GALILEO: A MAN FOR OUR TIME

here are two kinds of people in this world: those who love to read and those that for whatever reason have not as yet discovered the remarkable beauty found only in books.

When I was a child, my favorite day of school was Scholastic Book Service day when the teacher would stand I front of the class with a box filled with long awaited books. She would pick up a book or two or sometimes three, and read off the name of the child to whom they belonged.

My heart would pound as I awaited my name. once I received my books, I would gaze in wonder at the covers, then open and smell the fresh untouched pages, and then, almost immediately, I would begin to read—I still do this today.

As I progressed through school, teachers would end up removing books from me as I was caught reading in class. My parents once forbade me to read until my grades in other subjects besides English improved.

I am surely an addict, always in search of the perfect read. In the last few months, my life has been enriched with three books: Rebel Angels by Libba Bray, The Alchemist’s Daughter by Katharine McMahon, and Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel.

Unlike the fictional worlds of Rebel Angels or The Alchemist’s Daughter, Galileo’s Daughter is a biography of Galileo as seen, at least in part, through the loving eyes of his eldest daughter, Virginia, or as she came to be known in her convent, Suor Maria Celeste.

As I discovered Galileo afresh in the pages of this great biography, I saw a struggle that resonated deeply with me. Galileo loved his church (the Catholic Church) and he wanted the best for it in a post-reformation world, but his beloved church rejected his arguments in favor of a stationary sun and an earth that revolves around it, they prohibited the sale or distribution of all of his books, and they confined him to what amounts to house arrest for the rest of his life.

Otherwise well meaning church leaders can, at times, feel threatened by new ideas, or in our case, new cultures.

During one of his moments of trial, his daughter wrote him a letter in which she said, “I beseech you not to grasp the knife of these current troubles and misfortunes by its sharp edge, lest you let it injure you that way, but rather, seizing it by the blunt side, use it to excise all the imperfections you may recognize in yourself; so that you rise above the obstacles, and in this fashion…so will you…arrive at an awareness of the vanity and fallacy of all earthily things: seeing and touching with your own hands the truth that neither the love of your children, nor pleasures, honors or riches can confer true contentment, being in themselves ephemeral; but only in blessed God, as in our final destination, can we find real peace. Oh what joy will be ours, when, rending this fragile veil that impedes us, we revel in the glory of God face to face.”

In Romans 8:18, Paul expressed a similar sentiment when he said, “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”

Many blessings my beloved,
David