The organic wholeness of life as a monk of Portsmouth Abbey continuously enthralls me.  As a lay person, my life was divided into categories of focus: family, work, Daily Mass, exercise and recreation, each of which had its own special niche of time and location. As a monk, life unfolds daily in a natural rhythm beginning with communal prayer, spiritual reading, Mass, teaching or other assigned duties. Exercise and recreation just fit in wherever a suitable space exists. A few years ago when a daily run was part of my routine, a neighbor of the Monastery would see me jogging, sometimes at 9am on his way to work, or at 11am before lunch, or at 2pm or after evening prayer at 8pm. One day he asked how long my run was...five miles I said...how many times a day?...he queried..
.just once...I replied.

I was married for twenty five years. I have two daughters: Lisa, a Director of Outpatient Clinical Therapy for Teens; Lisa lives in Connecticut, and Michaela, a Health Care Advocate for patients with chronic debilitating disease; Michaela lives in North Carolina. After undergraduate school, I taught at Chemistry at Cranston West High School, in Rhode Island, for three years before returning to school myself. During graduate school, I taught part-time at Moses Brown and did a stint as an assistant professor at Rhode Island College.  I then joined Ciba-Geigy Corporation, an international chemical/pharmaceutical firm, where I had worked during my student and teaching days as a chemist after school and summers. I remained there for over twenty more years in a variety of chemical, environmental, and industrial safety positions until early retirement as a Corporate Director of Environmental Technology in 1991. I entered the monastery forty-five minutes after I left work on that last day.
 

Once I was walking the halls of Fordham, a Jesuit University, some years ago, I encountered a number of framed posters of its Jesuit professors with just such pithy résumés as in the title of this article, except they were all in reverse order, so that being a Jesuit became the surprise punch line!  I don’t know why, but some people think it is strange that someone with a science background could be a monk; I find both have fit very well together in my personal journey.
I have always been curious. Like many people, I wondered: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? How shall I get there?  The answer to these complex queries began to be resolved for me in the first grade by Sr. Mary Victoire, R.S.M.  She explained that “God made me in His image and likeness, to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him, in this life and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven”.
 So much for the big issues! Now all I had to do is figure out, how was I going to serve Him? Actually, I got quite a nudge in the direction of science when I was in the ninth grade. In those years, studies in law, medicine, and seminary required four years of high school Latin, and often more Latin in college, as well. I could almost hear God saying to me, “I am not calling you to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a priest; because, if I was, I would have made Latin a lot more fun for you.” So, I took the path God had laid out for me; in high school I chose the science sequence and not the classical one.  In college, the Chemistry Department was very strong and it seemed to offer the best potential for personal development.  Chemistry is a very intuitive science, not just a mathematical exercise; chemistry fired my imagination, so it was an obvious choice.
I taught public high school chemistry for three years after college, but these were the post-Sputnik years and government funding was readily available for graduate study in science. I was able to return to college with grants and fellowships that nearly equaled the salary I had been earning as a teacher. When I graduated, I knew that I loved teaching, but, I was curious to find out what life as a scientist in industry would be like. That curiosity led me to a twenty-five year career in chemical/pharmaceutical development, manufacturing, and environmental protection.



Scientists are people who are curious. Richard Feynman was the physicist who famously demonstrated to a Senate committee how the cold temperature of the liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuels caused the catastrophic failure in the shuttle, Challenger. He dipped an “O” ring fuel seal in a glass of ice water to demonstrate how the cold deformed it and allowed it to leak fuel. Feynman once wrote a poem for his philosophy exam at MIT entitled, “I Wonder Why”:
     “I Wonder Why. I Wonder Why.
          I Wonder Why I Wonder.
                I Wonder Why I Wonder Why
                     I Wonder Why I Wonder!”
        This sense of wonder is the spark that ignites the scientific mind; it is the reason that so many fine minds have devoted their lives to the search for truth. What I find so saddening is that in this search some, but not all scientists have focused exclusively on seeking scientific truth.
Many scientists, and especially physicists, have been enthralled in recent years by the observation that there are a number of exact physical constants in the universe which, if they were not set within precisely defined limits, the universe and life itself would not be possible. Further, if earth was not located in the position it is in, as the third planet from the sun, there could be no human life. These scientists call this “The Anthropic Principle”, the concept that the universe appears to be expressly designed for man’s existence!
 Is this true? Is this a scientific truth? Actually, the term scientific truth is a misnomer; science is a way of examining physical reality and as such, by definition, excludes everything else. Thus love, beauty, goodness, and, alas, even truth itself, are outside the realm of science. So when speaking of a scientific truth, what is meant is that collection of thoroughly tested and closely observed phenomena that can be explained by a model called a scientific theory, or, if repeatedly tested and not contradicted, a scientific principle, or law.
And yet, valid as a theory or law may seem to be, if it is disproven by a single example, it must be modified, or even discarded, for a newer theory that more nearly fits all observations, including the one that upset the original theory.  As Albert Einstein pointedly said, “No number of experiments can prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”  So, if we truly seek to know the “why” for everything, we cannot limit our search for truth to those things that are physically measureable.
This has not always been a problem. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) wrote that for all things, there were “Four Causes”:
       “The Material Cause” – made of which substance?
“The Proximate Cause”- made by which agent?
“The Formal Cause”- made according to what form or design?
         “The Final Cause”– made for what purpose?
Thus, the dining room table is made of maple; by a cabinetmaker; with a standard 30”x 60” top, 30” high, with four turned corner legs, and seating for six; for both formal and informal dining (but  allowing  for other non-designed uses such as homework).  And, remembering our science courses and the lesson from Sr. Mary Victoire, we ourselves were created from human genes; by our parents and by means of a genetic DNA code, or, alternatively, in the image and likeness of God; “to know God, to love Him, and to serve Him, in this life and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven”.
        What happened, then, to this happy continuum in our seeking the “why” in our search for truth and meaning?  In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon asserted that only the “Material Cause” (made of which substance) and the “Proximate Cause” (made by which agent) were able to be examined by scientific means and were therefore the sole purview of science. The “Formal Cause” (made according to what design) and the “Final Cause” (made for what purpose) were beyond the scope of experimental verification and were metaphysical in nature, and were thus the proper subjects of philosophy, not science. Of course, as with love, beauty, goodness and truth, it does not mean that they are not real; it just means that science lacks a format in which to study or evaluate them.  Or, as our Conceptual Physics textbook so eloquently phrases it, “Science is about Cosmic Order; Religion is about Cosmic Purpose.”
        And yet love, beauty, goodness and truth are not only real, they are precisely what gives life its meaning! The ancient Greeks were very much attuned to beauty as an object of love and something that was to be imitated and reproduced in their lives, architecture, education and politics.
The poet John Keats, in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, put it this way:
                ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all
                  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
And, Jacques Maritain wrote:
"But let one touch the good and Love, like the saints, the True, like an Aristotle, Beautiful, like a Dante or a Bach or a Giotto, then contact is made, souls communicate."
Each year, in the very beginning of our Conceptual Physics course, I explain my philosophy to the new physics students. I tell them that this is my retirement career and my plan is to have fun studying physics with them, and to love them. Once, a boy raised his hand and said, “Brother Francis, you don’t love me; you don’t even know me.” “Actually”, I said, “that makes it even easier.”
Another student asked, “So, do you believe that we were created by God, or by evolution?” “That’s an easy one”, I replied; “I believe that God created evolution.”
So, here am I, Brother Francis, O.S.B., by profession a religious and by profession a scientist and teacher; I have a foot in each camp, and I am not restricted by either in the search for truth and meaning.