Eureka moments
Haegel, Nancy M.
EUREKA MOMENTS NANCY M. HAEGEL THE PRAYERS OF AN ENGINEER The alarm rings at 6 A.M. I mumble a "good morning" to the Lord, kiss my husband, and listen to the radio. Unlike the first two,...
...In a recent PBS special ("A...
...Commonweal 5 June 1992: 13 At Notre Dame engineering was considered, at least in some circles I frequented, a major chosen primarily by those who wouldn't and/or couldn't work with people, those who wanted job security and/or money...
...Your will today, Lord, and please help...
...to blow it apart...
...When I am able, through my prayer, to look at my life honestly, I do see God—as well as my own sinfulness...
...Four years at the University of Notre Dame had given me a wonderful opportunity to grow in both that identity and that love, to encounter people whose own lives as Catholics were models for what I hoped for my own...
...I need the company of those willing to look at their lives in the light of the gospel, because I know I wouldn't have the courage to do it alone...
...That belief is challenged daily though by my own selfishness and by the knowledge that children die from hunger in a world of plenty, their lives consumed by the struggle for the barest of existence...
...How does my faith manifest itself in my work...
...Whether our research is fundamental or applied, it ultimately leads to everything from laser surgery to Star Wars, from the tele-phones, -faxes and -visions that make our world smaller to the nuclear weapons that threaten (dare we use the past tense...
...The pieces crash into place after weeks, months, sometimes years of effort and confusion...
...But I look upon my years of graduate school at Berkeley as my confirmation experience as a Catholic...
...Commonweal 5 June 1992: 15...
...And yet I have found that we often have more in the way of common values than is the case with many people who wear their Catholicism with a capital C. I suspect that what leads them and leads me is both within and beyond my faith and I grow increasingly convinced that God is infinitely generous in creating paths to himself...
...I get up and concentrate on getting myself and my family ready and out the door...
...The sacraments, the common prayer, the social teaching, those countless homilies are important...
...Yet the wellspring of it all is prayer, a prayer life that is as fruitful as it is hesitant and temperamental...
...Taking off your shoes in such a place is an act of trust, and risk...
...Armed with three degrees in materials science (a field of engineering dealing with the development and characterization of materials) and just enough research experience to make credible the thought of being able to teach, I joined the ranks of the engineering faculty...
...My family had given me a Catholic identity, and, more importantly, an experience of love, the first glimmer of God...
...Without Christ as a sign of redemption and the community of the faithful as a source of hope, despair is always at the door...
...I'm not a morning person—I don't pray, fill the crockpot, or run 5K before sunrise...
...I go in the hope that God will direct my efforts there and will give me the courage and insight to direct them elsewhere if and when that is God's will...
...An engineer of all things, contributor to the rape of the planet, soulless technocrat, one of the dullards of academic life...
...As Catholic Christians, we embark from an immense tradition of belief, and yet it is only that—an embarking point...
...I have had people enter my life who can only have been sent by God...
...I'd like to think it causes me to do what I do with more compassion, more justice, more hope, and more love than might otherwise be true...
...I do live, though, with a certain ambiguity about the work...
...I quiet myself, at the end of what is always a long and busy day, and go very slowly, meditatively, prayerfully, through the day—each person and encounter, each activity and incident...
...For me, sharing those moments with students transforms work and career into service and vocation...
...A daily request ("Your will today, Lord, and please help") suffices for morning prayer...
...Being a Catholic, being committed to any religious tradition, does make you different on most engineering or science faculties at major universities...
...Only then did I begin to realize that I could interpret my experiences and relationships, my work and my life, only in light of that belief...
...But I doubt that a long-term solution lies in imposed ignorance and so I generally take pride as well as pleasure in adding to our scientific understanding...
...Young (I was twenty-seven then), female, and Catholic, I realized that all three were characteristics shared by few of my colleagues on the engineering faculty...
...Only when confronted by the denial of belief in others did I begin to see myself as a believer...
...One of the lessons then was not that knowledge is evil, but that knowledge alone does not make us gods...
...I enjoy teaching, helping other people reach their potential...
...Despite our shortcomings though, I also tell them how much I need and value the Catholic community...
...I ask myself two questions: Where was God, and where were the opportunities to serve...
...On the good days, it's enough...
...But the third was a matter of choice...
...Friends and colleagues I respect, and whose respect I desire, think that religious faith is childhood baggage to be discarded, a crutch for the weak or ignorant...
...Not until Berkeley were there real choices to be made, questions to be answered, commitments to be held...
...I have always been told, in homilies now numbering into the thousands, that faith is supposed to make you different, different from "the world...
...The collection of dogma we have acquired throughout our history and our continuing propensity to stand in opposition to truths that emerge from science, other religious traditions or, more recently, women's movements throughout the world, are not easy to defend...
...And I love the "Eureka" moments, seeing students' eyes light up, whether in the classroom or the laboratory, when they make a discovery of their own...
...So while my work colleagues worry about my mind, my Catholic friends (at least in my imagination) worry about my heart...
...Einstein: How I See the World"), the narrator discusses Einstein's role, both scientific and political, in the series of events that led to Hiroshima and comments, "Einstein did not feel guilty about his science...
...The stereotypes, as always, are unfair, but the underlying question is valid...
...There will be hungry children in the world and anxious students in my office and maybe, if we are lucky, a Eureka moment...
...My faith is weak, my service limited, my commitments often shallow, my love often lacking—and yet, despite it all, my faith tells me that the God who brought life into being will use that life, my life and all other lives, to help bring about the kingdom...
...I am an engineer in part, I suppose, because after four years of college and another five of graduate school, I would have been hard pressed to do much else...
...Religious belief in my work community, at least publicly proclaimed, is the exception rather than the rule...
...So tomorrow the alarm will go off again, and I will go back to work...
...The tension in the work is occasionally mirrored by tension in the workplace...
...Suddenly, in 1986, reports of a new superconducting compound from scientists at IBM Zurich sparked worldwide excitement...
...Within the Catholic community, I'd always thought of myself as a skeptic, a peripheral though "practicing" Catholic...
...But I'm not sure that being intellectually suspect is what the homilists had in mind...
...Ready for work...
...Work for me consists of teaching, doing research, and serving the university community at UCLA...
...Scientific insight often comes suddenly...
...The experience of living and working with people who do not share a Christian faith tradition is an increasingly common one in this country—and one that must anticipate the "kingdom of God...
...Surrounded by friends who shared neither my faith tradition nor often any other, in a work environment that encouraged a respect for excellence and achievement divorced from any sense of work as vocation or service, I came to appreciate how similar were many of our values and commitments, and yet how different the wellsprings from which they came...
...Granted, most of us don't do Nobel prizewinning work, but we do share that sense of discovery and breakthrough...
...Unlike the first two, the latter is generally a useless and depressing exercise— the headlines are bad and the weather in Los Angeles is rarely worthy of discussion...
...Most often though, they are referring to actions or statements associated with our history or our hierarchy which, on occasion I do agree, can boggle the mind...
...A few true believers had persevered, worked long and hard, built upon previous knowledge, struck paydirt, and ultimately won the Nobel Prize...
...Times reports Rome's latest dictates on the "role of women...
...I have had moments that can only be described as encounters with God—limited in number but powerful enough to last a lifetime...
...I encounter God too in those whose brief lives are testimony to our seemingly unredeemable state as a human family...
...I continue this work though, in research and teaching, because nothing else I've ever done quite compares to the intellectual challenge, the creative aspects, and the sense of discovery I've found in scientific work...
...Respect me and care for me—care enough to wonder and perhaps worry...
...Theorists and experimentalists had labored for decades to predict and achieve superconductivity, a state of matter characterized by perfect conduction of electrical current and unique magnetic properties in new materials and at temperatures that would allow for routine and inexpensive use in electronics...
...This has worked, worked so well that it has, at times, caused me to retreat in fear...
...Yet my colleagues and friends do, I think, respect me...
...With one life to live, why engineering...
...I don't know, in part because some of the most compassionate, just, hopeful, and loving people I know don't share my faith at all, don't believe in our God, their God, perhaps any God...
...I'd like to think that it is reflected in a commitment more to an internal set of values and goals than to whatever behavior will trigger the external reward system...
...Even granting the ability of the secular press to make us appear sillier than we sometimes are, I don't look forward to the lunchtime comments on days when our bishops meet to discuss condoms or holy days, or when the LA...
...Ultimately, we must each call upon our own individual experience...
...I'd like to think that it manifests itself in my attitudes toward other people, in giving all people the fundamental respect they deserve, regardless of their talents, their status, or the inconvenient times at which they wander into my office...
...Ready for "the day...
...Like many people in my profession, I mourn our inability to use our knowledge wisely, humbly, justly, fruitfully...
...The first two were facts of nature—one would change with time, the other they had to live with...
...I was told more than once, in a variety of ways, That I was wasting my talents, selling my soul...
...A similar environment exists in my work today...
...That experience, regardless of how small the contribution or esoteric the topic, is the highlight of our work, our careers...
...I'd like to think so, but I don't really know...
...I have had just enough of what might be termed "religious experience" to entice, startle, and intrigue 14: 5 June 1992 Commonweal me...
...It is not frightening there, but neither is it peaceful...
...Scientists and engineers can look with both pride and dismay at the results of their handiwork, and, for many of us in academic research, the pride and dismay are hopelessly intertwined...
...Just enough so that I can never deny it, but not so much that I don't wonder, in an expression I heard somewhere, why "God is so damn subtle...
...But he did feel guilty...
...I arrived in Los Angeles in 1987 after a journey which included stops at Notre Dame and Berkeley and a year as a post-doctoral scientist in German industry...
...I felt guilty as the missiles flew over Iraq—but as a citizen, a Christian, a Catholic—not as an engineer...
...One thinks of the recent work in high temperature superconductors...
...It is hard to share these things with friends or colleagues when they ask "How can any intelligent person believe such nonsense...
...The risk pays off...
...About two-thirds of the world's population is not Christian, and my work environment, perhaps more than most, reflects that reality...
...And as I draw closer and closer in prayer to this source of my life, I feel deeply the words from Hebrew Scripture, "Take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy ground...
...It wasn't on the résumé, though one could easily read between the lines, but, perhaps even more than the other two, it influenced both the attitudes and the ambitions I brought to my new job...
...There will be bad news and smog in L.A...
...As human beings, we ate long ago from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil...
...So if my work colleagues know that I am a Catholic, they know that I am a doubting and tolerant one, believing in a God who is merciful with our doubts and prefers them to our certainties...
...I experience that God in my tradition, in my family and friends, in beauty, in service to others...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 11
