Lorica of St. Patrick, Part 3

I could have finished this poem of in two posts, but it would have taken such a drastic change in tone I thought it better to split it again. 

Now we come to the two verses which Cecil Frances Alexander chose not to translate and metricize, perhaps knowing that even in what we see as the benighted 19th century, no church in its right mind would include them in its hymnal, even if the seventh verse were a full enough verse to bother with. 

Verses six and seven are the poet's "therefore" to verse fives invocation of God's protection and guidance. And frankly, it makes me laugh.*

6.
          So have I invoked all these virtues between me, [and these]
          against every cruel, merciless power which may come against my body and my                   soul
          against incantations of false prophets,
          against black laws of heathenry,
          against false laws of heretics,
          against craft of idolatry,
          against spells of women and smiths and druids,
          against every knowledge that defiles men's souls.
7.
          Christ to protect me today,
          Against poison, against burning, against drowning, against death-wound,
          Until a multitude of rewards come to me!

Ok, so the first couple and last couple lines are alright. Cruel, merciless powers are kind of timeless in the 'need protection against' category. I'm not sure about incantations, but false prophets, check. The next sound a little archaic, but still kosher, so to speak. Black laws of heathenry. Not sure what would count as 'heathenry' these days, but alright, I'm good invoking virtues between me and whatever laws might be heathenous (its actually a word!). False laws of heretics. Check (though who counts as a heretic might get a little dicey). Craft of idolatry. I wasn't aware that it was a craft, I always thought people just sort of fell into it, but alright, anti-idolatry, can't argue with that.

"Spells of women and smiths and druids". My reactions, respectively: seriously?, huh?, and ok, I can see that. With a little more thinking and remembering my book of celtic mythology that I was given a while back, I'll almost give him the women. Almost. This writer was a good 300 years removed from the celtic religion being dominant. But women in Celtic mythology (at least the ones I read) were scary powerful (Their main goddess was a tripartite battle goddess, if that gives you some idea), and women in almost all pagan cultures were assumed to have some sort of magic power (heck, even today, though we have the courtesy of making it tongue in cheek. Ever hear "Never trust anything that can bleed for a week and live?").

On the smiths? I got nothing. The Celts had a smith god, but who didn't? A smith beat up the poet when he was a kid? No idea. Pass.

Druids. Yep, I can see wanting protection against them. Even if you don't believe they had any magical powers, they were the dudes who made a habit of human sacrifice. I'd be scared of the guys who made a habit of strangling, bludgeoning, slitting the throat of and/or drowning their sacrifices in peat bogs. Nasty bunch. But, since as a breed they have been extinct for the last millenium and a half, not terribly relevant.

Knowledge that defiles mens' souls. I'm with you there, Mr. 8th-century-poet-dude. You have no idea what kind of knowledge there is out there on this thing called the internet. Seriously, you have no idea. This line is more relevant than ever.

Protection against unnatural death by poison, burning, drowning and death-wound. Pretty much covers my list of ways I'd like not to die. Verse seven is basically a prayer for a peaceful, natural death. A pretty timeless thing.

Which brings us to the eighth and ninth verses. These verses, which are combined into on in Alexander's version because they belong together, are sometimes used as a benediction at the end of church services.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

This is to me a deeply comforting verse. Jesus said "I will be with you always, even unto the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20), but this drives home what 'with you' means. Christ walks beside us, because we have asked him to dwell in our hearts. He is watching our backs, and laying out the path before us. Christ woos us and wins us. He comforts us in times of trouble and brings us back to life. He surrounds us with his love, whether we are alone and at peace or in deepest trouble, and speaks to us through both our loved ones and the people we meet along the way. What more comprehensive expression of Christ with us could you ask for?

The last verse reiterates the first, with a slight clarification:

I bind unto myself today
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three.
Of whom all nature hath creation,
eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
praise to the Lord of my salvation,
salvation is of Christ the Lord.

Just in case the whole "THIS God made all of creation, not those pagan fakes" was too subtle, the poet says it hear explicitly, ending his prayer the way we should probably end everything. Praising the Lord of our salvation.

~PhysicsGal

*I also kind of had to laugh at the Order of St Patrick's comment on Alexander's omission of these two verses: "This is unfortunate because those sections contain the only deliverance from witchcraft in the Breastplate.  This has left these Christians vulnerable to witchcraft attack." If this is all that's standing between us and witchcraft, we're all in trouble. 

Studying and Random Acts of Housework

My qualifying exam is rapidly approaching (yikes!) and I have started studying in earnest. Sitting down and reading through the two textbooks those who have gone before are the most valuable. They also are two textbooks that when I was using them for class I hated. They are big. They are heavy. They are densely written, lightly edited and in one case had some major layout issues. Their problems sets are horrible.

But coming back to reading them, after a year for one and 4 years for the other, I have a new appreciation of them both. They are informative, if still having all their other problems, and are readable, just not in a 'I need to know this formula!' way. Most importantly, what they are saying sounds familiar (not a good thing in a book necessarily, but it makes me slightly less terrified that I don't actually know anything).

I have a confession. I don't really know how to study. I'm one of those awful people who coasted through most of school, never really studied, and still did well. Over the years I have tried to learn, but its hard to learn a technique when the final step of the technique is "do you understand this? move on" and you already are pretty confident in your understanding. I'm not awfully good at memorizing equations, but we were always allowed an equation sheet, so no worries there. Until now.

So now I am trying to learn to study while studying for the most important exam of my life. This is what comes of not needing to all these years. If I ever have children, I will do my best to teach them to study, even if it means teaching them something difficult just so they actually have to study. That is, if I ever learn how to do it myself.

A side effect of my getting down to studying is random acts of housework. Housework that either gets put off, or I do sporadically, or don't do every single day suddenly starts getting done. I swept my front porch. I put up a clock. I swept up all the little things that keep coming off our carpet remnant. I made the dining room look pretty.

via Wikimedia Commons

I've done this since college, and luckily for me my roommate did the same thing. Our dorm / apartment was never cleaner than when one or both of us had a test or a paper. Its productive procrastination at its best! And once it was all done, which didn't take long in a small dorm room, we had nothing left to productively procrastinate with, and a nice clean room to work in. 

So I guess the conclusion to this post is, even if I don't learn to study enough to pass my qualifier, my house will be very tidy. Small comforts?

Things look better in the morning.

I recently order a huge bag of really, really fine almond flour and about an equal amount of very fine oat flour. They greatly improved the texture of my Oatmeal Muffins to the point they were like normal wheat-based muffins and not cornmeal (they still don't rise very much, but who cares?). I've been wanting to experiment more with them, since I have so much and neither flour seems to hurt me. What I have learned so far is that experimenting with baking/pastry is a lot harder than experimenting with other types of cooking, and that unless you really mess up*, the results are still delicious.

This particular experiment was inspired by the fact that I have been missing Pop Tarts of late. Yes, those almost-entirely-fake, super sweet toaster pastries. They were a treat for really long car trips and going down the shore when I was a kid. So sue me, I'm nostalgic. But I thought that I could make a healthier approximation with homemade almond/oat pastry dough and some no-sugar-added fruit butters.

So last night I blindly plunged ahead. I probably should have looked up a recipe for pastry dough using almond flour. Or even one that was half oat, half almond like I wanted. I would have seen that almond flour crusts use a lot less fat to hold it together. When making a traditional pastry, I usually used a 1:2 butter to flour by volume (I do not fear fat). Almond flour only needs a 1:5 or less fat to flour ratio (I used a 1:4. I added half the butter I was going to and noticed it was already too 'wet'). Even if I had used the correct amount, it seems a lot of nut crusts have more in common with a crumb crust than the pastry crust I wanted and needed for this application. Even with an egg thrown into the mix, it was too wet and crumbly to be a good dough for pastry. It is, in its present state, very much like a butter cookie recipe. More experimentation is needed on this front.

However, I had made this dough, I was going to use it. After letting it chill for a couple of hours, I rolled out small ovals and put in about two teaspoons of fruit butter and folded it over or layered another piece of dough on top or made a really, really big jam thumbprint with half the dough. They baked up nicely, and looked really great.Until I tried to pick one up and it crumbled. I mean, just fell apart. I eventually enlisted a large spatula to get it onto a plate so I could at least see if it tasted good. It did, but wasn't exactly a pastry.

This morning  I sat down to write a post on "delicious failures". I wanted to take some pictures of the remaining 'pastries' and a picture of how it crumbled. Lo and behold, they didn't crumble when touched! I'm guessing the butter component set  over night so while the the 'pastries' are still delicate and melt/crumble in your mouth, you can actually pick one up. They would never survive a lunchbox, but at least they don't need a fork.

You can see where this one cracked when I tried to pick it up last night

This one has apple butter in the middle. More importantly, its holding together. 

I still want to do some more experimenting with this one before I post a recipe, but its a good lesson learned. Even if your baked goods look terrible straight out of the oven, they may be perfectly fine later.

~PhysicsGal

*Exhibit A: The great sugarless, honey-less spelt carrot cake. Exhibit B: The oatmeal coffee cake with more salt than sugar and not nearly enough milk. blech and crumbly to boot.

Resolution: Things I am NOT allowed to feel guilty about

If I believed in reincarnation, I'd think that I must have been a serial killer or a mass murderer or something horrible a previous life or two ago, because I certainly have enough residual guilt about *everything* to cover something horrible done a lifetime or two ago. I will apologize for anything and everything, including things done by other people and done by things like forces of nature. This excess of guilt overflows into pretty much every aspect of life. Most recently, it has been showing up in things like my diet, since I have to be fairly strict about what I eat, and the amount I exercise, study, spend cooking, etc, etc, etc.

Today, I started to feel guilty for eating an apple. An apple. Not even a huge one or a particularly sweet one. And apples have benefits for people with insulin issues. 

So I have decided to make a list of things I will not allow myself to feel guilty for. It may initially spawn some guilt for feeling guilty for feeling guilty, but oh well.

The I Cannot Feel Guilty About List

1. Eating Apples or unsweetened apple sauce
2. Eating fresh berries or cherries
3. eating stone fruit with a little cream for desert.
4. Eating vegetables, excepting winter squash and sweet potatoes. (what the heck do those count as anyway?! Vegetable or starch?)
5. Walking "only" 4 miles a day.
6. Eating eggs (residual guilt from my childhood when the media said eggs were evil, even though I never believed them).

It really gets my goat

I get angry at things. Not always the things other people get upset about, but I can get very irritated by things. And people. Particularly people being stupid. 

Stupid is the polite if inaccurate term for what irritates me. Anti-vaccine people annoy me because they utterly fail to understand what they are citing  and because they are killing children. My fellow Christians who like to discount scientific discoveries annoy me because they are being willfully ignorant and turning a blind eye to some really cook aspects of creation. My fellow scientists are currently annoying me by being willfully ignorant the other way. 

This is a thing that causes me low level irritation on a daily basis, but then I saw this blogpost from one of the science bloggers I follow. Two things bothered me about this post. One, he was basing his entire argument off some truly awful questions. Another is his exhibition of the worst habit of contemporary science writers (and writers in general) to broadly generalize about anyone they view as an 'enemy' in a manner that makes them seem irrational.  Things like this quotation are particularly irritating.

A professed belief in something like creationism is one of the essential markers of a particular brand of political conservatism. As a result, even people who know the scientific answer are prone to giving the answer they’re “supposed” to give as a member of a particular political affiliation. And the number of people who self-identify as political conservatives, like the number who deny the Big Bang and evolution, is pretty consistent over the last thirty years.

Note that the answers he is talking about are the true/false responses given to the statements "“The universe began with a huge explosion”  “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” 

Now I object to several things. One, the assumption that just because I believe in creation means I'm a right-wing nut job (I also object to my beliefs being co-opted by a political party, but that's a separate issue). Two, that there is one version of creationism. I also think true/false polls are terrible ways of gauging people's views.  

Attention non-religious science-types. The 'creationism' that you refer to so derisively is in fact Young Earth Creationism. This is a very narrow slice of people who believe that the universe was created and not just a random event. There are several flavors of creationism (main forms summarized here). If you went around and seriously interviewed a wide swath of Christians (since we are the 'creationists' everyone seems to want to poke), I'm willing to bet good money you would find most of them to be either Old Earth Creationists, or Theistic Evolutionists (I myself fall largely into the later category). But if you just straight up asked me "Are you a creationist?" I would probably answer yes.

I believe that the universe began with the Big Bang. I believe the the prima causa of the Big Bang was God. I believe that God used evolution to create the variety of life we have today, with a little nudging in the direction he wanted it to go. When it comes to the physics or the biology or the chemistry, I do not deny the scientific evidence or theories. I will argue for them with people who don't believe in the science. Why is science so threatened that I want to, and do, believe to know Who's behind the curtain?

Fellow scientists. You get mad as all get out when people deride your science without doing any research or learning beyond their own prejudices and maybe one newspaper article. Could you do other people the courtesy of not doing the same?

Before dawn...

Much to the bafflement of my colleagues, I enjoy getting up early. These days I do it for practical reasons as well, but even in college when I didn't have to I would get up well before the sun most of the year. Partly its because I like getting up in increments. Get up. Have coffee. Check emails. Eat. Get shower. I dislike being rushed.

But mostly I like getting up before the sun because I like to watch the world come awake. Blackness gives way to grey, the birds start to wake up and get noisy. Sunlight starts to creep through my kitchen windows.

 Its the most peaceful time of day. Almost no one else is up. Trucks are still in their garages, the neighborhood dogs haven't woken up yet. Everything is still. Nothing is hectic before the sun rises.

And you know what? I'm ok if everyone would rather stay asleep. I get enjoy this time of day all by myself. Even days like today that are cloudy and hazy. Its possibly the only time of day when I don't feel like I need to be doing things, because no on else is.

When Teaching is Reviving

Some days, like Tuesday, teaching is exhausting. Trying to lead the horse to water and make it drink and understand what its drinking. Prodding other tired, reluctant people to interact with me. Trying to make difficult topics easily understandable.

Then there are days like today that remind me why I love teaching. Classes that as a whole are willing to work with you. The handful of students sprinkled throughout who really want to learn and participate in their learning. I had students answer questions correctly that I had never had students answer before. Two of the students inspired me after class to come up with a new way to describe things that seemed to help them and several other students understand. These are the kind of days I love.

Its days like these that keep me going even on the days when I am just so bone tired and anxious and not at all in the mood to stand in front of 35 people and try to get them to comprehend a small slice of the workings of the universe. Its days like these that even when I walk into the classroom in an absolutely terrible mood, I leave feeling 10 pounds lighter and happy.

I honestly don't understand my colleagues who hate doing TAs (teacher assisting). The four classes I teach are the best part of my semester.

New Semester Exhaustion

I have the final post on St. Patrick sitting half finished, but I'm not sure if I can get it coherent before the weekend. The new semester just started for me, and as always, I'm exhausted.

Part of its the fact that I am now walking an extra 3+ miles uphill on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Part of it is the fact that I get really nervous before I meet the classes I teach each semester. Part of it is just a complete upset of my established routine. And this semester I have a constant, low level, draining panic over the qualifying exam. And trying to apply for grants. And do research. And hold my house together. And a dozen other things that are constant, but still require time and mental energy to address.

I love teaching. I love getting to know my students, inducing those 'ah ha' moments, or just generally sharing knowledge. I'm a treasure trove of random knowledge, so having a captive audience is great. And when I get my teacher feedback at the end of the semester, I love getting notes about how I made physics interesting, even if it isn't the student's topic of choice.

I just hate the getting-to-know-you part. I don't like learning names, though I try very hard for my students. I don't like learning a new class dynamic (are they going to be chatting or silent? Reluctant or engaged? Will I have to goad them into answering or will I have to tell them to quiet down?) In a week or two I will know where I stand, but in the meantime its like a giant game of social anxiety and everyone is looking at me.

So while I'm excited to begin a new semester, I'm also looking forward to the end of October. I'll know my students, my qualifying exam will be over, and I"ll have settled into a routine. And, it'll be nearly Christmas break.

Lorica of St. Patrick, Part 2

This post continues where I left off in my meditation on St. Patrick's Breastplate. Part 1 covered verses 1 -  3 and discusses in more detail the two versions that I refer to here. The original poem by an unknown 8th century Irish poet and the metricized* and edited translation by Cecil Frances Alexander in the 19th century. This post picks up with the fourth verse.

 The fourth verse sounds a bit new-age-y to 21st century ears, though it has a perfectly good explanation for being here in an 8th century hymn.

I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the star-lit heaven,
the glorious sun's life-giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind's tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
around the old eternal rocks.

Druids, the priestly types of the Celtic pagan religion that dominated the pre-Christian British Isles, were fond of claiming for themselves the powers of nature (or at least the ability to control it). This verse reclaims nature for its Creator and those who believe in Him, much like putting this poem in the form of a lorica reclaimed that form for Christ (early Christians seem to have made a habit of either mocking or reclaiming things from pagans.) I'd categorize this verse as one of those that was very useful when it was written, but less so today.

 Verse five I would say is the meat of this hymn. Its twice as long as the other verses, and I would say get to the heart of the writer's purpose.

          I bind myself today to God's Virtue to pilot me,
          God's might to uphold me,
          God's wisdom to guide me,
          God's eye to look before me,
          God's ear to hear me,
          God's Word to speak to me,
          God's hand to guard me,
          God's way to lie before me,
          God's shield to protect me,
          God's host to secure me,
          Against snares of demons,
          Against seductions of vices,
          Against lusts of nature,
          Against every one who wishes ill to me,
          Afar and anear,
          Alone and in a multitude.

Remember, this poetic form is known as a 'breastplate' hymn. Its meant for protection. In this case I would say its a prayer for protection against both outside forces, and those inner forces which cause us to stray from God's will. It reminds, although indirectly, of the Aaronic Blessing: 

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. 

Numbers 6: 24-26 (NRSV)

Particularly the first and last lines. Interestly, it also invokes "God's Host", presumably meaning angels and the like, to protect the speaker against three things we don't talk about much: demons, vices and lusts of nature. It also invokes for protection against other people "afar and anear" which takes on new meaning in this age of globe trotting. 

Last post I mused on how angels have fallen by the wayside, too sickly sweet, turned from fearsome servants of God into spiritual diabetes inducing Russel Stover candies. Those things your great aunt pulls out at the holidays. The flip side is that we've also, perception-wise, weakened their nemeses. Oh sure, we talk about all having to fight our own demons, but pretty much no one means it literally. The closest we get is the devil-on-the-shoulder thing. What ever happened to those guys? Did they all have to suddenly accept mandatory retirement around 1700? Did they all turn into cynical hipsters and decide to just slouch around Hell? Don't tell me humans started doing their jobs for them--humans have been doing that since the fall. Have we just started rationalizing them away? Have we gotten too 'enlightened' to see them? I'm not suggesting we go back to diagnosing schizophrenics as possessed or anything like that. And I'm definitely not suggesting we revive the ridiculous demonolgies of the Middle Ages. But I feel it is a question we need to address, seriously, and not try to sweep under the rug. Even if you aren't a hard core Bible literalist, I challenge you to find a way to explain away all of Jesus's casting out of demons without serious undermining the rest of the Gospel account. I'm not saying I have any sort of answer--I try not to think about demons, to be honest. But I think there is a certain amount of dishonesty, and we lose some credibility, by not addressing them. 

 Vices and lusts of nature are another we don't talk about. We joke about the seven deadly sins (all of which are vices) and we might give lip service to the lusts of nature, but we don't address them, at least not in ourselves. From where I sit, the church has an awful lot of planks to take out of our eyes. You can complain about the medicalization of vices and biological explanations for lusts, but what the heck have we Christians offered in rebuttal? A lot of shaming and blithering and hypocrisy. Of which we are supposed to be doing exactly...none. Seriously, point me to the place where we are supposed to be shaming our neighbors with anything else but our holiness, our taking care of societies cast offs, our embracing the sinner? The church needs to be praying this verse every single day until Christ comes again. 

*Thanks to my dad for pointing out my use of the non-existent word "meterized" in my first post and providing the correct term "metricized"

Oatmeal Muffins

Hello, I'm PhysicsGal and I'm addicted to baked goods (Hello, PhysicsGal). The problem is, except in small amounts or special circumstances, I can't eat baked goods made with wheat flour. Which for this western-European-descended blogger, is basically all of them. Sorely missed for me at the moment, having found sufficiently low carb deserts, are muffins. Not English muffins, which are good and they already have low carb versions in my grocery store, but American-style muffins, which are basically icingless cupcakes by a different method.  If anyone has found a better way to start the day (pace bacon and eggs) than a homemade blueberry muffin out of the oven, I haven't been informed of it.

So for a while now I have been tinkering with making an oat-based muffin. Oats are afterall the breakfast grain of choice. Nutritious, full of fiber, nutty and cheap. Too bad I can't really stand oatmeal without a lot of brown sugar. Granola is ok, but you can only eat it so long before it loses its appeal. I had seen a couple dozen recipes for oatmeal muffins, but none of them really suited my needs.

So I tried making my own from scratch. The first couple were...interesting failures. The first was like a lumpy soft granola bar. The second had WAY too much salt and the consistency of stale cornbread.

This latest batch is I think a winner. They don't rise very much, but they have a nice, silky texture with a slight grittiness from almond flour, like a store bought cornmeal muffin. I make mine just barely sweet so I can have it for breakfast, but additional sugar could be added to taste. This batch was plain for testing purposes, but any number of additions could be made. I think mixed berries would be wonderful.

The trick as it turns out is to give the oat flour lots of time to hydrate. I made my oat flour from 'old fashioned' oats that I pulsed as fine as I could get in my food processor, so its a little on the coarse side, and it turns out that oats just don't absorb liquid all that quickly. Starch type? All that fiber? I have no idea, but I know that its true. But it does absorb a lot of liquid. When you mix up the dry ingredients for this, it will be genuinely soupy. Potato leek soup soupy. After about 4 hours its the consistency of cake batter. By the next morning it's the consistency of a muffin batter. Mix in your leavening,  and bake as you please. So long as you let the oats soak in all your liquid, and have a roughly 1:1 oat to liquid ratio, you can be pretty adventurous in other aspects I think.

Enjoy!

PhysicsGal's Oatmeal Muffins

The night before, combine:
2.5 cups oatmeal flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
[Opt: additional sugar to taste]

Stir in:
2 egg yolks, beaten with
1/3 cup oil or melted butter
1/4 cup honey
2 cups milk

Mixture will be very thin. Cover, and let rest in a refridgerator a minimum of 4 hours and preferably overnight.

When ready to bake, heat oven to 350 degrees.

In a very clean bowl, start beating the reserved egg whites to stiff peaks.

In a small bowl, combine 1/2 cup nut flour or oat flour with 1 tablespoon baking powder. Sprinkle mixture over the top of the refrigerated batter, and stir to combine.

When egg whites are glossy and peaks no longer collapse, stir in one third of the foam to the batter. Gently folding in the remaining whites.

Spoon into greased or lined baking cups. NB: since these don't rise very much, you can fill the cups almost to the top without the muffins baking into each other.

Bake 20-25 minutes, until tops are getting speckled with brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

Edit: These stay very moist for several days, and freeze beautifully. Allow extra time for thawing, since they have twice the moisture content of normal muffins.

Enjoy!

~PhysicsGal

Lorica of St. Patrick, Part 1

To begin my series of meditations on the insights from the saints who have gone before, or historic Christianity if you want to be more academic, I thought I would start with the "Lorica of St. Patrick" or "St. Patrick's Breastplate" as it is more commonly known today. Two reasons for doing this. One, this is where my curiosity about historical Christianity was first piqued, so it seems a fitting starting point for deeper investigation. Two, starting with someone like Augustine, who has whole library departments devoted to studying him, was terrifying. And he probably deserves his own series if I am going to touch on him at all. This prayer/hymn is rather long as these things go, so I'm going to divide my study of it into two or three parts, depending on how the spirit leads, so to speak. 

This prayer most likely not written by St. Patrick himself, as the first evidence for it is several centuries after he died. However, it does emphasize certain points for which St. Patrick was known  and are attested to in his two surviving letters. For example, it begins and ends with emphasis on the triune nature of God, focuses on God's power to protect his faithful and his abiding presence with believers. It was written in an ancient Irish dialect, in the form of a lorica. A lorica  was a type of incantation or spell used by druids to ward off evil, and means "breastplate" or armor. It begins with an invocation of the deity, followed by what you are invoking them for, ended with a reiteration of who you are talking to and with what authority. This prayer could be seen as a reclamation of the lorica from pagan hands for use as spiritual armor, such as Paul talks about. 

Most people, if they are familiar with this prayer, are familiar with Cecil Frances Alexander's metricized and edited version known in hymn books as "I Bind Unto Myself Today" (incidentally, one of the few if not the only hymn set to two tunes in one setting). Alexander's version puts the prayer into iambic tetrameter, and eliminates verses 6 and 7. Both poems are rather long, so I will reproduce them as necessary, rather than in full. Both can be found in full on the The Order of St. Patrick's website. 

The first thing you notice when reading through the texts is that it is a combination of catechism and prayer for protection and guidance . The first two verses in particular, while invoking God's power, lays out the foundation beliefs of Christianity: the Trinity, God as creator of all, Christ's birth, baptism, death, burial, resurrection, ascension and promised return for Judgement are all there in the first two verses. Its a good place to start. Alexander's version fleshes it out with more details ("His baptism in the Jordan River/ His death on the Cross for my salvation/ His bursting from the spiced tomb" vs "... his baptism,/ to the virtue of his crucifixion with his burial,/ to the virtue of his resurrection..."). If you were writing under the name of the man who helped convert Ireland, you'd probably want to start out with an emphasis on the Trinity and a catechism. 

Catechisms and confessions of faith are kind of funny things these days. I've been to quite a number of churches that don't have any sort of confession of faith as part of their normal services. I've known upstanding members of congregations who could not recite the Apostles' Creed or explain why each phrase in there was important. Now, last post I wrote about relying more on the wisdom of God and less on the wisdom of man, but I can't help but think this falls under the category of wisdom of God. Christ knew his time was short. I seriously doubt he wasted  his time. Shouldn't we be holding to our catechisms, which encapsulate the most fundamental of our beliefs and the entire story of salvation, like a life preserver? Not letting them fall by the wayside while we get distracted with petty side issues that do nothing to further the work we were set out to do. 

The next verse concerns itself with aligning the speaker with both the heavenly host and that great cloud of witnesses. 

   I bind myself today to the virtue of ranks of Cherubim,
          in obedience of Angels,
          [in service of Archangels]
          in hope of resurrection for reward,
          in prayers of Patriarchs,
          in preaching of Apostles,
          in faiths of Confessors,
          in innocence of Holy Virgins,
          in deeds of righteous men.

or, as Alexander phrases it

I bind unto myself the power
of the great love of cherubim;
the sweet "Well done" in judgment hour;
the service of the seraphim;
confessors' faith, apostles' word,
the patriarchs' prayers, the prophets' scrolls;
all good deeds done unto the Lord,
and purity of virgin souls.

This verse is left out of many hymnal versions, either because the hymnal editors only allow five verses and this one is deemed less important, the weird scan of the second line or some other reason (I have heard one person object to the idea of virgin souls being purer). With the possible exception of hemming and hawing over the Holy Virgins, there's not much of a problem with the last five lines of the original verse. We might not emphasize the saints who have gone before, but its not like we don't talk about Moses or Peter or the martyrs or praise good deeds done. Why wouldn't we want to say "I stand with these people and by their good deeds"? Its the other verses I would like to focus on for the moment.

The writer seems to be a lot more comfortable talking about cherubim and angels than most Christians I know, including myself. Cherubim have gotten labeled as those stupid winged baby heads and angels have become synonymous with 'guardian angel' or sappy religious Hallmark cards. "Don't drive faster than your guardian angel can fly" and that pouty pastel child you see on baptism cards. Those things couldn't strike fear into the heart of the Cowardly Lion, pre Oz. This prayer isn't talking about these mythical things, more fairy than servant of the Most High. It's talking about an Angel of the LORD. The being that has to preface every human interaction with "Be not afraid". The creatures who hover at the throne of God and cover their faces. God's messengers and generals. Putti I wouldn't want to be caught dead with. The cherubim that Isaiah saw or the angels who lead the charge against the dragon in Revelation? Them I would be proud to bind myself to. 

"Hope of Resurrection for Reward". "The sweet 'Well done' in judgment hour". Judgement Day. Dooms Day. The End of Days. Talking about the apocalypse is in right now, but its always the zombie apocalypse, the Mayan apocalypse, or some random dude with a calculator and selective reading ability's apocalypse. For the most part, Christians don't seem to like to talk about it these days. Too many wackadoodles. Too many awkward conversations. Apocalyptic literature reads, honestly, like a really weird acid trip. Eschatology is a field with a lot of good minds in it, but not one you're average Joe is going to dive into as a hobby.

Nevermind that for believers, its supposed to be a good thing. We will be raised in new, incorruptible bodies. We will see God, and we don't have to be afraid. We're washed in the blood of the Lamb, our transgressions have been blotted out. Judgement Day is when we get to hear "Good job." And afterwards comes the new heaven and new earth and that is going to be the most wonderful thing ever.

Musings on Wisdom and Foolishness

This blog seems to be focusing mostly on the 'faith' bit of its tag line at the moment, but I think that is my prerogative as a blog writer. Besides, its easier to write about than physics (fewer equations) and doesn't require me to have taken pictures as I was inventing a recipe.

This dichotomy of wisdom and foolishness in Christianity has been playing around in the back of my mind for a while. Not a full-fledged pondering, just one of those things that keeps popping out at you at odd times. I think I became aware of it when I was reading "Call the Midwife". In one of the chapters, the author introduces the idea of the "Holy Fool", more common in eastern than western churches, to explain the behavior of one of the people in her memoir.  A Holy Fool is a person who is foolish in the way of the world, but wise in the way of God. A man who knowingly cares for a child who is not his own; literally giving away all you own; giving away every scrap of clothing on your body, knowing fully what you are doing. 

Perhaps the fact that this was already in the back of my mind made the passage from which the term derives hit me hard yesterday. 

 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. 

 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it is written,“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,    and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 

 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are,  so that no one might boast in the presence of God.  He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption,  in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

(I Corinthians 1: 17-31, NRSV)

A couple of things have been bothering me with this combination of foolishness and wisdom, bothering more in the sense of conviction or wonder than the way misaligned mugs bother me.

 The first thing that always pokes me when reading this passage is the idea of the "wisdom of the world". Exactly how encompassing is this? I assume that ideas like 'fight back when some one hits you' and 'don't give your money to that bum' would fall under the heading "wisdom of the world". But, what about things that might be considered more, well, factual, less philosophical? The wisdom of the world would say that the dead cannot come back to life, especially a body 3 days dead in a tomb. That's less open to debate. That's a matter of biology, chemistry, good hard sciences. God turned that  to foolishness when he raised Christ from the dead.

 I suppose it would be easier if I were the kind of person who could just ignore science all together. That would make my life a lot less complicated. But I can't. I'm a good Calvinist and a decent science type. I believe that God made the world ordered and intended for us to figure it out. I don't believe he set up the world to trick us or confuse us (though doing quantum homework sometimes made me wonder). The world starts in a garden and ends in a city--I confess I picture it to be a very high tech city. One with quantum computers that never ever crash and no internet popups. But I wonder how much of the  world's knowledge should really come under the heading of worldly wisdom.

 Another thing is that it always comes a shock to think of the Gospel as foolishness. Like stepping into the shower you thought was going to be nice and hot and instead is icy cold. I grew up in the 'odour of sanctity', as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, and there was never a time when the truth of it didn't seem self evident.  Oh, I know that I look like a fool to some people. I'm not blind to those looks of half-pity I get sometimes from people when they find out I'm a Christian or, gasp, go to church. I've had the discussions on how a rational person could believe the Bible.

 Somehow, this passage really struck me. I've heard it a million times, read it over and over, but it really walloped me yesterday. We are supposed to embrace this foolishness. Not explain it away, give intelligent, well reasoned arguments while it was rational to believe. Just proclaim the Gospel, in all its worldly foolishness, of the God who became completely human, subject to the same sickness, weakness and temptations, who submitted to humiliation, scorn and ultimately death. Who defied the wisdom of the world and rose again after three days rotting in the grave, incorruptible.

 I've done it my whole life. Sought the reasonable explanations for people. And they are there, for theological ideas. For those things which are man made. But for the Gospel? How can you possibly explain that which is unexplainable? How can you make something that is inherently unreasonable in the eyes of the world reasonable? " For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

 I think I need learn to embrace the foolishness of God, and lean less on my own understanding. 

Morning and Evening Sung Prayer: Update

Well, I did have to change evening songs. I couldn't get past the second verse of "Abide with me: Fast falls the eventide". I don't see that changing anytime soon, since "Amazing Grace" and "I heard the bells on Christmas Day" have been making me cry for years, and its only gotten worse the older I get.

In my search for evening hymns, I discovered a few things. One, there are a lot of them, and most of them have fallen out of disuse in recent years since fewer and fewer churches have evening services. Some of them have very weird texts. Some of them have beautiful texts. An oddly large number of them seem to have non-tunes or un-sing-ably thumpy tunes. A few seemed to be chants that they had tried to turn into hymns. And in modern hymnals, they all seem to be used for funerals or memorial services.

While I think that the primary reason these hymns have fallen out of disuse is primarily the lack of evening church and the dated-ness of a lot of them, I can't help but wonder if part of it is the shift in emphasis in the church. A lot of older hymns and prayers, particularly ones meant for use at the beginning and end of the day, have a focus on God's protection against a host of evils. Demons, sickness, ill intent of man, temptation and sin, accident. All these things were fair game. 

Demons are definitely out of style these days. People aren't demon possessed,  they are either mentally ill or evil (heavily leaning towards the former). There is no supernatural hand at work in natural evils either. Temptations come from within our own sinful psyches, not a demon whispering in our ear. To a large part I don't disagree. Biological disease, byproducts of  a chaotic system, and our own sinfulness can account for much, if not all, things attributed to demons. But I can't help but wonder if we are losing something by saying in effect, "Sure, they had demons back then, but not in this day and age". There is probably somebody's masters or doctoral thesis on the loss of demons in our popular theology.

Sickness. We pray a lot for the sick. What church doesn't have a prayer list with the members of the congregation who are ill? But we don't seem to pray as much for protection against sickness ever happening in the first place. Is it because we think we can control it now? We understand germ theory, we wash our hands, sneeze into our sleeves, have good public sanitation. But we still get sick. Rogue germs, our own bodies turning on us, merest chance encounter with that one mosquito/rusty nail/cat scratch. We may not get sick over night with cholera, but we are still as vulnerable as ever, just to other things. 

Ill intent of our fellow seems a really odd thing not to pray against these days, seeing as how one ill intentioned person can do so much more damage. Old days, you might get robbed, maybe stabbed, but the bad guys were limited in scope. These days, one person can kill thousands and be no where near them when it  happens. Why exactly aren't we praying against this?

Accidents don't happen any less frequently. We aren't any less tempted. So what gives?

Reflecting on my own practice, discussions with other believers, popular books, I'm beginning to think that we are forgetting "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." More and more I hear God being used as a kind of supernatural therapist and happy pill. An adult security blanket. A lot of focus on God's love, not a lot on him as warrior, physician, protector, or anything else. Even His love seems to be getting kinda wishy washy in our popular mind. When was the last CCM song that talked about God being "my battleshield, sword for the fight"? Or even a mighty fortress? Do we think all that warrior talk is just for those primitive warrior types, not us sophisticated, civilized people? Do we really think we have any less war? Are we really buying into the progressive, humanist tripe that we can make the world good if we just try hard enough? 

This has turned slightly more rant-ish than I had intended. But I think what started as a devotional exercise with hymns (and still is) has turned into a desire to read the writings of more of those saint who have gone before, a long time ago. Sure, some it wont be any good, but I have a suspicion that we may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater on some stuff. 

Morning and Evening Sung Prayers

I have never been able to get into the habit of daily, prayerful contemplation. Everything else in my life is part of a routine. My morning routine I almost have down to the minute. I have a cup of Irish Breakfast tea every day at 10 am and 2 pm. I walk my dog on the same route four times a day.

Which is not to say I don't pray. I pray in the shower, when I'm doing dishes, when I'm walking the dog. Anytime my body is otherwise occupied. I used to pray before bed, but kept falling asleep before I would finish.

This has been bugging me for sometime. And I've tried different things. The closest I got was when I set myself to read the Bible from cover to cover sophomore year of college. Over the years  I had read the Bible several times, just very piecemeal. I had a book of daily prayers influenced by Celtic Christianity which I like very much, but it was very short and didn't adjust for time of year. During Lent this past year I tried to take up the discipline of the Hours. But my graduate student schedule meant that I ended up reading several of the hours together, which seemed to defeat the purpose. And it felt weird not having anyone to do the call and response with.

So I've decided to start over, and take smaller steps, starting with something that I can learn to do any time, anywhere. I'll begin with morning and evening sung prayers, since music and lyrics have always had a habit of staying in my head well. I've picked "St. Patrick's Breastplate" for my morning prayer. It seems a good way to start the day, I already know the tune and about half the words. I like the idea of claiming God's power to protect me as I start out the day, probably because I am a worrier by nature. I'm starting out with "Abide with me: fast falls the eventide" for my evening prayer, but may have to change if I can't stop crying.

This may not sound like quiet contemplation, but its hard to get my mind to shut up. Doing something like this helps calm it down, temporarily. I'm hoping I can use this to work up to a time of actual extended contemplation.

If anyone is out there reading this, I would love to know how you manage to make time for this kind of thing. Not just physically, but mentally.

~PhysicsGal

Geometrical Optics: Paraxial Approximation, Ray Trace Method

This is the first of about 25 posts I'll be doing over the next couple of months to help me study for the dreaded qualifying exam. It's said that the best way to learn something is to have to explain it to someone else, so I'm hoping to improve my own understanding of these topics by trying to explain them to a broader audience.

The first topic I'm tackling is ray optics, for a couple of reasons. Its the first optical topic that I learned, and it is in a way the first optical physics created historically. Its also the optical topic that I like least. Hate would be an appropriate word, actually, for my feelings towards ray optics.

Why do I hate it so much? Possibly because the book I used to first learn it was poorly written and so poorly laid out that diagrams and text overlapped. Mostly because I find it unbelievably tedious, simplistic, and it is of little to no use to me, since I am the one optics person who isn't into photography.

What I specifically dislike about Ray Optics:
1)It assumes all light travels as a ray (hence the name). No wave properties, no photons, no interacting EM fields, just lines of light. So, kinda ignores my whole subspecialty (no wave properties, no vortices, no research for me).

2) There are two ways to go about it. The 'correct'-er way, which is essentially geometry and repeated use of Snell's Law, over and over and over. This is usually done with a computer these days. The other is to use the paraxial approximation, which on top of assuming that light is just rays also assumes that we are only interested in the light that goes through a very small area at the center of the lens (para- near, beside axial - axis). This method is only good for a narrow bundle of rays near the center and, while it is easier to do by hand than non-paraxial, it still requires pages of tedious and easily messed up algebra

Why Ray Optics is still taught:
1) It can help a person, such as a lens or systems designer, know what is happening with the light passing through the system. Many errors and aberrations can be determined through ray diagrams and optimization takes place using it.

2) It's an intuitive place to start for a lot of people. Every little kid given  a yellow crayon and a piece of paper will draw a sun that looks like this:

Light travels in straight lines. Sundials, shadow puppets and dressing room mirrors that let you see your back all seemingly demonstrate this to us every day. 

3) Realistically, its probably the most practical optical analysis for the real world. Wave optics may be more correct, more precise, show things in greater detail, but it is also computationally intensive. In a commercial setting, the approximation that takes 5 minutes to run and give you an answer you can use immediately is going to trump the precise calculation that takes a  week to run and another week to analyze.

I'm going to focus on the paraxial approximation, and the simplest method of doing for this post, because otherwise it was threatening to become a book.

The paraxial approximation is takes all the assumptions made to get ray optics in the first place and adds the assumption that you are only interested in using the lens right around its center, so all your angles are very tiny, and that the lenses are 'thin' so the curvature is small and you can neglect the distance the light vertically travels in the lens itself. Is it realistic? No, of course light is going to go through the whole lens, not just at the center. But this analysis can be done by hand in about 15 minutes if you aren't prone to sign errors, and can give a person a good idea of what the limiting factors of their system is and what the main aberrations are likely to be. Its kind of like a systematized back of the napkin calculation you do before you do a proper analysis with ray trace software, which is finicky and you want to know what your answer is going to look like before you use it. 

The crux of this method is that we assume $sin \theta = \theta$. That is, that the angles are so small that the sine of the angle is (roughly) equal to the angle itself. When doing sketches of this method the angles often look huge (30 degrees or more) but the sketches have the implicit caveat 'not to scale'. It would be unenlightening (and frustrating) to be drawing angles of a few degrees. For one thing, the lines would end up overlapping.

The simplest method of doing this is ray tracing. It lets you follow individual rays through the system, and see what it is doing at every point. Its also long winded, because it involves tracing each ray at each interface in the system. Not too bad if you only have one lens, not so fun if you have lots of lenses or lenses and stops. It relies on two basic equations:

1) refracting formula: $n'_{i} u'_{i} - n_i u_i = - h_i K_i $

2) transfer formula: $h_{i+1} = h_i + d'_{i} u'_{i}$

$n$ is the refractive index (the subscripts denote which side of the interface it refers to), $h$ is the height above the optical axis of the ray, $u$ is the small angle (no sines or cosines needed), while $K$ refers to the 'focusing power' which for a surface (such as a mirror) is $(n_{i+1} - n_i)c_i$ where $c$ is the curvature or $\frac{1}{f}$ for a lens, where f is the focal length. $d$ refers to the distance between the $ith$ and $(i+1)th$ planes. Once you get the hang of the labeling, its a tedious but simple solution.

For example, two thin lenses in air:

Each dotted blue line represents a 'plane', and the red arrows represent a marginal ray. Number the planes from left to right, starting with the 'zeroth' plane. We will have a total of seven equations, (transfer, refract, refract, transfer, refract, refract, transfer) so we could solve for up to seven unknowns.

1) $ h_1 = h_0 +d'_0 u'_0$
2) $ n'_1 u'_1 - n_1 u_1 = -h_1 K_1$
3) $ n'_2 u'_2 - n_2 u_2 = -h_2 K_2$ {note: $n'_1 = n_2$, $u'_1 = u_2$, assume h1 = h2}
4) $ h_3 = h_2 +d'_2 u'_2$
5) $ n'_3 u'_3 - n_3 u_3 = -h_3 K_3$
6) $ n'_4 u'_4 - n_4 u_4 = -h_4 K_4$
7) $ h_5 = h_4 +d'_4 u'_4$

Note that each equation relies on information from the one before it to proceed. Depending on the kind of ray you are tracing, you can immediately make some assumptions. For example, since we are tracing a marginal ray, we can assume that its start and end height are zero. I've set up the example so that the first lens acts as the ASTOP, so we assume its height at the first lens is the edge of the lens. You can assume all n's that represent air are 1. This plus a little additional information will allow a complete solution.

A faster method is the transfer matrix method, which I will get into in the next post, because this one has already taken long enough to write. Hopefully I can make future posts a little less dry as dust.

~PhysicsGal

Finding my Courage

If you looked at this blog when it was first posted vs. now (post August 1, 2013), you may have noticed that the tagline changed from being a blog "mainly about physics and food" to being about "physics, food and faith". If so, you may wonder about the change.

The fact of the matter is, that is what I wanted this blog to originally be. And then I chickened out. Why? I don't know. Its not like I've ever been particularly shy about my faith. Even in my heavily atheistic department, I've never been shy about it or avoided conversation about the consequences of my faith. So why did I balk online?

The only thing I can think is that I was afraid that by doing so I would offend one or the other demographic. Most of the scientists I know are not particularly open to faith. And while a good portion of the Christians I know are math and science types, I know that is abnormal. But the whole thing is ridiculous. First of all, at the moment no one seems to read my blog except website bots and I don't think I can offend them. Secondly, this is exactly the kind of thing I feel is needed. 

So I will say it explicitly. I am a Christian. I have always felt drawn to God as long as I can remember and I committed myself to Christ when I was 11. I have also always been drawn to science, and physics in particular. I went to college with the intention to go to seminary to be a pastor. I came out with a physics degree and am studying for a PhD in singular optics. I find no opposition between these two aspects of my life, nor do I hold them in separate compartments. 

I do not know how frequently I will post about my faith. But I want to be able to do so without it seeming like a sidebar or a divergence. And I'm not sorry if that offends anyone, just as I do not apologize for being a scientist.

~PhysicsGal