Galileo's Head Was On The Block

The crime was looking up the truth. And as the bombshells of our daily fears explode...

I’ve got this feeling. It’s that Harry Potter Book Seven feeling, when everyone is getting ready for the final battle. And it looks grim. Voldemort is in charge. Muggles are terrified; there have been awful awful losses (Dumbledore!), and there are about to be a lot more. We always suffer, when we are traveling to new lands. We always suffer, period. Sometimes everything is terrible.

And yet.

Book Seven of Harry Potter is also exciting because you know, deep in your heart you know, the good guys are going to win.

That’s how I’ve been feeling, these days. Scared, sure. But also excited. And ready.

Harry Potter. Great. I can hear you now. For one thing, isn’t J.K. Rowling cancelled, and hasn’t she kind of lost her mind? And also, hi, it’s a children’s book, at the core. I think we have moved beyond the time when a children’s book can comfort us! Man, Castellani, you are REACHING, here.

Well, first of all, J.K. Rowling studied classics at university — her parents wanted her to study something practical, but classics is what felt practical to her, and guess who was right? And you know what studying the classics taught her: it taught her, this is how a story works. This is how a story always works.

From Homer to Harry Potter, there are these essential truths.

The story starts with something broken, a kid in a closet, a world at war. (Iliad starts nine years into the Trojan War, a world already weary of a never-ending battle.)

The story starts with a world that isn’t working right, with a hero who isn’t yet ready to make a change.

And then it starts to turn.

I wouldn’t read anything J.K. Rowling writes these days; she has fallen into a vortex of pain and fear and anger, and at this moment, she can’t see her way out of it. She told a FANTASTIC and DEEPLY TRUE story about wizards, but at this moment in history, she’s not a reliable narrator.

But you know who is?

Galileo!

Ha, didn’t see that coming, did you?

You scientists are going to like this one. So are those of you who might miss my husband in the pulpit.

Prone To Ranting

When we were first dating, Steve published an opinion editorial on Jesus’ point of view about immigrants: pro, if you recall. He published the piece at Christmas time, he remembers, and the title was “Oh Come Let Us Deport Him.” He noted that Jesus was an immigrant, that in the big picture, we are all immigrants. (This was 2006, by the way. Sometimes we take a while to learn.)

He went to look up his piece online, when it published, and zoomed down to the comments section. Those of you who know my husband know he likes affirmations, but those of you who have been in the comments section know that is not a place to find them.

The top rated comment under his article said the following: “I know this guy. He’s a self proclaimed Christian prone to ranting.”

Steve looked at the comment, and his face fell. I stood beside him, and looked at the comment.

“A self-proclaimed Christian prone to ranting,” I said to him. Then I grinned and poked him. “I mean, he’s not wrong.”

I can’t say if Steve is still a self-proclaimed Christian, that’s for him to write about (read his memoir!), but I can tell you, he is absolutely still prone to ranting, and we have been on a tear recently.

One of the things we have been talking about is Galileo. (I know you wish you lived with us. Come visit!), and so I invited Steve to rant about Galileo. Here he goes:

The Story of Galileo, by Steve Runholt

Back when I used to preach regularly (read: EVERY SUNDAY FOR A LONG TIME), I sometimes felt an urge, a need, to mix things up a bit. I did this as much for my listeners’ sake as for my own.

So every so often I would ask my congregants to close their eyes and join me on an imaginary journey. In the blink of an eye, as fast as the speed of thought, we would find ourselves on the other side of the world, thousands of years back in time.

“Imagine you’re a young shepherd boy,” I might say. “You’re standing out on a sun-drenched plain, a sling shot in one hand, a small stone in the other. Standing opposite you is a towering, heavily armed giant, holding a shield in one hand, brandishing a long, heavy sword in the other.”

Or: “Imagine you’re hunkered down in the hull of a small fishing boat. You and your companions had hoped to make an uneventful crossing of the Sea of Galilea but a fierce storm has blown up and now the boat is being tossed around on the foam-topped waves so violently you’re convinced you’re going to die.”

The exercise brought these old, old stories to life for us in a new way. Or that was the hope, anyway, that closing our eyes and engaging our imaginations would help us see or hear or smell things in them we had never experienced before and, thus, more vividly sense the truth of them for ourselves.

So. Imagine that you’re standing on the rooftop of your modest villa in Padua, Italy. It’s midnight and you’re holding a new type of telescope up to your eye, one the new type that has just been invented somewhere in Holland.

You do this over and over again, night after night, in part because you’re wonderstruck by what you’re now able to see with the aid of this powerful new device, and partly because you’re terrified by it.

You’ve determined—through empirical observation—that one of the foundational beliefs held by you and literally everyone else on earth is wrong: the only explanation for the phenomena you’re seeing is that the earth moves.

The truth shocks you as much as it will shock everyone who hears it but there is no denying it: the earth is not the center of the universe, the crowning jewel of God’s own creation. You’re not even sure the Sun is the center of the universe, a thought that is, even for you, unnerving.

When you finally publish your findings—backed up by irrefutable and easily repeatable observations--the response is swift and harsh and exactly what you expected. Thugs are sent to your villa to arrest you. You are brought before Church officials—the highest officials in Italy, perhaps the highest officials on earth—and charged with heresy.

THE EARTH DOES NOT MOVE, they thunder. They insist you recant, that you renounce this wildly subversive, utterly disruptive claim.

You know your reputation is on the line, along with your career at the university, and perhaps even your life. So you say nothing. Your silence is perceived as an act of defiance.

The same goons who came to your villa now drag you away, back to your cell. Underneath your breath, just loud enough for a few well-placed observers to hear, you whisper, E pur si mouve.

But it does move.

When he first raised that telescope to his eye, it was not Galileo’s intention to disrupt the established order of his time. He had not planned to challenge the theological and cosmological assumptions every European shared, from the simplest peasants to the Pope.

He raised that telescope to his eye because he was curious. In effect, he gazed at the cosmos for fun, because he loved the experience of seeing wondrous new things.

Galileo Is My Guide

Okay, this is Robyn again. The reason I love this Galileo story, the reason I’ve been getting strength from this Galileo story, the reason I have been singing the Indigo Girls around the house, is I think we are having a Galileo moment in history right this moment. I really do.

I think, right at this moment in history, when Voldemort is in full power, and no one listened to Steve about immigrants back in 2006, when we have been living in this state of compromise for such a long time and we are more than nine years into a Trojan War, I think Galileo is among us.

And I think there’s more than one of him.

And I think they’re telling us a true story in lots of different ways.

No, I’m not gonna give you the punchline yet. Myself, I’m still listening. But I think it’s becoming clear.

Also, as we’ve said before, no one is coming to save you. Not Harry Potter, definitely not me, also not Galileo. You are the hero of this story. So I’m going to just ask you a question, here, today, as we move forward side by side into this terrifying, unstable, incredibly exciting world.

What do we believe today, in the same way people once believed the world was flat?

What do we believe, what have we believed for so long that we have forgotten it wasn’t always true?

What do we think is true about the world, but is really just a story?

Who is trying to show us something better?

Whose crime is looking up the truth?

Imagine it’s Book Seven, or Year Nine of a long war. Imagine a crucial moment is upon us, because it is. Imagine you know you’re going to win, because you are. Imagine you’re absolutely ready, because you are.

Look all around you. Try to peer past your blind spots. Now close your eyes and listen. Listen with an open mind and a curious heart.

What do you believe, now?