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You don’t have to be, but I am someone who practices their spirituality in the context of a “full fat” religious tradition, specifically within a Catholic tradition of Chriatianity.

I’m also a working biologist, and quite happy with the modern paradigm of life as the progressive outworking of chemical thermodynamics, with no mystical “life force” to be found.

Living with a foot in the church and a foot in the laboratory is a lot more common than is sometimes realised, but does mean that I also live across social media worlds that are frequently at odds. So it was not my first rodeo when this past Easter weekend, I saw the now-infamous tweet by Professor Alice Roberts that “Just a little reminder today. Dead people – don’t come back to life.”

Twitter being twitter, that barely-controversial tweet attracted a storm of criticism accusing it of being inappropriate for poking fun at the faithful on a sacred day. And twitter being twitter, of course some people were noxious about it.

Personally, I was in no sense offended (whatever that even means really). Nobody owes my beliefs or practices respect, let alone deference. If you can’t cope with the fact that ideas are contested and perspectives differ, then you will have a hard life. I don’t mind having my religion sneered at. In my college years, I was one of the sneerers too. The claims of Christianity are absurd, ridiculous. But here’s the thing: We know that.

The problem with Roberts’ tweet was not that it sneered at the Christian claims about the resurrection. It’s that it did it so poorly. It says “how dumb can you be to believe that the dead can rise — that a virgin can give birth, that a man can walk on water, turn water into wine, etc. etc.” It doesn’t pause for a moment and reflect on why the narrative of the resurrection persists, or consider the possibility that even in the remotest provinces of the Roman Empire, the finality of death was deeply and intimately known by all. Or that Christians have spent two thousand years contemplating the absurdities and paradoxes of the faith and are not waiting to be enlightened as to how silly we all are.

I am not here to dunk on a single online comment. But to make this suggestion:

Once you start engaging in any spiritual praxis at all, whether embedded in a formal religious tradition or not, you start learning to live with and embrace contradiction, impossibility, folly. Whether praying the rosary, or adopting evidence-based mindfulness meditation, you have no choice but to encounter the still depths of the human spirit. You will meet places in yourself that are not subject to reason or realism, and for those of us brought up in the long shadow of Aristotle and Aquinas, that can be terrifying.

I believe in God, the Creeds and the Church, not because they are reasonable, or logical. I know that virgins don’t give birth (especially to boys), that the dead tend to stay dead. Yet I can recite the Nicene Creed with a clear conscience. Why? Because my innermost heart thirsts for the Divine; God calls me and I hear and must reply.

Rationally, I know that wanting something does not make it true; that none of what I claim can be proved. That the history of “proofs of the existence of God” is an interesting thread in the history of philosophy but ultimately not intellectually satisfying. Yet here I am, and I must respond to and live out those parts of me that are not rational, as well as those that are.

Ultimately, I believe that this makes me a better scientist too. Few things are more dangerous than the person who is unaware of their own irrationality; the one who convinces themself that their opinions are all logical, and remains quite unaware of the emotional currents that really drive their desires and behaviours.

When we engage honestly in spiritual practice, we become aware of our roots; our depths. We start to see more clearly what animates us. That awareness can help us be aware of our biases; our assumptions; the way our academic work is conditioned by our personalities operarting in a particular kind of organisational and historical context.

And only once we are aware of the impossibility of “objectivity” in our work can we really start to approach it more closely as an ideal. Now there’s another paradox to embrace.

Do you remember 2015? I remember it kind of vaguely but one thing stands out: The number of people I know who at the end of the year said “Well thank goodness that’s over. Next year has to be better. Here’s to 2016!”

Flash forward to 2020 and, well, here we are.

Do we need a reminder of what here is? I’m sure we are all painfully aware but in case you are reading from the future, and somehow have not heard about the second decade of the 21st century, here includes: a surge in the number of authoritarian governments and a global trend away from multilateralism toward insular, nationalistic politics; the most powerful economy and military in the world being governed by a verbally incontinent authoritarian manchild without any sign of prudence or responsibility; the most dramatic climate shifts seen in human history, with Earth’s systems in genuine peril; and, of course, a long-predicted-yet-somehow-unexpected viral pandemic causing almost a million deaths worldwide (and counting) and the worst economic crash in living memory.

Oh sweet summer children of 2015.

And yet here we are; doing our best to do our jobs (if we still have them), juggling videoconferences, rationed time in physical workspaces, fretting about whether to send children back to school and desperately wishing it would all get back to normal.

I invite you to shed the illusion of normal. It wastes a good crisis, and can only set us up for disappointment.

Even during my own short life, I challenge you to tell me which year was normal. Was it 1973, the year I was born amid the OPEC oil crisis? Was it the 1980s, the decade of my schooling, when we lived under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation, and my own country simmered on the verge of violent revolution? Was it the 1990s, when I came of age, communism and apartheid fell, and the world radically realigned itself around a single pole of power? Was it the 2000s, which opened with 9/11 and descended from there into an unending war that continues to influct suffering and death to this day? Or perhaps the 2010s, when inequality and the climate crisis ran rampant and ushered in the worldwide chaos we see now?

When, exactly, was normal? And for whom? And what about it do we want back?

Will mass vaccination against Sars-Cov2 cause the vicious divisions in our society to recede into memory? Will a Biden presidency bring back the Greenland ice? Will the conclusion of the most fraught phase of Brexit ease the dramatic inequality that is fueling class and racial tensions?

The answer is no. There is no normal to get back to. And to wish away the present is also to waste the unique opportunity it gives us to make decisions -individually and collectively – about our futures. We have the opportunity to rethink the way we want to organise our societies and, particularly, our working lives. Yet governments seem in a desperate rush to discourage that rethinking, and to push people back into crowded, environmentally destructive commutes and stressful offices, solely for the benefit of commercial landlords. Don’t let them.

Realise, too, that no matter how soon we have mass vaccinations, and what any given election decides, we have entered one of history’s fraught periods. As a society, we have to decide how we want to cope with the inevitable wave of crises that will unfold in the coming years and decades. Will we take the approach of retreating into insular national communities, bristling with guns against scary outsiders, or will we try to address the underlying challenges in a constructive way?

As individuals, we do have choices about how we cope, and how we shape our own and our communities’ lives going forward. But we can only exercise these choices properly when we are not thrashing around looking for security from the very institutions that are undermining it. We must find a place of peace internally if we are not to be either overwhelmed into paralysis, or reduced to a series of thoughtless reflexes.

I urge you to adopt or renew an active spiritual practice. Place yourself in relationship with the women and men who have weathered history’s storms and been their societies’ lights in the darkness, by finding peace and stability from another source.

The Daily Office, Mindfulness Prayer, Sitting Zazen, performing salat, praying daily prayer, secular mindfulness exercises — there is a spiritual tool for everybody, but it is only with regular practice that we gain the skill to find that stability and peace; that sense of wholeness and communion that does not depend on the vagaries of our daily life and historical moment.

In the midst of the madness, find your way to touch the eternal.

Universities are special places.  Not only do they form our young people in the skills and perspectives needed for critical, thoughtful citizenship, but they are the main site of scholarship — an important part of how our society understands itself and the world around us.
Set a little apart from the daily pressures of commercial life (though not nearly as insulated as many in the commercial world suppose), they exist “in the world, but not of it”, a place somewhat apart to reflect upon, and work for the benefit of the world at large.

In this respect, they have something of the character of a monastery — an impression strengthened every time one witnesses the solemn liturgies of academic life, like professorial inaugurations and graduation processions.
As someone who serves in both university and religious worlds, I deeply love the sense of community, purpose, and serving a higher calling that runs through both worlds.  Indeed for many of us who live in both, there is no final distinction between these two ways we seek the spirit of truth.  This sense of purpose is what ennobled the time I spent as an undergraduate research assistant cleaning up cane rat dung, and what makes it a pleasure to iron altar linen (and anyone who knows me probably realises that ironing is not my strength!)

But in recent decades, something has changed.  In both the academy and the cathedral, an alarming number of people, even in my small circles, are suffering from mental health problems, feeling unwanted or unable to live up to expectations, and even abandoning their vocations.  The range of temperaments and personalities that succeed and thrive is becoming ever narrower, and the space of the kind of eccentricity that once so enlivened both college and cloister has disappeared.
At some point in the past 40 years or so, we have been persuaded that it is inevitable and natural to be measured and evaluated based on various metrics of productivity and efficiency.  
So university lecturers have to teach more students with fewer contact hours (and frequently with no job security of their own), researchers have to keep churning out publications, avoiding anything that might risk the flow of citations, and institutions churn out vastly more PhDs than could possibly find work doing what they are trained to do.  Meanwhile across the road, the church minister is being assessed and measured not by the holiness and compassion she inspires in her community, but by the number of committees she sits on, and the number of people who turn up for the Easter service.

The consequence of targeting ever-higher productivity and efficiency is inevitable.  The few who excel at what is measured seem at first to thrive.  Others struggle, stagnate and leave.  The intangible contributions they make to the life and health of a community go unmeasured and unrewarded, and so the life and health of the community suffers.  Soon, even those who ‘make the grade’ find themselves feeling isolated, frustrated, burned out.  And the real goals of the institution — humanism in the academy, holiness in the church — suffer because of their intangible, unmeasurable, ’non-SMART’ character.
The words of the veteran Zen master come back to me again and again: “It is what it is. What are you going to do about it?”

I suggest that two approaches are necessary:

1. If you inhabit one of these institutions, you have to find a way to help yourself survive and thrive.  There is so very much to love and appreciate; such an immense privilege in giving your life to the purpose of scholarship (or of holiness) that I still think it is worth it, but you will need to find ways to support yourself and those around you.
   • Remember why you are there.  Be thankful for the opportunity to work where you do, tackling the questions that are in front of you. Embrace and remind yourself of your purpose here (not your KPI metrics!)
   • Appreciate and give love to the people around you.  The institution is not going to provide human, compassionate support; that is for us to do.
   • Use the resources that are available to you to care for yourself.  Take enough vacation.  Learn to practice mindfulness.  Attend group meditation sessions. Find the spiritual tool that best enables you to feel whole and connected.
2. Strategy 1 above is often as far as it goes — indeed many employers encourage all of those tools, because they make the crisis in mental health your problem, not theirs.  But of course it is not enough and there is always a limit.  I propose that activism should form part of your spiritual practise in response to this crisis:
   • Publicly frame the real animating goal of your institution and demand that your leadership pursue that first.
   • Place people and the community at the centre of your framing in every strategy consultation, faculty meeting, feedback session.
   • Emphasise the intangibles and the strength of having diverse temperaments and personalities in your community.
   • Push back against the overextension of the doctrine of ‘efficiency’ which can become the enemy of humanist values.

It is what it is.  What are you going to do about it?

What does it mean to live a good life? 

This is one of the oldest questions in philosophy and one that surely occurs to every thoughtful person.  For scientists, it is also a question embedded in the choice of subjects we investigate, our reasons reasons for investigating them.  Is it more important to extend the boundaries of knowledge, or to make others’ lives better?  And whichever goal you prefer, how best do you pursue it, and how best do you reconcile the goal with your natural curiosity?

I won’t pretend to answer any of these questions for you.  Goodness knows I have not finished answering them for myself.

But there are different temperamental approaches to what it means to live the good life.  These approaches are sometimes best explored and communicated in fiction.

I recently revisited the story of The Lord Of The Rings, and was struck by how, at the moral heart of the story, sits a forceful, romantic conservatism: a vision of the good life in which each person knows his or her place and lives in harmony with the natural order of things.  Change, when it comes, is violent and disruptive, and the moral imperative is to restore ancient order.

By contrast, another of my favourite pieces of fiction is Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Mars’ trilogy — a trilogy similar in heft and scope to Tolkien’s, but animated by a radically different moral temperament.  In this world, while change can be traumatic, it represents the freedom and agency of humans to choose to do better.  Here, there is no prelapsarian paradise to return to, only the opportunity, with each day, to choose anew to make the world better – or not.  (Incidentally, it also includes some of the best descriptions of extremophile biology in popular fiction!)
Does science give us any hints about it?  It’s true that science, strictly speaking, deals with what is, not what ought to be.  But surely we found ourselves most at peace when living in accord with what we understand the world to be.

Two observations came to mind:

First, just about every phenomenon we measure or modify involved change.  Change is at the heart of physics, chemistry, biology and all their various friends and relations.  In fact the great insight of twentieth century physics (and later mathematics and biology) was to show that our observations were not separate from the change going on around us, but integral with it.

At the same time, in order for us to practically do science, we have to have a measure of faith that while the universe is constantly in flux, it is also reasonably consistent.  That while stars may ever be swirling around each other, the meaning of gravity and its relationship with mass is pretty much the same here in the Milky Way as it is over in Andromeda or further afield; and that the same chemical elements have the same electron orbital energies whether they are in a chloroplast or a metal refinery.

Where does this leave us?  Perhaps with a need for a balanced perspective.  We know, from the intimate way we watch and measure the world, that change is in its very essence.  And so, the good life cannot mean stasis.  But also, that as human beings observing and being part of the world, we do need a place of rest, of relative calm where we can know ourselves and the world around us.

What is your temperamental approach to change?  And where do you find your place of calm and consistency among the world’s whirling flux?

In English folk tradition today, the first Monday after Epiphany, is called ‘Plough Monday’.  It is traditionally the day when work begins after the midwinter revels, and when the tools of one’s trade are blessed by the local priest.  The blessing of the tools may be seen as a kind of prayer for success and prosperity in one’s work, but I believe it is far more than that.  It is a reminder that our work is holy.

The way we spend our productive hours; the way we support ourselves and our families, represent a great deal of the way we spend our time and energy.  And our work – no matter what it is – always has an impact on many others.  There is no such thing as work that is disconnected from others.  The solitary sheep farmer, working alone on a huge ranch, affects the welfare of the animals they work with, the land they take care of, and those who wear or eat the wool or mutton they produce.

And so because all work is connected to others, all work is part of the great symphony of human life.  With our work — and our approach to the people we affect through it — we can either build that symphony into something more beautiful and transcendent, or we can frustrate and diminish it, whether through malice or lack of skill.

In short, work is holy.  This – and not a superstitious desire for wealth – is what led medieval farmers to church on Plough Monday for the blessing of the tools.  And what leads Buddhists to consider Right Livelihood one of the essential aspects of a virtuous life.  As scientists we have the tremendous privilege to spend our time and earn a living working out what makes the world tick, and when things are going well, it is easy to feel as if our work is a kind of worship, albeit a secular one.

But the path of science does not always run smoth.  Last year I got caught up in a frantic rush of supervision, deeply challenging experiments, unreliable lab instruments and intractable data sets, all while racing against the clock of the PhD process.  By the time I went on vacation I was quite far from a mindful awareness of the holiness of work.  This blog, among other things, suffered.

Each year, however, we are given an opportunity to rest and rejuvenate.   And each year we get to reflect and reorient ourselves in our working lives.
This year, as I return to work this Plough Monday, I shall begin by blessing my tools and instruments — my pipettes, glassware and analytical instruments, my plants and the soil and greenhouses they grow in.  Because that will make the reminder explicit.  My work is not just for me.  It is for you, for all of us, and the the Eternal Mystery that permeates this world we study.

Go forth, my friends, and measure the world with love and kindness!