do you think you're going to be ministering to later on? Goofy guys who, you know, need help. And even if they drive you nuts, even if you think, you know, life is tough when you're stupid, what do you expect, kid? Even people who do stupid things deserve to have someone to listen to them. But I was a nerd. I was not that person. I spent 20 years of my life becoming a nerd. I transferred from the college I was at to mit, got a couple of degrees there and the doctorate in Arizona, and worked many years as a scientist before finally coming back and asking, really, what do I want to do? What I wanted to do was to teach at a small university like the Jesuits have. And I realized I could do that. I could be a professor. When I went back and prayed again, the message that I got, it's not like a voice from the ceiling, but simply a realization that, oh, Jesuits have brothers. I once met a Jesuit who had a doctorate in physics. The Jesuit brothers can be the guys who do the cooking and cleaning and drive the school bus, but they can also be professors. As soon as that occurred to me, it felt so right. Every time I would ask my friends, I would take it to prayer. I'd take it to my parents, and they all said, yeah, we could have told you that. Years ago. I entered the Jesuits as a brother, knowing that I wanted to live the life of a Jesuit, taking the vows of a Jesuit, living in a community with a Jesuit, but not being expected to do the priestly things that a nerd like me couldn't do. The irony, of course, you wind up doing these anyway.
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A
Do you find that freeing, or do you sometimes think, oh, you know Maybe I should have gone on for ordination. Where are you with it right now?
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C
Every time I've thought about ordination, I get this big voice from the ceiling. I just. Oh. I mean, not literally, but feels like that anytime that my prayer is feeling dead and I'm thinking, God, are you there? I said, well, God, what about I get ordained and then God reminds me he's there. He doesn't want me to do that. But more than that, I realize the Jesuits have this interesting thing called the fourth vow. It's very confusing to a lot of folks. When you're a Jesuit and you take your final vows and you're a priest and you've done the full course, you're invited to take a vow that says you're available to be sent anywhere in the world to do whatever the Pope asks you to do. Brothers don't get that vow for the very good reason that in my case, I'm not someone who could be free to be sent everywhere. I'm not a priest. I can't do priestly things. I have really, really strong talents in certain places and none at all anywhere else. So rather than saying, I'm free to go wherever you send me, I'm saying, this is what I'm good at.
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A
Well, and the irony, of course, is that you ended up working for the Pope.
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C
Exactly. You know, and directly under his obedience, but in a different way. Because he's the boss.
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A
That's right. Now listen to back up a little bit. As a self professed nerd, what drew you to life in a religious order?
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C
Boy, I think the ultimate moment came when I was in my 30s. I was teaching at a little university. I was very happy there. One of those things about spirituality that the Jesuits teach you is you make these kinds of big decisions when things are going well, not when you're trying to run away from something. I was very happy teaching at Lafayette College, but I had heard about a fellow scientist like me, single, you know, he was in his 40s, and one day he didn't show up to work. And it was three days before anybody noticed, he'd had a heart attack and he died in his apartment. I realized it's not good to live alone that way. And simply because I'm such a nerd, it's important for me to be a part of a community that pulls me out of the temptations of trying to live alone, just because I am the kind of guy who would happily be a lone wolf. It's good that I'm not a priest, that I realize I Need the community, including priests, to give me daily mass to make sure that I'm connected to other human beings. Because the life of a nerd, even though you're going out and doing science and talking to your collaborators, it can very much be the life of an introvert and a life of someone who can be tempted to give in to their introversion and not make the important effort to connect with people.
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A
Did you ever think of life as a nerd and a scientist with a wife and kids? Was that an attraction to you at one point?
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C
Oh, it was a tremendous attraction until I was about 30 years old. I thought that was desperately what I wanted. And I kept saying, God, I couldn't find anybody who would date me, that sort of thing. I did find some very intelligent women who dated me for a while, and they're all smart enough not to marry me. But a funny thing happened. This is the early 80s. I'm living in Boston. I'm a postdoctoral fellow at MIT at this point. And I hear about a company that had invented the very first spreadsheet program, was called VisiCalc. And the nerd who invented it had been at my dorm at mit. And they were going to offer me a job for some new product they had come up with. I went for an interview, and they're all great people, and they were going to offer me, like, twice what I was making as a researcher. And at the same time, through one of the clubs I belonged to, I actually met somebody who was normal. I mean, not. I used to date interesting women, and interesting is not always who you want to date. She was normal. She was a nice person. I had never asked her out, but, you know, should I? Walking home from that interview, I suddenly pictured myself living in Wellesley, the suburbs of Boston, in a nice car with a picket fence, a Volvo parked out front, 2.4 kids, a dog and a cat. And I screamed, no, this is not me. This is not what I want. This is anything but this. It was bizarre because it had been what I always thought I wanted until it looked like it might be possible. And what I did instead was to quit science and join the Peace Corps and go off and do crazy things, which was much more fulfilling to me. I remember telling the story once to a friend of mine, and I realized I'm driving in his Volvo to his suburban home, to his wife and two kids and dog and cat. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that life, except it would have been wrong for me.
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A
That's right. And it's a great Ignatian Meditation to imagine yourself in that situation. What do you think, say, single lay people can take from your experience of wanting community? I would imagine there are people out there thinking, I'm. I'm pretty lonely right now.
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C
Yeah. Loneliness hits you no matter where you are. Getting married won't stop you from being lonely. Living in a religious community won't stop you from being lonely. That is entirely what you carry with yourself. And in a sense, you learn to live with it and embrace it. In a sense you recognize. And this is the joy of religious life. When I don't have a family, then I'm completely dependent on God. And you then create this really deep personal connection to God as not a cure for the loneliness, but as a support for recognizing who you are in relation to God.
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A
That's beautiful. That's my experience, too. And also trusting that God will, in a sense, provide for you.
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C
Right.
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A
With your Jesuit brothers, with colleagues, with friends, and. Yeah, that's really beautiful. Let me jump right into. I always love talking about this with you, Guy. And I know I've talked to you about this personally, privately. Is there a problem reconciling faith and reason, or say, science and Catholicism? What do you say to that question?
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C
Well, of course, that's my job. The Pope hired me so I could go show the world that you can have a collar, which I'm not wearing, and an MIT ring. Actually, the biggest problem I have is trying to figure out why anybody would think there's a conflict. Certainly when I was growing up, it was the 50s and the early 60s, and science and religion were still at peace. At that time, the nuns were teaching us the science. There was no sense that science and religion were at war. I've never experienced that. And so it took a while for me to sit back and actually rationally analyze where is this coming from? And finally, my best explanation is it comes from people who think that religion is a big book of facts and science is a big book of facts. And what if the two facts disagree with each other? But that's not what religion is and that's not what science is. And actually, while there's never been a case where my religion said one thing and my science said another, because they're not really talking about quite the same thing. What does happen all the time is this bit of science disagrees with this other bit of science. And then you get excited because you're saying, oh, I'm going to learn something new. I'm going to get a paper out of this. Because the point of both religion and science is that we're attempting to approach something that we will never completely understand. I will never completely totally know who God is. I will never completely understand the laws of physics and the laws of nature. I'm never going to run out of stuff to do. And that I think to some people is frightening. But to me it's the most delightful thing.
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A
That's really interesting. So in as a science, I'm not a scientist, obviously as a scientist you would say that I will never fully understand these propositions. I mean like gravity and those kinds of things.
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C
Oh yeah, absolutely. The trouble is we teach physics kind of like we teach religion. It's a bunch of things to memorize when you're 10, 11, 12 years old. And a lot of people never get beyond the 12 year old level. They never get past the confirmation classes or high school physics. High school physics means did you get the answers in the back of the book? But that's not real physics. Any more than playing scales is the same thing as playing music. It's the exercise you have to go through to get yourself into understanding how physics works. But then you get to do the fun stuff, which is the stuff where the answers aren't in the back of the book and where the goal isn't to come up with the answer, but rather to come up with a deeper sense of what's going on, which will, if it works, right. Create more questions than you thought you had before.
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A
Well, I think that that could be said also about religion, in a sense. I think that some people are.
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C
Yeah, of course, yeah. Some people support each other for you.
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A
So much, but in a sense that.
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C
I'm sorry I keep talking on top of you, but I get excited about this.
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A
No, not at all. I'm glad you're excited. I guess what I meant was I think that a lot of people are taught religion when they're very young as a series of sort of yes and no black and white answers. Right. And particularly if you don't move beyond that, you also tend to think of religion as just these set of facts that you have to assent to. And as you're talking, I'm thinking if you have that idea of religion.
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C
Right.
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Almost like nothing wrong with the Baltimore Catechism, but a kind of Q and A, yes and no, black and white, then you will see it as a set of facts instead of a kind of encounter with mystery.
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C
Right, right. Well, and what happens actually with the Baltimore Catechism? I grew up with the little blue book of the Baltimore Catechism. What happens if you do it right is when you're 18, something happens in your life, and you go, oh, that's what they were talking about. And then when you're 27, something happens. You go, oh, that's really what they were talking about. And this never stops. So that the catechism is great if it gives you a bunch of tools, a bunch of words, but you've got to be growing enough to be able to say that you come to an ever deeper understanding of what those words mean.
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A
That's a great insight, because you're right. I mean, the Baltimore Catechism is useful and gives us the right answers, but there's much more to religion than just the words.
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C
Right. I've got to say something that just reminds me of, please. When I became a Jesuit and I started learning Jesuit spirituality, the shock to me was not, oh, my gosh, here's a way of thinking of God that I never had before, because, in fact, I'd gone to a Jesuit high school. I hung around Jesuits before. I was familiar with the stuff a little bit. The shock, as you went deeper and deeper, was to discover that they have words for these things that I had been experiencing. And I thought maybe I was the only one. And you discovered, no, you're not the only one. No, this isn't something that you're hallucinating, or else we're all hallucinating the same universe. But in fact, not only is this something common to all of our human experience, but they've got words to describe it. And these words give you tools to then say, oh, and this piece works with that piece. And I can express this to a spiritual director who can then go back on his experience or her experience and say, ah. And maybe if you go and read this passage from Scripture, you'll see something you never saw there before.
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A
Yeah, that's interesting. I agree with you. I think that one of the great things about doing spiritual direction is that you can encourage people to express these things and you can give them a language with which they can express them. What words or concepts would you say you were taught that helped you to express yourself?
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C
One that really blew me away, because being the 20th century, sort of not skeptic, but too smart for that kind of stuff, was when they started talking about the actions of the evil spirit, the actions of the evil one. And, oh, oh, I don't want to believe in a devil with horns and a tail and all of that, but damn it, I've experienced that. How do you make sense of that? I've Got a nerd way that finally allowed me to recognize the idea that evil is the absence of good. And yet the absence of a thing can feel like an entity. This happens in electronics. When you remove an electron from a semiconductor, the hole that's left behind can be described as if it was an actual entity rather than just the absence of that one electron. And the funny thing is, the more good you have, the sharper the absence of the good appears and the more you can identify it and just use the model of, oh, let's say there was an evil spirit. This model allows me to figure out what's going on in my life without having to buy into the duality. There's a good God and a bad God, because that's not true. But rather that absence of the good that I need can be what's drawing me to do something that I really don't want to do.
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A
Well, it is shocking sometimes that there is this sameness in the way that the evil spirit works. And, you know, I understand it as the spirit that pulls us away from God, the spirit that the impulses that move us away from God. And Ignatius goes over that in the Spiritual Exercises and gives, you know, ways that you can identify the evil spirit. I mean, one of them is, you know, the army commander that looks for the weakest part of your, you know, so called castle and kind of focuses on that. And it's helpful for people to say, you know, as you were saying, I'm not the only one that's going through this, you know, and this is Ignatius's experience. And he's also drawing on the experience of being a director with other people. It is very freeing.
- [24:43]
C
It is. It's also important to realize that we do this even in rational science. You know, when I'm teaching electricity to a freshman class, I'll talk about electrons as if they're little silver balls with negative signs painted on them that go bouncing down the wire. I know that's not what an electron is, but when you can picture it that way, then you have a way of learning how to deal with it. Just as if you picture the devil as a goofy guy with red horns and a tail. That gives you a way of dealing with the actual reality of the temptations that we're dealing with.
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A
We're going to pause for a short break, but we'll be back in a minute.
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C
Foreign.
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A
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and LifeLock has tips to protect your identity. Use strong passwords, set up Multi Factor Authentication, report phishing and update the software on your devices and for comprehensive identity protection, let LifeLock alert you to suspicious uses of your personal information. Lifelock also fixes identity theft, guaranteed or your money back. Stay smart, safe and protected with a 30 day free trial@lifelock.com podcast terms apply. Loyola University Chicago's Hank center is proud to support the spiritual life with Father James Martin and to highlight their mid fall events on October 15, the center welcomes Villanova's Eugene McCarraher and Notre Dame's Tony Mills for a robust dialogue on the promise and peril of technology, Laudato si AI and the experience of being human. Their October 30th event continues the theme of technology and culture and features Sister.
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Ilia Delio, their visiting Fellow in Catholic Studies.
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Sister Ilia will offer the Hanks Center's annual Teilhard de Chardin lecture titled Incarnation and Evolution the Catholic Vision of Teilhard.
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C
De Chardin, an exploration of new intersections.
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Between science and religion as they are emerging in the technologically convulsive 21st century. For more information about these events and to see a full list of all Hanks center events for fall 2025, please visit Luc Edu CCI do you think the Big Bang? I always go back to the Big Bang and that great question that I learned in philosophy when we were studying together. Why is there something rather than nothing at all? Do you think the Big Bang would make someone naturally more religious? I mean, in a sense it had to have come from somewhere, right?
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C
Yes and no. The idea that the Big Bang, for instance, is the same thing as a creation out of nothing. That's wrong. Because the Big Bang is what happened after creation occurred, after there is space and time and the laws of physics. And Georges Lemaitre, the Catholic priest who came up with the Big Bang, was very adamant about this. One time, Pope Pius XII had given us a talk to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in essence he said, oh, scientists are talking about the universe having a beginning. Ha. We could have told them that. And Lemaitre went to him and said, no, that's not how it works. Because the other thing about the Big Bang is it's like all of our science, an incomplete description of what we think happened. And a thousand years from now, if we do our job right, everything that we call the Big Bang is going to look foolish because it's not even asking the right questions. Just as Aristotelian physics was really good for 1500 years until we realized the places where it didn't work. So you don't want to base your theology or your philosophy on today's science, because today's science is going to go obsolete. The bigger question why is there something instead of nothing? That's a valid question, whether you believe in the Big Bang or even an eternal, continuously evolving universe.
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A
That's fascinating to me. Would you say, in your own belief system or cosmology, if I could use that term, would you say that God created space and time first and then the rest followed? Is that your idea?
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C
Yes. And we get this even from Genesis 1. In the beginning, God is already there before anything is created. God is outside of space and time. God is outside the universe. Rabbi Sacks, in his wonderful book on creation, the name of which, of course, I'm forgetting at the moment, but Rabbi Sacks talks about this as sort of the miracle of Hebrew theology, recognizing a God who is outside of space and time. And that is the only God who can give meaning to the universe, just as it takes somebody who's not a chair sitting in the chair to give the chair a meaning, which he says he stole from Wittgenstein and I stole from him.
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A
Guy, I didn't expect to ask you this, but it just dawned on me. You must have so many questions for God, obviously, about Jesus and the disciples and all that kind of stuff that we all have. Do you have a scientific question that you want to ask God when you get to heaven that you've been dying to ask him, or that doesn't make sense to you?
- [30:12]
C
Yes, in a funny way. And it comes from something that I learned when I was part of the Catholic Church student group at mit as a student, and it's fundamental to who I am as a scientist. So let me give you the buildup to it. There was some study group among, you know, the Catholic chaplain at MIT was doing. And he brought up the idea of a philosopher. And I want to say it was Jacques Mauritan, but I could have that totally wrong, who points out the contrast between the death of Jesus and the death of Socrates. Socrates believes in the soul, the immortal soul. So when it comes time to drink the poison, he says, no problem. Get rid of the stupid body. I'll go on and have a happy afterlife. Jesus, facing his death, sweats blood because human life, in being a human alive, is so important to him. The word soul in the Greek sense is hardly ever found in Scripture. I wouldn't say never, but hardly ever. John Polkinghorne, the great Anglican priest and physicist, has this marvelous phrase we Are not apprentice angels. We're not souls trapped in these stupid meat bodies that we have to get rid of. The physical universe matters. What we do in the physical universe matters. What we do to our bodies matters. And so my question, which I won't have to ask God because I suspect when I die it will become obvious, is how does that work after death if we are not little Casper the Friendly Ghost up in the sky playing harps? If the physical body matters but we are outside of space and time, Are we like somebody who gets to pull down their favorite book and read the pages over and go, oh, I remember that part that we don't get to do anything new. Are we still creatures of a particular place and a particular time, which Jesus chose to be when God so loved the world that he sent his son to be part of this physical universe? How does that all fit together in a universe of time? And I don't know. And I'm delighted to not know because it means that I'm going to be delighted when I find out.
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A
These are fascinating questions. I was just, believe it or not, with some friends at lunch today, and one of the questions I asked, a little more mundane, is when we get to heaven, I also believe that you're right. The body is important and time is important and our history is important. When I see people, what age will they be? And will they be? How will I recognize them? If I see Guy Consomano, Am I going to see Guy Consomano at the end of his life? Or am I going to see Guy Consomano from what I knew knew him during philosophy? And I just find that endlessly fascinating. I assume God, the master of time, can take care of all of that, but it will be fascinating.
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C
Well, I think you're going to see all of them, including when I was 18 and really stupid, or when I was 57 and really stupid, or when I WAS 73 and really stupid?
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A
So all kind of existing together.
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C
Exactly. Because I think we will be creatures of space and time, but God sees all space and all time.
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A
Yeah. Beyond all that, we're talking a lot about science. How does that. To get a little more personal, how does being a scientist influence your prayer?
- [33:45]
C
Would you say it, first of all teaches me humility. I'm not going to get up in my prayer and tell God how to fix the world because I can't even fix my lab. It teaches me how to that the universe is beautiful. And so even when I see ugly things in my life or in the world around me, I don't despair. But it also teaches me that when I am tempted to despair because I see terrible things happening around me, that I'm speaking to someone who knows what I'm talking about and who gets it, who's been here, who has lived in a world where he was part of a captive nation under the rule of, you know, Roman soldiers who didn't get what Judaism was about, and even when they tried to do the right things, would sometimes do the wrong things, and yet he cures the centurion's children. It's that sense of realizing the world is bigger than me and that I'm invited to find out more about it that I think is what. What gives me the greatest delight in prayer.
- [35:06]
A
So you're saying even in the midst of ugliness, I assume you mean sort of moral evil and natural evil.
- [35:13]
C
Both.
- [35:13]
A
You see both, yes. You see these beautiful things.
- [35:16]
C
What.
- [35:17]
A
What inspires you the most? I mean, where do you find the most beauty? And what. Where do you see God the most?
- [35:22]
C
Walking outside at night and looking at the stars. That never ceases to pull me out of myself. And why I relate so much to something that Pope Benedict said in a homily back in, I think it was 2012, on Easter Saturday night. He says in one part, he's talking about light and dark and the symbolism of that. And then he sort of rolls his eyes and he goes, we human beings create our own light to blind us to God's lights. That's light pollution. That's putting up big city bulbs that blind you so you can't see the stars anymore. And indeed, they create such glare that you can't even see the oncoming cars. They're supposedly there to help you out. That sense of what we do to ourselves out of our fear, that makes things worse. Light pollution is a perfect example of that, because when you finally do get to a dark site. Oh, my gosh. I did my retreat a month ago. You know, all Jesuits get this privilege of having a week to do a silent retreat. And I happened to be in Australia for a meeting. And so I went to the Jesuit retreat house and winery at Seven Hill, north of Adelaide. There's a beautiful telescope there because I arranged for there to be a telescope there about 10 years ago. But even before I took the telescope out, I was stepping into the cottage where they were putting me up, and I looked at the sky and I saw the Milky Way, so bright that it almost cast a shadow and leading down from Scorpius and the constellations I know to The Southern Cross. It was breathtaking. It reminded me of the first time I'd seen those constellations. And yet it was a new experience that I am now reminded of and take consolation from.
- [37:17]
A
That's beautiful. Do you think of that psalm verse a lot? You know, when I see the work of your hands. Right. What is man that you are mindful of him?
- [37:26]
C
Right. Psalm 8. And yet the next line is, you've made us, you know, practically gods for all of our goofiness. God has given us the ability to appreciate the universe, which anybody can do. You don't need a PhD to do that. I could do that when I was three years old. But for those who do have the intellectual twist to our nature, we can encounter God there. The universe is beautiful, and Maxwell's equations that describe the universe are ineffably beautiful. And no matter how deep you dig into it, you just keep finding newer and more remarkable bits of beauty.
- [38:08]
A
When you read the Bible, do you think you look at it any differently than, you know, the average intelligent believer? I mean, as a scientist, do you feel like you bring a kind of scientist's eyes to the Bible?
- [38:20]
C
Oddly, it's not as a scientist that I look at the Bible and read the stories there, but as a science fiction reader. And the question is always, is the Bible true? There's a lot of truth to be found in fantasy novels. There's a lot of truth in Lord of the Rings that has nothing to do with whether or not elves really existed. The reason the story works is because it's telling you a truth that the owner's manual to your Volkswagen won't tell you. That said, there also are places in Scripture in this library of books, as we were taught, because there are so many different books and there's so many different authors. There is a lot of it which is history. And you have to know what is history. I started studying history in my first year at university before I went off and became a nerd. History is not just a chronology of what happened, but it's an interpretation of what happened. It's looking at the data and saying, here's what was going on. Which is why you can continually have new histories written about the same events, because you suddenly see things in a new way, just as we talked about, you know, reading the Baltimore Catechism and going, oh, that's what they were talking about. But one of the fascinating things is our science fiction, our, you know, ancient literature is full of gods coming to Earth, usually on a cloud of, you know, glory. Making no mistake, hey, I'm God. Get out of the way. And that's not the way that it happens with Jesus. Usually when people are trying to start a new religion, they're not going to start out by saying how stupid I was the entire time. And yet that's the Gospel of Mark. An entire comedy of people getting it goofily wrong over and over again. When you read scripture with somebody who's got experience in knowing how literature works, you're just blown away with how profound it is, considering especially that it was written by a bunch of illiterates who didn't have a university education and, you know, five years of a doctorate in literature. You read Mark? I go back to Mark. I learned enough Greek in high school to realize Mark's Greek is so terrible even I could read it. It's not written by somebody who is a literary master. And yet the story he tells, though it's not told all that elegantly, is incredibly profound. So profound that 2,000 years later, we've not run out of ways of appreciating just how good it is.
- [41:09]
A
You know, we've been talking a lot about, you know, your connection with the Bible and your understanding of Jesus and God. What's your. What's your daily prayer like?
- [41:19]
C
There's a few things that I try to do. There's a part of formal prayer I absolutely believe in the daily rosary. I usually do that. I tend to wake up at three in the morning. And it used to be that I was the director of the observatory. I've just gotten out of that job. And so I would be at 3 in the morning in Tucson. It's the middle of the day in Rome, and I had to find out what was going on there. But I would start by praying the rosary while in bed. And that rhythm, that almost mechanical way of viewing a prayer is really important to make sure that I'm back on the tracks. Other times it's a conversation. Usually when I'm walking, especially when I'm in Rome. And there's a beautiful set of gardens next to the Vatican Observatory's headquarters. I can go for a walk. And the first step is always God saying, notice where you are. Wake up and look around. Pay attention to that sky. Have you ever noticed that tree that you're walking past? A million times. Take a look at that. Be aware of where you are and what I have given to you and what's around you. There's an image that I got out of my last retreat. I mentioned that I did my retreat at a winery. It Happened to be the week when I am the vine and you are the branches. Was in the gospel readings, and being surrounded by branches and being surrounded by vines, the spiritual director I had then think of you being a branch, Jesus being the vine. What is the vine doing but bringing you the nourishment that you need? And I can picture, especially when I need it, that sense of nourishment coming through a vine into me so that I can grow a few grapes.
- [43:21]
A
Beautiful. You mentioned, guy, that you're cycling off one of your current positions, right? Director of the Vatican Observatory. After how many years was it.
- [43:32]
C
So it's been 10 years. It was two years, a five year term. And after my second term, I said, please let me out of this. Enough is enough.
- [43:39]
A
What was it like working in Vatican circles for all that time?
- [43:43]
C
Well, the humility came naturally there because my Italian is good enough to know that it's terrible. And it's not just the language, it's the culture. But by accident, I learned early on that instead of going to. If you needed a widget from the Office of Widgets, you don't go up and say, give me a widget. You would go to the people in charge and said, I've got this problem. How do you think I should solve it? And then they may actually see a way of solving it that you never heard of, or they may be the ones to say, you need a widget and that it's up to them to give you the widget. But beyond that, that humility of saying, I'm the stupid American, I don't know what I'm doing. When you ask somebody a favor in America, the idea is, well, there's a price. Now I owe you. But if you're an Italian at the Vatican and I ask Jim Martin for a favor, Jim Martin, by giving me the favor, has taken me on as his client. And from now on, it's up to Jim Martin's honor to be sure that I flourish so that he can show the world that he is so wonderful that the people working for him do.
- [44:58]
A
Well, Tom Reese, our former editor and author of Inside the Vatican, a Jesuit who we both know well, often says that the Vatican is a court, and that's one way to understand it. Does that, from what you're saying, does that ring true?
- [45:13]
C
The court in the sense of a medieval court? Absolutely.
- [45:16]
A
Exactly.
- [45:17]
C
Not like a court of law. Correct.
- [45:19]
A
Guy, you know, I would love to speak to you for hours and hours and hours, but we have to wrap up here. We have a question from the AUDIENCE and it's from Joanne and I think this is a great question to ask you. Guy Consolmagno, Here we go. If God knows what's going to happen, what's the point of asking for things in prayer? In other words, why do we petition God in prayer?
- [45:44]
C
Well, God knows what's going to happen in the way that you know what's going to happen in a book you've read the second time because God is outside of time. God doesn't know the future. God remembers the future. The reason to me to pray is not so you'll change God's mind, but so that in the process of asking you change yourself, you begin to realize what is it actually that I do want? What is it actually that I do hope will happen, what's going on inside of me. And that isn't the only thing that happens in prayer. But that's an essential part of what happens in prayer. And because God is outside of time and yet has invented time and will deal with you in time, I do believe that your petitions make an effect on God, that God cares, that God loves you, becoming more you by figuring out what you want. And in the process for the fact that he gave us this freedom, the fact that it's a book that God is the co author of, it's a shared universe novel, as they would say in the science fiction world. We're all writers of our own science fiction novel. Science fiction because it happens in the future. That's the part we're writing. And the fact that God gives us this freedom means that having prayed, God will remember what it was we prayed about. And that's why God remembers the future that comes out of it.
- [47:30]
A
Well, Guy, a beautiful answer from a Jesuit and a scientist. Thank you very much on behalf of Joanne and thank you on behalf of of all of our listeners and viewers for joining us. Thanks for your time and blessings on your new work.
- [47:44]
C
Thank you so much.
- [47:59]
A
This episode is brought to you by indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions. Appreciate. Well, I've known Guy for so long, but it's always great to talk to him and I He was just so on fire, wasn't he?
- [48:49]
B
Oh yeah, absolutely. It's incredible to listen to his scientific mind, but also his spiritual mind and the way that he's able to marry those two. I really enjoyed listening. One of the things that came up in your discourse discussion was this concept in Ignatian spirituality of the evil spirit. And, Jim, I have to confess that since this was introduced to me way back in college, I really struggled with it. Not so much like consolation and desolation, but this idea of kind of personifying evil spirit that lives inside of my mind has been very discouraging, mostly because I think it's there a lot of the time. And so then I start to think, oh, my God, I. I have evil thoughts all of the time. And so I've kind of had to do away with that language in my spiritual life. But I would love to hear you expound upon it and maybe disabuse me of my illusions with it.
- [49:45]
A
Well, thanks for bringing that up. I think it's a great question. And Guy brought it up. And I actually, believe it or not, like to talk about the evil spirit, because I deal with it as a spiritual director in my own life. And I've thought about it a lot. Here's how I think about it. First of all, Ignatius called it the evil spirit or the enemy of human nature. The first thing to say is that everyone has had an experience of it. We all have within us these impulses that move us away from God. Right? We simply do. And in Ignatian spirituality, the way that the evil spirit manifests itself, and you can say himself or itself, I do feel that it is personified. I do feel that it is a force, an entity, has a certain sameness. You know, Guy talked about that. You know, that when he was talking about sort of putting words or language to it. So Ignatius says, for example, the evil spirit acts like the. The army commander. I use that analogy, right? Looking for our weakest spot.
- [50:42]
C
Right?
- [50:42]
A
Or as he says, the false lover. What does that mean? The one who doesn't want his secrets revealed. Oftentimes when we're sort of in the grip of bad thinking, we don't want to sort of share it. You know, Alcoholics Anonymous says, you're only as sick as your secrets. And then the other way is the spoiled child. You know, I have to have this. So when I see these things happening over and over and over again in my own life and in the lives of people that I direct, I say, look, this has a sort of quality to it. There's a certain characteristic to it, a predictability to it. Even Absolutely. And that's a very good point, Maggie, because if you can predict it and know what's happening, you can say, ah, aha. That's the evil spirit. So also moving us to despair or another way of looking at it. I sometimes say to my directees, universal language is usually a tip off. So as an example, someone comes to me and says, I feel no one likes me anymore. Everyone hates me. Nothing's going right. That is evil spirit language because it's universal and it's false. Right. I mean, it's ridiculous to say no one likes you or everything's going poorly. So the point is to be able to recognize the evil spirit and the way that the evil spirit works in your life so that, as you say, you can predict it and more importantly, identify it. And I think once you sort of say, all right, it's out there, it's moving me. It's easier to deal with it when you can identify it and say, I don't have to listen to that. Right. And also to know that God is more powerful than that. Right. So I think it's a reality. It's a reality in people's spiritual lives. You know, it draws us to do selfish things and cruel things and thoughtless things. Right. But there's always a choice. It's the recognizable quality in there that I find so compelling and that Ignatius describes so well that the more you do direction, the more you read about it, the more you go to direction, the more you're able to say, okay, I see what's happening. This is that movement again.
- [52:42]
B
And I think when you personify it, you give it a name.
- [52:45]
C
You.
- [52:45]
B
You're actually saying, this is not entirely who I am. Just because it's my thoughts, it's not totally governing me.
- [52:52]
A
Right, Absolutely. And you can have a sense of control over it. So I'll give you an example from my own life. Sometimes when I travel, I get, in a sense, not overwhelmed, but just, oh, my gosh, this is terrible, this is awful. I don't want to get on that plane. I'm so tired, I'm sick, whatever. Everything's going wrong, I don't feel well. And, you know, it's happened to me so often that I can say, and even my friends say sometimes when I text them, that's the evil spirit. And I often think, I know this is a little out there, but I often think that the evil spirit pushes back on us sometimes in direct proportion to the good that is going to happen, let's say, on a more sort of homey level, if you're visiting someone in the hospital, the evil spirit will say, you're gonna get sick. Don't go right. You're busy. It's not going to make any difference to her. Who cares? The hospital's too far. All these things are going to push against you doing something generous because the evil spirit doesn't want you to share God's love with somebody. Right. And I sometimes say to people in direction, think about how the evil spirit would act in this situation. Right? What would the evil spirit want most to happen? I sometimes with young Jesuits say, you know, if you're thinking about your vocation, what would the evil spirit want most to happen? Well, that I would get discouraged or doubt my initial call, or doubt that God is with me or say that, you know, all these things that I've gone through spiritually, I've made up. Do you see what I mean? So to kind of be creative and say, of course this is the evil spirit, because this is exactly what the evil spirit would want. I often say to people at the end of a retreat, now I know what the evil spirit's going to do because it's so predictable. The evil spirit. Once you get home from the retreat and I see you smiling, you probably know this, you will start to doubt things because the last thing the evil spirit wants is for you to have this experience of God and hold onto it. So to sort of imagine what the evil spirit would do, I think is a great defense against the evil spirit. And so it really is, in the end, nothing. It's something to be attentive to, but nothing to be afraid of.
- [54:55]
B
Yeah. Well, thank you very much. I've appreciated this longer conversation about it, Jim. I just wanna highlight something for our audience and that is that you have a new book out, right?
- [55:06]
A
I do. It's called In All Seasons For All Reasons. It's volume two, and it's drawn from essays from Give Us this Day, who is one of our sponsors. It's a little book on prayer. It's very inexpensive, it's very short and just essays on prayer for different seasons, that is the liturgical seasons, and different reasons, sort of different reasons for praying. So I hope people like it.
- [55:29]
B
Yeah, that'll be a great accompanying resource for the spiritual life.
- [55:34]
A
Well, thanks, Maggie, and thanks to Guy Consolmagno, to Joanne for her question, and thanks to our audience, as ever. The Spiritual Life with Father James Martin is a production of America Media. It's produced by Maggie Van Doren and our executive producer, Sebastian Gomes. We recorded in the William J. Loshert Studio in New York City here at America Media with the production assistance of Kevin Christopher Robles. Our audio engineer is Noah Levinson. Adam Buckmuller edited the video of this episode, which is now available on America Media's YouTube channel. The theme score is courtesy of Teddy Abrams and Nate Farrington. You can follow me across social media. Amesmartinsj. Also, please help us to grow the show by leaving a five star review on your favorite podcast platform. If you love the spiritual life and we have even more to offer you on America Magazine's website, keep informed and inspired about our Catholic faith. Become a subscriber today@amer America magazine.org subscribe or click the link in the show notes. Thanks so much and God bless you.
- [56:54]
C
Sam.