My conversation with... Jennifer Wiseman

Re-enchanting podcast guest Jennifer Wiseman shared an infectious wonder at the universe. Podcast co-host Belle Tindall reflects on their conversation.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Four stars scintilate above a spiral galaxy viewed from the side.

Hubble Space Telescope captures a side-on view of NGC 3568, a barred spiral galaxy roughly 57 million light-years from the Milky Way.

European Space Agency, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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The details of astronomy, the workings of astrophysics, the enormity of space, the fact that the universe is still expanding by the moment, the mystery of what lies beyond what we can see and even predict – those are things that do not sit comfortably in the confines of my brain.

It’s as if my brain is allergic to the sheer enormity of the subject. My mind does deep, it does not take lightly to vast.

And that is precisely why I so thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with astronomer, author and speaker, Dr Jennifer Wiseman for the Re-Enchanting podcast. Jennifer is Director Emeritus of the programme of Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre. Science is a means by which Jennifer is able to live a wonderfully curious life, marvelling at the natural world and what lies beyond it.

When the narrative of science and religion being ultimately and inevitably at war with each other is the narrative that gets (by far) the most amplification, it was really interesting to hear how they coincide so powerfully for Jennifer. When talking with her, it becomes clear that they co-exist, they are the symbiotic forces that fuel her wonder at the universe. A wonder that is undeniably infectious. As she pointed out, the very fact that we have a curiosity about the universe we find ourselves in is, in itself, something to marvel at.

‘We are here, we’ve come through this 13.8 billion year development of the universe to the point where we can have this self-contemplating life that recognises a bit of where we’ve come from and how we connect to the universe.’

These are surely the thoughts that existential crises are made of.

Speaking with Jennifer made me feel small. Small in time, and small in place. I suppose dwelling on the enormity of an ever-expanding universe will do that to a person. Afterall, there are around one hundred billion stars in our galaxy (that we know of), the closest of which is four lightyears away. The vast majority of these stars have their own solar systems, hosting their own planets that orbit around them. And that’s still only within the confines of our own cosmic neighbourhood; there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our (observable) universe, and infinite mystery that sits far beyond these numbers.

Since our conversation, I’ve been left with this simple, but salient thought – we’re incredibly small. But further to that, I’ve been pondering the notion that there’s a good kind of small, and perhaps we are it. We may be just one of the eight-billion inhabitants of a ‘pale blue dot’ in a universe that stretches far beyond the capacities of human understanding and measurement, but there’s a profound beauty in that. It does not equate to a feeling of non-consequentialism or oblivion, on the contrary, it is deeply empowering. It is, after all, the powerful reality upon which much of the twelve steps of recovery offered by AA/NA is built. There is a mysterious, and yet obviously tangible, power in coming face-to-face with our own small-ness, and surrendering to that which is deeper, higher, bigger than us.

Learning a little about Jennifer’s childhood living among the Ozark Mountains, with evenings spent gazing up at a canopy of stars that stretched from ‘horizon to horizon’, it was enchanting to hear about how her career has been an out-living of a childhood appreciation for the things that are so much bigger than us mere humans.

If you have a pull towards all things astronomy, this episode is undoubtedly for you. If you’ve ever pondered what science and faith look like when they’re not entering the ring from different corners, readying themselves for a show-down, this episode is also for you. If you’re craving enchantment of the most cosmic kind, this episode is for you too.

This conversation with Dr Jennifer Wiseman will be a refreshing antidote to the disillusion that comes with assuming we are the centre of our universe.

Listen to the Re-enchanting episode now.

Review

Books

Culture

Ethics

Film & TV

8 November 2024

4 min read

Small Things Like These: putting the spotlight on backstage goodness

What it means for a film to be good.

Kevin Hargaden

Kevin is a social theologian studying ethics and economics.

The gaunt face of a dishevelled man stares into the distance

A ‘stellar’ Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong.

Lionsgate.

Small Things Like These is a novella by the Irish writer Claire Keegan. Published in 2021, it compresses a remarkable story into 128 pages. Acclaimed widely by critics and readers, it follows Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant living in the small County Wexford town of New Ross in 1986, as Christmas approaches. While delivering coal to the local convent, Bill makes an alarming discovery. Memories of his childhood begin to press in on him and he finds himself in an existential crisis.

Like her previous (very short) work, Foster, Small Things Like These is an understated book with a searing moral clarity. And just as Foster was adapted for the screen – in the astonishing Irish-language film The Quiet Girl – a movie version of Small Things Like These is now likely showing at a cinema near you.

The movie is built around a stellar performance from Cillian Murphy. It would be criminal if his name is not featured among the shortlists when awards season comes round. Many of the film’s most arresting scenes feature close-ups of his face as Bill wrestles with the implications of his discovery and the phantoms of his past. The effect is that the film serves as an almost literal portrait of what it means to be a decent person.

The story begins with Bill making a delivery to the convent. He sees a mother drop off her screaming daughter to the back door, where she is met and manhandled inside by a nun. The teenager protests passionately, but to no avail. The viewer understands that this girl has “fallen pregnant”, to use the Hiberno-English idiom that was so common in the twentieth century. She has been dispatched by her family to this institution to serve out the months of pregnancy and to remove any shame or taint from their reputation. Bill watches as the girl shouts out for her father, who is entirely absent.

And, after a tense interaction with an aggressive nun, he goes home to his five girls and his wife, clearly shaken.

A few days later, unable to sleep, haunted by memories of his own childhood being raised by a single mother, with an absent father, relying on the kindness of a wealthy local landowner, he begins his deliveries before dawn. As he deposits peat briquettes in the coal shed of the convent, he discovers a teenaged girl abandoned in the corner of the tiny, filthy room. She is in deep distress and Bill responds instinctively, wrapping his coat around her shoulders and bringing her inside to the convent.

While the existence of Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes were not a secret in twentieth century Ireland, the exact details of their operations were not widely understood. With these two encounters, so close together, and his own personal biography as the son of a woman who was subject to exactly the same marginalising dynamics, Bill can no longer be satisfied to turn a blind eye to the oppression and alienation endured by those sent for reformation.

It evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

The film gathers momentum as Bill is forced to confront the way his mother had been treated for “falling pregnant” and the reality experienced by girls the same age as his daughters who were in a similar situation. In the midst of his existential angst, he finds little solace in the no-nonsense pragmatism of his wife who reminds him “there are things you have to ignore” to get on in life. He is taken aside by his local publican, a woman who has similarly scrabbled up from humble origins to establish a thriving business and cautioned to not make trouble for the nuns since “their fingers are in every pie in the town”.

I will refrain from fully revealing every detail of the film’s plot. But this element of the screenplay – where Claire Keegan along with Enda Walsh – draw out the sense in which the oppressive ecclesial institutions were enabled and even sanctioned by the wider population is exceptionally well done. The film does not pull any punches on the evils that were committed in the name of churches in Ireland. Indeed, if anything, the presentation of the nuns veers too far towards caricatures of pure malevolence. But with surgical precision, it evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

And that is the lasting significance of this film. Toni Morrison has spoken about how it can seem harder to write about goodness than evil. “Evil has a blockbuster audience; goodness lurks backstage.” In Small Things Like This, Claire Keegan introduces us to a hardworking small business owner who treats his staff well, a loving father who seeks to care for his wife, a man who lives down a back street of a provincial town in an overlooked part of a small island on the periphery of Europe. And in this very definitively backstage context, he is presented as heroic in his pursuit of the Good.

We all fancy ourselves to be the one person who would stand up and oppose systems of oppression if we ever found ourselves enmeshed in them. Cillian Murphy’s depiction of Bill Furlong whispers to us that we likely are enmeshed in just that way and are choosing not to notice. Small Things Like These is a heavy film that somehow liberates. It reminds us that there is, within each of us, this appetite for seeing the Good and bring brave enough to do it. It is worth your time far more than any competing blockbuster.