Ariana deVries

Welcome to the podcast everybody. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing our Jesuit Brother, Brother Guy Consolmagno. Welcome!

Brother Guy Consolmagno

It's great to be here.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So you are an astronomer and the director of the Vatican Observatory. Prior to that you were the curator for the Vatican meteorite collection.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I used to be. When they made me the director I handed that over.

Ariana deVries

Right, exactly. I'm sure it would have been tricky to do both things.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I would much prefer to be the curator. Yes.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. And you even have an asteroid named after yourself. That's pretty fun.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

That is.

Ariana deVries

[Laughter] So tell us a little bit more about what it is that you do as the director of the observatory?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Well, as a director, I really take seriously that sense that whoever is in a leadership job ought to be a kind of a servant's job. My job is to make sure that the other astronomers at the observatory get the resources they need to do the science they want to do. And so that means that I do the boring stuff like preparing the budget every year that we submit to the Vatican City State. And I make sure that people have office space where they can work, and that they have the computers they need. And I encourage them to go to meetings. An awful lot of it comes out of my history of having been a scientist at normal research institutions, and knowing what worked and what didn't, and how we can take advantage of what makes the Vatican different from say, a place like MIT. On the one hand, we don't have the same budget as MIT. But on the other hand, we also don't have the same restrictions. We don't have to worry about coming up with results after three years to get the grant renewed.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

We can do long term research projects. And that's exciting.

Ariana deVries

Yes, I guess that would enable you a little bit to kind of explore a lot of different things because you wouldn't feel like you have to get results, right?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Yeah, these guys are not worried about getting tenure. So, you know, not right away at least.

Ariana deVries

Right. So, you are an astronomer and a theologian.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I'm not a theologian. I'm an amateur when it comes to theology.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And that's, I think, important.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Okay, good to clarify. But you've shown great interest in that, as well as...

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Well, it comes with the job that comes with being a Jesuit. I was an astronomer for nearly 20 years before I joined the Jesuits. And the one thing that I learned is that if you're going to be a Jesuit doing this job, people are going to ask you about certain things, and you'd better be ready to answer. So I studied the history of Galileo; people are always gonna ask me about Galileo.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I did a couple of courses on on quantum physics and Eastern mysticism because people want to think that they’re the same thing. They're not.

Ariana deVries

Uh huh. Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Both of them are interesting, but they're really not the same thing.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And also knowing that I was going to be in the public eye, I learned about black holes, even though there's nothing farther from the research I do than black holes. You learn how to answer those questions.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Because people don't know the things that you would know. And so they're asking things from what they understand. Right?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Right. And they say, "Oh, this is my chance to find an astronomer, what really are black holes?"

Ariana deVries

[Laughter] Yeah. I don't have any questions like that for you today. So...

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Thank heavens. [Laughter] I'll tell a story. We have a summer school every two years. We bring in students, undergraduates, and graduate students from around the world. And I overheard two of them talking at one of the schools. And one, an older woman is talking to a younger student, and she saying, "When you're an undergraduate, and you go home for Christmas, and your mom asks, 'What's a black hole?' You can say as an undergraduate, 'Well, they don't really understand them yet. But when you're a graduate student, you get to say, 'We don't really understand them yet.'"

Ariana deVries

[Laughter] Yep. So then why were you interested in science and astronomy? What got you started with that?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I probably would have been interested in any case, but being a baby boomer, really made a big, had a big effect on me. The year that Sputnik was launched, 1957, was the year I started kindergarten.

Ariana deVries

Okay.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

The year that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon was the summer before my senior year of high school.

Ariana deVries

Yep.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

So I grew up with the space age. Right along with that. My dad had been a navigator in World War Two and he'd learned how to use the stars to navigate. But he'd also been interested in stories even before then - only as, you know, the son of an Italian immigrant in Boston - the odds of becoming an astronomer in the 1930s were very low. So he went on he went to college, but he studied you know, economic or practical. By the time I was growing up, I grew up and for lack of a better term, white privilege. I had...I was white and male and upper class and an American. And by the time I was growing up being an Italian was no longer, you know, thought of as as something to hold you back the way it had been from my father's generation. So I went to great schools, I had, you know, encouragement all the way. Both my parents were college educated. The question was not "Will you go to college?" But, "What are you going to get your doctorate in?" You know, as a kid, I was dreaming about these things.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And also growing up in the economic boom after the war meant that you didn't even question if things would be possible. Of course, you could do this. Of course, you could do that it never occurred to you that there might be something standing in your way. And that led to a kind of arrogance. But it also led to the self confidence to say, You know, by the time I'd finished the Jesuit high school, I thought all classics were fun. Latin and Greek was fun. Maybe I don't have to be a scientist. And I spent my first year studying history at Boston College. But my best friend was going to MIT and MIT looked like it was fun. And you get, you know, tunnels you can explore at night. And they had weekend movies at science fiction movies, and the biggest science fiction library in the world. And I went to MIT to have fun. Ya know, it was a nerds idea of fun because I'm a nerd. But it was for the fun of it. It wasn't, "Oh, this is where I can get a job" or even "This is how I can you know, change the world and make things better".

And it never occurred to me that I couldn't switch from being a history major to being a major in planetary geology. Why not? I only later realized what a phenomenal advantage that is to have that kind of background.

Ariana deVries

Right

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And it was when I was in graduate school and my best friend didn't come from that kind of background and was, you know, wracked with doubts. Am I good enough to do this. Whereas when I would run into a brick wall in grad school, I'd say, if I can't do this, nobody can come on, Shut, shut up and go back to work. You know, his mom was saying, oh, Cliff, if it's too hard, you can come home and repair TVs. Whereas My parents are saying, you'll get through and don't worry. Yeah, that's a big difference.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And a lot of that, I think, speaks to why even to this day. The field of astronomy, though we certainly have more women than I was when I was a student. It's still very, very short of people of colour people from minorities. And, and yet, I've learned that everybody wants to know astronomy. Everybody wants to take part of it. But not everybody has the arrogance to think they can do it.

Ariana deVries

Right. Yeah, because it seems like something that very lofty or very out there. I mean, it is...

Brother Guy Consolmagno

...Hard to see why you can justify doing it when there's people starving in the world, including your immediate family.

Ariana deVries

Right. Yeah, cuz I've heard you mentioned before how that was hard for you to reconcile, like when you went to help with the Peace Corps and things like that, of how do I join the two?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

That's what led me to join the Peace Corps is, you know, wait a minute, I've been living off of my privilege, maybe it's time to return something. And what shocked me was that what people really wanted from me was not to dig ditches for them, because frankly, they could dig ditches better than I can. But they wanted the thing I could contribute, which was an entree into this big millennial long conversation we call astronomy, right looking at the stars and wondering what is that in? Could we ever go there and do they ever come here?

Ariana deVries

Yeah, cuz I feel like there's a part of us that longs for the mystery of that. And something to hope in and look, be excited about when even when life isn't super awesome. And so being able to look at the stars,

Brother Guy Consolmagno

yeah, especially when life isn't super awesome. Yeah, you can look at the stars and realize no matter how badly I've screwed things up here, the sky is still beautiful, right? You can look at the stars and it does put things in perspective. It's, you know, in the horrible moments of our history, that's sometimes very reassuring. You know, now that I'm pushing 70, I've lived through enough horrible times, to be able to look back on it. When I was in high school, it was the height of the Vietnam War. Horrible times. It was the, you know, there were riots in Detroit, within a mile of where I was going to high school. And not only were the riots horrible, but the conditions that lead people to feel so much despair that they would riot, were horrible. And it would have been very easy to be trapped into thinking that's all there was to the universe. And yet, even now, 50 years later, how many people of your generation could tell me the name of the general running the war in Vietnam?

Ariana deVries

Right? I couldn’t.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

How many people remember, you know, who was president in 1969? Some of you might know, some of you might have to look it up. Um, Woodstock big rock, you know, rock opera, big, big rock concert that everybody was talking about. Can you name three groups that actually performed there anymore? The things that we thought were really important in 1969 turned out to not be important, but people landing on the moon they're going to remember in 500 years.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, totally.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And this is a, I guess just to finish it off, this is what makes us different from just well fed cats and dogs. This is what makes us human. This ability to see beyond the immediate needs, which are real means - you do have to eat. But to be able to say that in order to be human, you have to do more than just eat.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. And you started out as an earth scientist, correct.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

By accident.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So then I feel like you understand the grounding of Earth in addition to the wonder and the mystery of the stars.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Oh, absolutely. And the wonderful thing of studying planetary geology is it makes you realize it's the same geology.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Different conditions, different outcomes, but it's the same science.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

The moon is not radically different, you know, in a sort of epistemological sense, or it's not anything that we couldn't understand by going there. It's a place you can touch. It's a place you could walk around on; it’s just a little bit harder to get to than most places.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, right. So do you feel like that enhances the mystery of space? Or kind of lessens the mystery of space?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Oh, it does both. Um, the best comparison I can think of is, imagine, remember when you were 14, and dreaming about falling in love. And maybe by the time you're 30, you've had a few, you know, romances successful or not successful. The dream that you had when you were 14 turns out to be really different from the reality. But there is no way you could have known that at 14. It's only the experience that makes you realize that the dream was based on something you didn't even know. Yeah. And experiencing the solar system firsthand. is like experiencing love firsthand. It makes you, in some ways, chuckle at the naive dreams that you had, but it also makes you recognize you wouldn't have gotten there without those dreams in the first place. It's only the experience that makes you realize that the dream was based on something you didn't even know. Yeah. And experiencing the solar system firsthand. is like experiencing love firsthand. It makes you a In some ways chuckle at the naive dreams that you had, but it also makes you recognize you wouldn't have gotten there without those dreams in the first place.

Ariana deVries

Right. So then I feel like, yeah, that has also a lot to do with our relationship with church and religion and understanding that as a child compared to understanding that as an adult. So then...

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I'm nodding my head massively here.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. [Laughter] I can hear you through. So then tell me a little bit of your background with church religion and how that changed as you decided to become a part of the Jesuit order and how you received support from your community in that.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

It's very odd. Unlike a lot of people, I did not have the kind of faith crisis that a lot of people have when they're teenagers. And that came, I think, from that that privileged arrogance, but also the sense that what the arrogance did is it didn't make me feel like I had to prove anything to anybody by look, I'm smart enough I can put that childish stuff behind. Instead, I was able to say, okay, you know, the physics I know at 18 is different from the physics I understand that 10 doesn't mean that physics is wrong.

Ariana deVries

Mhmm.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

But, I also have to remember, there were buttons that everybody wore buttons in the 60s said question authority. And my immediate answer was, "Question authority? Says who?" Think about it.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

An awful lot of rebellion isn't rebellion; it's conformity. Rebellion is the style of being a teenager, and I refused to follow those styles. So, you know, everybody wanted to do drugs, so I wouldn't do drugs. Everybody wanted to get drunk so I wouldn't get drunk. And I, you know, naturally feel wonderfully superior to everybody else, which was its own kind of drug.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

It took me a while to recognize that one but I grew up in a family where my, you know, Irish mom, Italian dad, religion was just taken for granted. I went to a Catholic grade school with excellent teachers, and they taught me science. So it never occurred to me that there would be a conflict between science and religion, because all of those questions were very well handled when I was 10 years old, 12 years old. And then, of course, the Jesuits in high school, were able to just reinforce that and make you realize that religion was a deeper sort of thing. The biggest, I think religious moment to me was my freshman year at college as a history major at BC. And I felt really, really miserable in the freshman dorms, because all the other guys wanted to drink and do stupid things. And I just was it just, it wasn't that I was more moral than them. I was just bored with that sort of stuff.

Ariana deVries

Right. It wasn't attractive to you.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

They'd screw up their lives and then they come and complain to me. And I think to myself, of course, life is tough when you're stupid. You've got problems. Maybe if you did your homework, it wouldn't be so bad.

Ariana deVries

Right. Yep.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And just to get away from the freshman dorms, I thought, well, maybe I'll become a Jesuit priest because I can get out of the dorms. And I was gone to the Jesuit high school college at Boston College. So I talked to a Jesuit about joining, and he had this really strange suggestion. He goes, "Son, (I hate it when they call you his son), Son. Have you prayed about this?"

Ariana deVries

Oh, yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I'm, you know, 18 years old; who prays? So following his direction, I went back to my room, closed the door and was waiting for the voice from the ceiling. Nothing was happening, wondering what is this prayer stuff? I guess, you know, I ought to be able to do this and I'm going to be doing it for a living. And the question occurred to me, I don't know where what does the priests do for a living Yeah. And it occurred to me that what priests do for a living is to listen to the same idiots who I couldn't stand listening to, or my freshman dorm, you know, people with problems.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And I was terrible at that. In part because I had grown up with too much privilege. I had not learned how to deal with problems, because I hadn't had to. But certainly, I was also enough of a nerd that I didn't have, necessarily the antenna to follow that kind of thing. And it occurred to me then, either I wasn't hearing anything because there was no God which case it would be dumb to be a priest. Or maybe this actually was God telling me it would be dumb for me to be a priest. Either way, the answer was obvious I was in the wrong place. I didn't belong at BC. Right did belong was where I was happy where I felt called, where I would look forward every weekend to go visit my friend at the at MIT. And then that's when I decided to transfer, and I chose Earth and Planetary Science on a whim gives it sounded like, you know, planets. That's cool.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

But the lesson that came from that is, first of all, to spend the time to be quiet and ask, "Am I really belonging here?" And secondly, that God tells you where you need to be by the things that make you not just happy, but content. That make you realize I am in the place where I belong. And even if things are going bad, you know, being a student at MIT was not easy. But I knew I belonged there and I was able to endure and triumph. It takes a long time to get there.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. And it doesn't take life being super easy to get there either, right?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

No. Yeah. Well, I was just thinking, you know, when I turned 30, I had no idea what I wanted.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

That's when I went off to join the Peace Corps. I didn't enter the Jesuits until I was basically 37. It took that long. And all that time I've been a churchgoer and happily part of my religion and I enjoy my religion. I enjoy being part of a system that is there to help you reach the things you can't reach on your own. You know, I belong to a big church for the same reason that I went to a big technical institution to learn my science. I need the support of other people. If I'm ever going to get to the forefront of remember actually going to be able to take advantage of the conversation that's gone on before and learn from that.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So then as a Jesuit, you've dedicated your life to finding God in all things. And you've written that "Christianity does not start with faith, but with experience. Faith is a reaction to that experience." So how do you hold on to your release while also having an attitude of inclusivity towards other faiths and cultures?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

For the same way that I know that I can learn science from people who have bought into some theory of planetary formation that I don't believe in. And I can give you reasons why I'm right and they're wrong, but their data are just as good as my data.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

In a lot of ways, my experience of religion is paralleled to my experience in science. And I know that it is the people who are close to you, but not the same as you who can best teach you and stretch you and make you grow. When I was 30, I was dating a wonderful woman whose attitude towards religion was close enough that I could figure out where she was coming from in different enough that I could let it challenge me. And of course, the relationship didn't turn into a romance but it did turn into a tremendous growth. For me, I And I hope for her, you know, wherever she is now whatever it is she's doing. That was nearly 40 years ago. And yet, I still remember that because I needed someone like that to challenge the easy faith that I had kind of fallen into the rotted falling into at that point. And so it's really important to have people that you almost agree with. The great thing is you start reading about other spiritual people, people who have gone through this journey, and in the life of CS Lewis, all of his friends, were people like that to him, the people who were close enough to him that he would trust them, to let them challenge him.

Ariana deVries

Right. Yeah, and I feel like we need to not be afraid of those people in our life or the...afraid of the challenge and the questions, but to let it help mold us and become even better versions of who we are.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

In a sense it's going back to that wonderful arrogance. To be so certain that God loves me that I'm not worried about somehow losing that.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

That, you know, when I go into a kitchen and try to cook something, I follow a cookbook, because I'm not a very good cook. I know people who can walk into a kitchen and see the ingredients there and know enough about food to put a really wonderful meal together without ever having to look it up.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, I'd be one of those people. [Laughter]

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And the difference in religion is some people need the cookbook, and that's okay, because you'll get an edible meal. But don't think that anybody who's not following the cookbook is somehow evil. Maybe they've got a better understanding of food than you do.

Ariana deVries

Mmhmm.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And maybe they can teach you something. But fundamentalism in anything, whether it's science or religion, or cookery is an okay place to start, but it's a terrible place to end.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, and I've heard you say before too, that just because You don't go to church doesn't mean you're not interested in and fascinated by and drawn towards bigger questions. And just because you do go to church doesn't mean that you have it all figured out and that you're not still questioning and wondering and asking. Yeah, but what about this?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

If you think you understand the universe perfectly, you'll never be a scientist because science is all about looking at things you don't understand. Yes. And if you think you understand God perfectly, I don't see how you can actually be a religious person because there's nothing left. Yeah, but I, I go back to, you know, the story of love again, I'm in romantic love. My parents lived both of them to nearly 100 my dad made it to 100 they were married 72 years. And they were still learning things about each other. till the very end. Yeah, that's whatever love relationship is that automate what your relationship with God is?

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So I know a lot of people that I Talk to, and I've heard their stories they struggle a little bit with how faith and science can work together. So how do you believe that it's possible for the two to live together in harmony?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Well, you're searching for the truth. It's not the truth. It's the search for the truth. Yeah, you don't search if you think you've already got it. And you can't search if you don't already have stuff that you think you do have. No, you've got to start from someplace, and then build on it. Yeah. And it's so that allows me to know that I can be confident in what I do know, but also recognize that not only can I be wrong someplace in there, I probably am wrong. And it's okay. Because that's a place to grow. And I've never in my life experienced the case where it's like It's told me one thing that I'm sure I've been religion told me something completely different, and they two completely conflicted. That's not how religion works. That's not how science works. But what I have experienced is science told me this one thing that I'm sure of, but then science itself also told me this other thing that seems to contradict the first bit of science. And that's where you get excited, because you say, “Wow, I'm about to learn something new. And wait till I get to the next meeting and tell my friends about this, this will be a paper someplace”.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, and I think that oftentimes with religion and faith, that's the area where we get a little bit scared is when we understand something is true. And then we see something else and then we don't know what to do with that. Right?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Right. Um, I'll give you another example. Going back to love I guess I'm being you know, fixed fixated on love. This is a guy who you know, his love life was so good that he took a vow of celibacy, right? Well, if I'm an expert on anything, it's how not to make a relationship work. And you don't make a relationship work by being afraid to challenge and question it. I'll give you a slightly different example.

I love sailing. And when I was at MIT, I was on the sailing team and we had these dinghies that we would sail in the Charles River. And all the years that I sailed in those things, I never once capsized. And I never once won a race. It's the same way in love. If you're not willing to have an argument with somebody, it's because you don't trust the relationship, and you don't trust them. If you're not willing to have an argument with God, it's because you don't trust God. But part of the argument is listening to the other side. And even in some cases, the scariest part is listening to what you just said and going, ah, maybe not. Maybe I got that one wrong.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Right and being okay to be wrong.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Yeah.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. You mentioned in your TED talk that "Religion and science are both acts of worship". Can you expound on this a bit more and share what you believe worship means?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

To me worship is encountering God, and the encounter has got to be a two way street. It's God encountering you and you're encountering God. It's making yourself open to hearing what God's trying to say to you. Now, how does God talk to us? How does God encounter us? I can do no better than to quote St. Paul, first chapter Romans since the beginning of time, God has spoken to us in the things he created. And so encountering God in creation becomes an act of worship, to be able to look at the universe not just as a marvellous puzzle but as Voice a statement of the Creator who so loved the world that He sent His Son. And in the incarnation, Saint Athanasius puts it, "The entire universe is cleansed and quickened".

So the universe is sacred, and the universe becomes pregnant, in a sense. It's a way, it's about to give forth. It's about to give forth a new life. And this life is the relationship between you and the Creator. It goes back to why am I doing the science? Am I doing it just because it's a job? Am I doing it so that people will pat me on the head and say, What a clever boy I am. Trust me. I've done science for both of those reasons. And at the end of the day, it's not enough. Because Science is too hard. By hard I don't mean difficult. I mean, boring. There's an awful lot of boredom that goes into waiting for the data to come in, waiting for you to be able to understand it. And You don't have the wherewithal to wait it out. If there wasn't something deeper that you really, really wanted, in that deeper thing ultimately has to be the joy of understanding, which to me is the very same joy I feel in moments of prayer when I suddenly go, oh, God was here, which was also a really, really scary moment.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So something that I'm really interested and want to hear more about what you have to say about this, is you mentioned that religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality to protect it from creationism, which at the end is a kind of paganism. It's turning God into a nature God. And so how do you reconcile that with finding beauty and feeling God in seeing the stars and being in nature and for people who understand God in those ways? How do we keep it close to reality?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

There is the challenge.

Ariana deVries

Hmm.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Umm. The thing to always avoid is the easy answer. And so anything I would say here would be the very kind of easy answer that something to be avoided. Yeah, but there has to be this living tension, that God created everything but gave it freedom. And without that freedom, there is no love in without their freedom. We are not entities who could be in a loving relationship with God. And the universe itself has a certain freedom. God doesn't have every atom on a string. And you find that in the life of Jesus, Jesus could have been, you know, something like a nice avatar arriving fully grown and our cloud of power and might and saying, "All right, everybody here is how it's going to be from now on". But instead he came as a baby. And, you know, as several times you find in the in the Gospel stories, he could have ordered the bricks to turn into bread. He doesn't do that. He is so confident, dare I say arrogant, that he doesn't feel he has to control the universe on a set of strings. That instead, he's willing to wait for the universe to accept him. takes a long time. But he's got all the time in the world to wait for us.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So then is it...it's less about saying that God is in these things, and more about finding the beauty of who God is.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

You see how, you see God's personality in the way that God did do things.

Ariana deVries

Right. But it's not God.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Rather than insisting God should have done things this way.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. I mean, Who are we to say that we understand who God is?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And yet, who am I to say that I understand how my best friend is?

Ariana deVries

Right. Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And yet, my best friend is still my best friend.

Ariana deVries

And it's the joy of discovering more of who they are that makes the relationship great.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

You got it. That's where I am.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. I like that.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I'll tell you another twist to that story.

Ariana deVries

Go for it.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And this, I think, comes along with the temptation to fundamentalism. When I was in my 30s, I was living in Boston, and I was sharing an apartment with an old high school friend of mine. And my high school friend was madly in love with a girl he'd met in college. And he would describe on Valentine's Day I've bought a a dozen roses. Boy, if that doesn't tell her, nothing will. And he was right; nothing would. She liked him, but she wasn't in love with him. A year after that after they had broken up, he actually met the woman he's now been married to for nearly 40 years. And I'm sure over the years, he's bought her roses for Valentine's Day. But he didn't do it to win her love. He did it to express the love they've already got.

And so many of the things that religion/Scripture tells us we should do in our relationship with God are not things that we have to do or God won't love us. There are not things that we have to do to make God love us. But there are things we can do, to show God that we love God.

Ariana deVries

And in a sense, nature and the cosmos are his way saying that he loves us, too.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Exactly. And not just nature and the cosmos, but the joy that we get when we encounter and live in the cosmos.

Ariana deVries

Right. Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

The fact that it is fun.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Right. Totally . So I know that people have asked you this too, but and then you end up writing about it; about extraterrestrials and if they can be baptized, but...

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Sort of science fiction, so of course, obvious question.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. But I do want to know what your thoughts are on that. And if you believe that there is sentient life beyond our planet in the universe, and if you do, do you think Jesus came for them, too?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

You've asked the question in exactly the right way; do I believe. I don't have the evidence. Do I believe there are other planets? Yes, and it's not a matter of belief. They're there. I can see them. I can see their effects in my telescope. I cannot see evidence for other life in the universe, but my belief means that I will do things that I wouldn't do if I didn't believe, such as spend some time trying to understand what life elsewhere in the universe might be like, and some time trying to figure out how we could look for life in the universe.

If you came to me and I'm the director of the observatory, and you say you want to, you know, money, your telescope time, because I've got this way of looking for life in the universe, I'd say go for it. Because I believe enough that I think it's worth looking for that there's a chance you'll see it. And I could be wrong. On the other hand, if you came and said, I want to spend two years searching for a flying saucer man, I'm going to go I don't think so. Because I don't believe in flying saucers.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Again, I could be wrong. So that's the difference between having evidence you have to have the belief before you can look for the evidence. The great thing about the question, can you baptize an et, is not this answer or that answer. And I, you know, I'm clever enough, I could come up with funny answers, “Only if she asks”. But the better question is, what does baptism mean?

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And only when you recognize the universe, it's bigger than just the people who look like you and me, then you appreciate what baptism means, what redemption means. And it's not the first time the human race has had to deal with this. We've encountered human beings on other continents. And the question you know, to them was, well, are they just animals that we can enslave? Or are they human beings that we should baptize? And plenty of mistakes were made all over the place by plenty of people for that for the best possible motive was saying yet to say they should be baptized is another way of saying they're equal. Human just like you and me. And that's the experience of the people in the new world. Imagine how the Romans must have felt when they went up and saw these crazy people with red hair and painting themselves blue and in Ireland.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

So they are telling my Italian ancestry and encountering my Irish ancestors, and they must have thought, are these people really worth baptizing? It's important to recognize that the baptism goes both ways. We learn from the new cultures. We have a way of encountering God now having encountered other religions and other people in to be able to say this works. And oh, I see what they're doing there. Don't do that. That doesn't work. We've made that mistake, too.

And so you don't grab on to everything equally. But you do have the freedom to say, "This could work; I can learn. And I hope I do learn". Now, the odds are that yes, there is life. The farther away in the universe you go, the greater the odds that there will be intelligent life, but that lowers the odds that we'll be able to communicate with them. And really the question will ever come up. And yet, this entire universe was created by the same God. The incarnation in Christian theology, we identify with Jesus and we identify Jesus as the second person of the Trinity. In what scriptures say about the second person in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh.

Well, the second person didn't begin when Jesus was born. The second person is there from the beginning. In the beginning of the universe is the same point in everywhere. At The universe, that's what the Big Bang is telling us. We all come from the same point in the same time. Yeah. And in our creed, we say, creation occurred through the second person. It's not just God the Father making stuff. Yeah, read the creed carefully. So it does mean that how ever God creates and interacts with these other intelligences. It is the same God, it is the same fundamental question.

And finally, in Scripture, we've got the example of the stories of angels. And the interesting thing to me about the story of angels is not only that, oh, there is another created entity in a relationship with God. But a created entity that by our traditions had a very different story of redemption of choice of Do you believe or not believe, but the one thing that's in common is the necessity for the future choice.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. That's really...I really like how you explain that and view that. That makes me excited for what could be.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Yeah, there was a wonderful poem by Alice Meynell - Christ in the Universe - and I won't quote it, because I can't off the top my head, but it's well worth looking up. And maybe you want to put might want to put a link to it.

Ariana deVries

Sure. Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And she talks about the marvellous moment when we encounter the creatures from around the universe, you know, after, after all and having together. And the final moment is when we can show them how God appeared to us. And she wrote that in 1918!

Ariana deVries

It's so great how things of the past can be so relevant for things now.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I hope so, because now is going to be the past.

Ariana deVries

Yes, right.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

You know, when I was a kid, I thought it was going to be 1969 forever. Thank God it isn't.

Ariana deVries

Right, exactly. So I know some people maybe will maybe not necessarily agree with everything that you believe or I believe or...

Brother Guy Consolmagno

I hope they don't. Good heavens!

Ariana deVries

Yeah! So how do we communicate effectively to people who don't necessarily see eye to eye as us and share the value and asking questions and looking outside the box and being comfortable with the mysteries of life?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

It starts by being comfortable with yourself. It comes by not being afraid. And once you're sure who you are, then you can enjoy other people who they are. The one thing you can't be is a wanna be, to make pretend, and you don't want to try to say, “Oh, I understand, I hear you, because the first thing to recognize is - no, we don't understand them. And that could be somebody as close as our siblings, and we don't understand them.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

You know, if I can’t understand my siblings, what makes me think I can understand people from a different place in a different culture? But I can love my siblings, and enjoy being with them, and enjoy learning from them. But that only comes when I'm comfortable with who I am and with who they are.

Ariana deVries

Right. Yeah, that's something that I've been learning a lot lately, too, is I don't necessarily see eye to eye with some of the people who are very close to me, closest people in my life, and yet, I so desperately want to do life with them. And the only way to do that is to love both myself and them regardless of what we both think and understand.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Well, if I can quote a Nobel Prize winner, who happen to be a pop singer From the 60s, Bob Dylan. “Don't criticize what you can't understand” And that's not to say that they're right. They can be wrong. People who love can be wrong. But as you get older what you said, this is something that you can't write down. You can only hear. When you're a kid, you hear the church saying, “No, don't do that”. But when you're older you're really hearing the church going, “No, don't do that”.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And it's not a set of rules that say you have to do this, but rather, the world is full of stupid mistakes that will affect your life. And yet, God even uses our mistakes.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, that's so true.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

So don't be afraid of them. And don't be afraid to admit them.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So for those who may be struggling to figure out how all this fits together, how science and faith fit together how the questioning works, and don't know how their questions have a place within our places of worship. What words of encouragement would you have for them?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

There was a religious writer Anne Lammott, who has a marvellous phrase. She's actually quoting Paul Tillich who wrote an entire long article, but she summed it up in one phrase. “The opposite of faith isn't doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty”.

Ariana deVries

Yes, my father in law likes to say that.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And certainty kills your faith. So glory in your questions. Questions mean your faith is alive.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. And I guess that goes back to not being afraid.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Not being afraid. Which is a whole lot easier to say than do.

Ariana deVries

Totally, because fear is a big thing.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Oh, yeah. And it's interesting. The very moment that the resurrected Christ appears at first He says, “Don't be afraid”. Maybe that's the zeroeth commandment.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So as we bring this conversation and this interview to a close, I just have one final question. And that is what is one of the most challenging parts of being an astronomer and what is one of the most rewarding aspects?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Oddly enough, the most challenging is the boredom. It takes a long time for data to develop, it takes a long time for you to gather the information. And at the end of the day, when you've been sitting in front of the computer all day, you can be tired and feel like you've done nothing. One of the jokes that are Jesuit community full of astronomers is we all rush to try to empty the dishwasher because at least you've done something.

Ariana deVries

Right. Yeah, I can feel like that as a mom sometimes, too.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

It's that sense that every day is just like every other day and I'm not making progress when in fact, the progress, you're laying the groundwork for the progress that will happen.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

And the most rewarding to me is when I go outside, and I look at the stars, but instead of them being old, not only pretty lights in the sky, there are places that I know, places whose stories I can tell. In the in the 80s, there was a really trashy movie called tide square, I would not recommend this as a great movie to rush out and see. But it had one really cute gimmick. In those days Time Square was pretty much a deserted, miserable place full of homeless people and drug addicts and the like. And so the opening scene is they pan around Times Square, they have all these actors playing homeless people and despicable people and people that make your skin crawl. And then they go on and tell the story. In at the end of the movie, they do the same pan only now you know who all those things, people are. And it's a completely different experience.

So being able to look at the stars and to know who they are, to know their names, to know their histories, to be able to say, “I've studied you, you're really interesting”. That, to me, is to be able to look at the sky with that extra depth is the best part of being an astronomer.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Right. And I feel like that kind of thing is also what makes faith so exciting, too, is that mystery and that wonder.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

The mystery and the wonder AND the experience.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Right. That's so good. Do you ever wish that you had taken a different path?

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Of course, and any number of different paths; there was so many things I could have done. But at the end of the day, I realized I managed to somehow stumble into the one thing that I actually am really good at. And that not many people would have had the bizarre combination of background to be able to do what I can do. And so that makes me feel contented with where I am.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, that's good. I guess that's how we all should do you life regardless of what paths we've taken.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Nobody can be everything!

Ariana deVries

No, I know.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

That’s why we’ve got friends.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. And why we can do life with other people and be in community.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Exactly.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

Brother Guy Consolmagno

Thanks for asking the great questions and for the work you guys do.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. I love being able to talk with people who see things differently than I do and who have a different understanding of the world. It's wonderful to do life with people who are not like me.