Sursum Corda: Prayers for the Diversion of Giant Asteroids and Other Petitions

Some mornings, like this morning, I wake up earlier than usual. I don't keep any kind of clock or electronic device next to me in the bedroom, so to know the time I go out into the kitchen. This time the little blue digits on the stove told me it was just past 2:30 a.m.

If I wake up and find it is before 2 a.m., I almost always go back to bed and fall asleep. Between 2 and 4 it is optional what I do, depending how I feel. This morning I felt like starting the day, so I went out onto the porch and sat in the rocking chair. The darkness was thick and silent. Being Sunday morning, there were no sounds of night construction crews coming from the distance, as there might be on other days of the week in the hot part of the year. 

I savored the moments, and time before me. It would hours before I would make coffee. Immediately I found the Rosary beads and began praying, in Latin as usual. My mind skipped around as recited the prayers, and I pulled my thoughts back towards sacred as much possible, as I must always do, as we all must do, except for the great saints among us. 

I remembered the words from a Youtube video from a Catholic priest I'd seen the night before, about meditation. Meditation has a very long tradition of the Church and is an integral part of the practice of Catholicism, even though the word itself has been co-opted to now mean mostly Eastern mysticism in our culture. In the video the priest explained the difference, including how the objective of meditation is different in Christian meditation than in Eastern.

He also mentioned how St. Ignatius of Loyola, as well as Teresa of Avila, both advocated meditation in which one more or less pretends to talk to Jesus, or Mary, or another Saint, as if facing them directly. It is the original method acting, I thought to myself. I had already been doing that, as it happens, often imagining Mary---the terror of demons---being able to see me, and into my soul, as I recited the greetings to her that are part of the Rosary.

This morning, after going once through the five decades of the Rosary (a decade is a set of 10 Ave Marias/Hail Marys), and before the usual ending prayers, I decided my early rising was a gift to devote to additional prayer. So I went immediately into a second set of five decades, alternating the decades in multiple languages as I like to do---Latin, Greek, German, French, English. Then I decided two rounds were not enough on this morning. For the first time ever I went for three---the full Rosary, as they call, of 153 in total (counting the 3 that one recites at the very beginning). The last round of five decades I did entirely in English.

By the last few of the 15 decades, I found myself in a place of peace that was rare. My mind drifted towards petitions on behalf not of myself, or anyone I know, but for the whole world at once. It was a gift. 

It might sound silly, but among the directions my mind took was to praying for diversion of all giant asteroids from Earth, that might destroy us. I sometimes prayer for this. It is not as if I particularly fear this type of event. I believe we are protected from these so long as God wills it, but I know there are people out there who have explicitly wished for this event, jokingly or not, even printing bumper stickers to that effect. I think it is good that these diabolic intentions are countered explicitly by prayer, and as a part-time astrophysicist who is also a Christian, who else should do this but me?

In these moments of feeling opened to the whole world, which are gifted from time to time to non-saints like me, what usually comes is an awareness of the magnitude of suffering that exists out in the world at that very moment. I don't mean the kind of suffering that politics and media want us to focus on---the collective amorphous kind that are supposedly experienced by groups of people based on what in academia has come to be called identity. 

I mean the real kind of suffering, experienced by individuals, the kind that is unique to them in its variation. I mean serious suffering. 

It is as if all at once I can feel the pain of everyone suffering at that very moment in the entire city, or nation, or the world. Or I imagine I can, in my limited capacity.  

Perhaps at that moment, I might feel no personal suffering, having been granted a respite from grief, physical pain, and from anguish over worldly situations of myself and the people I love. But in that moment the suffering comes as a flood that overwhelms me from the certain knowledge that out there, in the world at this moment, every type of horrible situation that you can imagine happening, or fear could happen, or that has happened to you, is happening to someone, and their suffering is as real as any suffering can be. Right now, as I type this, as you read this, someone out there is feeling exactly that.

Someone is dire physical pain, almost unbearable that cannot bear the thought of continuing to live. Someone just got a fatal diagnosis. Someone was just told by their doctor that they will probably lose their eyesight. Someone else just gave up on last hope for the cure of lifelong disease. Someone just learned that the cancer has metastasized and invaded their bones. Someone just threw up from chemo. Someone is in a hospital bed bandaged head to toe from from burns that will never heal.

Someone is breathing their last breaths with the horror of confronting morality suddenly in their last seconds, never having suspected that today would be their last day on Earth.

Someone is weeping unconsolably from having lost their last companion, unable to bear the thought of what is to come. Someone is in a nursing home unvisited for years, forgotten and neglected, unable to even express the torment they are in. 

Someone is deep despair from loneliness or torments of inner demons, from seemingly unconquerable addictions, mental illness and trains of thought that enslave them to being confined to a living torture chamber.

Someone just found out the person they thought they were going to marry has left them to be with another person. Someone just learned their spouse has been having an affair. Someone is watching their prematurely born baby gasping at the edge of life in a NICU unit. Someone just woke up in the middle of the night to receive word that their child was killed in a car accident.  Someone just learned their spouse died of sudden heart attack before they could even say good-bye. Someone has to remember, each day for the rest of their life, a squad mate bleeding to death in front of them as they were helplessly pinned in bomb wreckage.

Someone, somewhere, is about to receive that type of phone call. Someone just woke up and remembered what happened the day before, and from that moment of peaceful waking, the horror came over them like a demon, and will stay with them until they fall asleep. 

The world is raging at the moment, but of what do they rage? I have no use for pleas to bend my knee in obedience to political causes and to mouth slogans that are supposed designed to address group suffering. I have no use for the litany of collective-identity pain from "systematic oppression." I have no use for pleas for submission to a movement that already knows what my sins are based on my demographics 

Such pleas may be well-meaning, but they are ultimately designed to lead us towards advocacy of certain political action supervised by individuals seeking worldly power. They want you to line up behind the celebrities and public figures whom they respect.  They offer nothing but deception and distraction from the real suffering in the world, that kind that is experienced by each individual, each one of us, who without exception is made in the image of God. 

You can discern the phony pleas for compassion by how people react when you decline to join in with their revolutionary comment thread. How do they react when you politely take a pass on adopting the latest noble-sounding slogan-du-jour, to go with the six slogans you should already have adopted by now,  in a constantly shifting hierarchy. Do they express judgment of you, or even quiet anger, perhaps with a warning that you have put yourself on the "wrong side of history"? If so you know what their true intentions were, and in my opinion, it has little to do with relieving suffering.

Lord, who didst decree the charge of the electron and the speed of light, and all the dimensionless constants in the fundamental laws, in Thine infinite mercy, let it be Thy will that the positions and velocities of all celestial bodies of the Solar System,  evolving in time from their initial conditions in accordance with the quasi-deterministic laws of  classical mechanics as applied to non-integrable many-body systems and approximated by perturbative convergent solutions of Newton's laws, General Relativity, the yet-undiscovered equations of quantum gravity and other theories yet unimagined by Science, be such that all giant asteroids and other bodies that could destroy life on a large-scale be strongly diverted from the Earth, even before our detection of their presence, and that they career harmlessly into the vacuum of space, never to approach this planet in any menacing way. 

For Thy continued protection, we thank Thee, O Lord. We know all power belongs to Thee, and it is in Thy power completely to destroy all life on Earth in this way, or any other way, in an instant without warning. For the sake of Thy children, in all nations and on all continents, who still need time to repent, and to come to Thee, and for the sake of the suffering of Thy Son Jesus Christ on the cross, spare us.

Lord, hear our prayer.