FINDING GOD IN ALL THINGS
By David McMahon, Communications Manager, Society of Jesus in Australia
August 2010: During the Australian winter, two visiting American astronomers, one of whom also happens to be a Jesuit, decide to spend a few days at picturesque Sevenhill in South Australia’s Clare Valley, the mid-19th century spiritual home of the Jesuits in Australia. Given the prevailing drought, Br Guy Consolmagno SJ is delighted at the prospect of observing the stars from the Southern Hemisphere.
Alas, that’s not quite how it turned out.
As he tells it, “We had twelve days of torrential rain. We didn’t see a thing. The Sevenhill priest says a massive Thanksgiving for the two American astronomers who broke the drought.”
July 2025: Br Guy is back at Sevenhill, exactly 15 years later. As it turns out, there is a real sense of déjà vu about the trip.
“Once again, they’re desperate for rain. They’re facing a drought again. This time, I had two really good nights and a few periods on other nights where it was beautiful for about 20 minutes before clouding over. On my last two days, it rained the entire time, which is what they needed. So yes, I ended the drought yet again.”
What took this star-gazing Drought Whisperer to Sevenhill the first time?
Actually, the story goes back to when he was in his early thirties, when he was heading to Kenya for a stint with the US Peace Corps, and went telescope shopping with his best friend, Dan M. Davis. “Dan and I met when I was doing a post-doctorate at MIT and Dan was a grad student. He was an avid amateur astronomer, and he knew that in Kenya, the skies would be gorgeous. But after looking at about five things in the sky, the Moon and a few planets, I realised I’m not taking advantage of the telescope, because I don’t know where else to point it. What are the really good things to look at through a small telescope? You don’t just look at every star. I mean, there are 2,000 stars you can see with the naked eye on a good night, and 1,950 of them are boring. Where do you find the 50 fun ones?
“So when I got back to America, Dan and I decided to write a book about how to find cool things using a telescope. It’s called Turn Left at Orion and it’s actually been very successful. We’d been through a few editions and we decided in 2010 that we were going to do a complete revision of the book. By then, it had been out for 20 years, three editions, great success. So now we’re going to do a bigger edition and really do the Southern Hemisphere stars up right. That’s when I heard about Sevenhill, a Jesuit retreat house and winery in a very dark site about two hours north of Adelaide. But because of the rain, we saw nothing. We had to come back the following December!
“But there are so many great things about seeing the skies in the Southern Hemisphere. The earth is round, so if you’re on the northern half of the earth, the southern half of the sky is blocked by the earth and vice versa. To be perfectly honest, the constellations are richer in the Northern Hemisphere, but of the ten greatest deep sky objects you see with a small telescope, seven of them, I’d say, are in the Southern Hemisphere.
“For instance, there is a globular cluster in Centaurus called the Omega Centauri cluster. It’s probably the nucleus of a captured galaxy. But it is the most spectacular cluster you can see anywhere. As our book will explain, you take the Southern Cross, you jump from this star to that star, two more steps and there is this little fuzzy thing that you can see with the naked eye. You use a pair of binoculars and it jumps out at you. And in a small telescope, it makes your jaw drop.
“It’s great stuff, I love it. And you don’t even need a telescope, you can just walk outside, look up, and if the night is dark you’ll go, ‘Oh my God.’ You have to embrace the emotion of, ‘Oh my God.’ Because that’s why you want to do it.
“Astronomy is a place where everybody can meet. Wherever you are in the world, whatever your politics are, whatever your religion is, everybody can look at the stars and have that sense that the universe is bigger than me and my problems. Astronomy is a unifying factor – after all, we all live under the same sky.
“What you do as a Jesuit is you make very clear to your superiors who you are, where you think God is calling, what you think your strengths are, what you think your weaknesses are, and then it’s up to them to process all of that with a bigger sense of what’s going on. And for them to say, ‘Yep, heard all of that. This is where you’re going.’ That’s obedience. It’s the toughest of the vows and it’s the most wonderful.” Photo: David McMahon
“Astronomy fascinated me when I was a kid. I was a post-war Baby Boomer. I started kindergarten the year that Sputnik was launched. By the time I finished high school, astronauts were walking on the Moon. Smart little kids were all going to be scientists. At the same time, I loved science fiction stories, adventures in space. But there was another factor for me – my father had also loved astronomy when he was growing up, but as the son of an Italian immigrant in Boston during the Depression, that kind of aspirational career wasn’t going to happen. Then he served as a navigator in B-17 bombers during the war, so he learned astronomy to navigate.
“The very first time I saw the Milky Way was at my father’s shoulder. I was probably three and a half years old. In those days, we lived in Detroit. Michigan is surrounded by lakes, big lakes, small lakes. Everybody’s got summer houses. We had a summer house well away from the city, on the shores of Lake Huron where it was wonderfully dark. And you could see the Milky Way.
“Even now, in this phase of my life, whether I’m looking for meteorites in Antarctica, whether I’m looking out of an aeroplane window, no matter where I am, there are different levels of joy. First of all, there’s the beauty of seeing the stars, as well as the fact that there are stars to be seen. Then there’s the memory of my father telling me about the stars. And there’s the memory of being a student, which was a very happy time of my life, learning the science behind the stars. And the memory of a little bit of research that I did once, maybe on that particular nebula, or on that particular part of the Moon. All of these different memories are layered together. And the more that I have, it just gets richer and richer and richer.
“The real miracles in my life as a scientist have been the people whom I keep running into and keep meeting, who seem to have precisely the perspective I require or just the piece of equipment that I need. I’ve got this little interest in the back of my head, and by accident I meet somebody who has just the knowledge that I don’t have, that can complement what I need. The real miracles are the people. Science is not done by a lone genius sitting in his basement, but by a community of people.
“There are times when God has had to give me a swift kick in the rear, but I’ve been smart enough to not try to kick back. I once had a retreat director who referred to it as divine coincidence. Just the thing that I needed, there was the door that was open precisely at the time that I was looking to run away from whatever it was, or to run towards whatever it was.
“I did my undergrad at MIT, my doctorate at Arizona. And then I was back in Boston as a researcher. After that, I went to Kenya, where the first thing I discovered was that I loved teaching. I then went back to America and got a teaching job at a lovely little school, a place called Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Loved it.
“At the same time, I’d been dating somebody and when I was in Kenya and she was in Boston, things were great. But when I returned and we were actually in the same room, things were not so great. We realised, ‘No, this isn’t meant to be.’ It took a while, but we figured this out. By now, I’m in my late thirties. Previously, when I was 18 and still at Boston College trying to figure out my life, I had thought about being a Jesuit priest, and God had made it quite clear to me, no, you don’t have the skills to be a priest.
“But I’d loved the Jesuits from my high school days. I also loved astronomy. And I realised there was a connection – the Jesuits have got the universities that I wanted to teach at. And I then remember that there are Brothers and that you don’t have to be a Father.
“I didn’t have the people skills to be a Father. People would come to me with their problems, and I realised I didn’t have great pastoral care instincts. It actually comes from having much too happy a childhood, I couldn’t relate to their problems. It’s like the issues surrounding faith and science. People want to know, ‘How do you resolve the conflict between faith and science?’ My reply was always. ‘What faith and science conflict? I’ve never experienced a conflict.’ I’ve actually had to study to figure out what people are talking about when they think there is a conflict. Because it’s not at all natural. It’s entirely artificial.
“I joined the Jesuits as a Brother. I’m all set to teach at university. I’m 37. God says yes this time. And not only God; my parents, the girls I’d been dating, they all said, ‘Yes, be a Jesuit.’ They knew me better than I knew myself. And they were right. It took me almost 20 years of bouncing around in life to finally find myself in the right place. So I finished two years as a novice, two more years studying philosophy.
“The very first time I saw the Milky Way was at my father’s shoulder. I was probably three and a half years old. In those days, we lived in Detroit. We had a summer house well away from the city, on the shores of Lake Huron where it was wonderfully dark. And you could see the Milky Way.” Photo: David McMahon
“So it’s now 1993. I’ve been a Jesuit four years, I’m 41 years old. I’m waiting for them to tell me which of the five universities in my Province they were going to send me to. And they said instead, ‘No, we have a letter from Rome signed by Father General. You’re being sent to the Vatican Observatory.’ Well, it wasn’t what I wanted, wasn’t what I was planning on. I actually wanted to teach. I didn’t jump for joy. Well, I jumped for joy only in the sense it was nice to know that you’re wanted.
“But I joined the Jesuits to be a Jesuit. I didn’t join the Jesuits to be an astronomer, or a professor or any of the other particular jobs I might’ve had. If they had told me to go to the inner city of Detroit and serve soup in a soup kitchen, I would have done it happily. I thought being an astronomer was in my past. Instead, I was being pulled to say, ‘Nope, that’s in your future too.’
“I didn’t push back. No, absolutely not. What you do as a Jesuit is you make very clear to your superiors who you are, where you think God is calling, what you think your strengths are, what you think your weaknesses are, and then it’s up to them to process all of that with a bigger sense of what’s going on. And for them to say, ‘Yep, heard all of that. This is where you’re going.’ That’s obedience. It’s the toughest of the vows and it’s the most wonderful. Going to Rome was the logical outcome of the trajectory that I was on.
“So I showed up in Rome really enthusiastic, not because it was what I’d always wanted, but because there was a sense that I was really being called. I hadn’t manipulated things for this, quite the contrary. No, this is where I was being called. As soon as I saw the letter from Rome, saying I was being sent to the Vatican Observatory, I laughed, because this is typical of what happens in the Jesuits. If you ever tell anybody, ‘The one place I really don’t want to go is …..’ well, that’s precisely where you’re going.
“For me, it was a confirmation that the intellectual life is a really important way of getting close to God. It’s not the only way, because serving soup in a soup kitchen is really important, but that’s not the only way to find God. Being a contemplative behind walls is really important, but it’s not the only way to find God. I’m a nerd, and there are some things I know I’m terrible at, like the reason I’m not a Father, the reason I’m not an engineer. But this was the gift I was given by God, and God is confirming that this is one other wonderful arena where we get to meet or I get to invite God.”
“There are times when God has had to give me a swift kick in the rear, but I’ve been smart enough to not try to kick back. I once had a retreat director who referred to it as divine coincidence.” Banner image: David McMahon
To enquire about becoming a Jesuit in Australia, contact vocations@sjasl.org.au and for more info, visit our Vocations page.