Editor’s note: Throughout July, we’re hosting 31 Days with St. Ignatius, a month-long celebration of Ignatian spirituality. In addition to the calendar of Ignatian articles found here, posts on dotMagis this month will explore the theme of “Finding God in the Unexpected.”
“We’re going to the Beast Meat Restaurant.”
It was July, 1994, and I was attending the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Prague. The best part of such meetings, of course, occurs over coffee or lunch, and so I happily accepted an invitation to join some colleagues at a restaurant specializing in game: “beast meat,” as it was translated literally on the menu.
My scientific research in graduate school had involved studying meteorites: rocks that fall to Earth from the asteroid belt, holding clues to the origin and evolution of planets. But eventually my work led in other directions. I spent a couple of years in Africa with the Peace Corps, followed by four years teaching at a small college. Finally, in 1989, my journey led me to join the Jesuits. Four years later I was assigned to the Vatican Observatory.
Now, after novitiate and philosophy studies, I was trying to pick up my scientific career, and so I had traveled to Prague to learn what had happened in meteoritics while I was away.
But game meat was not the wildest thing that happened at the restaurant that day. Ralph Harvey, of Case Western University, was sitting across from me. When he heard about my role as a Jesuit scientist at the Vatican Observatory, his eyes lit up. “Would you be available to join the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program?”
Meteorites may fall anywhere on Earth, but the ones that hit Antarctica are the best preserved—and easiest to spot. Every Antarctic summer, November to January, a small team of scientists live in tents in Antarctica, criss-crossing the ice fields for two months and looking for black rocks against the blue ice. In 1996, I served as part of that team.
It was adventurous and stressful. The weather was unforgiving. The daily work of preparing food or lugging barrels of fuel for the snowmobiles was something you had to do yourself, or it wouldn’t get done. We were hundreds of miles from the nearest permanent base, thousands of miles from civilization. Six scientists sharing three tents. Despite the distance from home, we were never actually alone; finding time to yourself was almost impossible.
I would wake up at 3 a.m. every morning just to have a chance to say a prayer by myself while my tentmate, Ralph, slept. I’d take a host, consecrated by one of my Jesuit community before I left for the ice, from a Tupperware container I kept warm in my sleeping bag. (No stoves could burn while we were asleep.) As a brother, I could not say Mass; a short prayer and maybe a reading from a psalm was my local liturgy.
Then came a week when a snowstorm kept us trapped in our tents for days. Finally, Ralph ordered me to take a walk outside—never out of view of the camp, of course. With my Walkman I listened to the haunting melody of the Agnus Dei set to Samual Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
Then I recalled Psalm 139:
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you. (7, 11–12)
Never had I been so far from anyone or anything—or so close to God. In the most remote part of the Earth, during a season when the sun never set, the words shone with a raw, literal meaning.
Today in 31 Days with St. Ignatius, encounter The God of Surprises with Jim Manney. When or where has God surprised you? Share with #31DayswithIgnatius on social media.
