Advent Stories of Science and Faith
Advent Stories of Science and Faith
ECLAS consider the connections between science and faith this Advent.
With contributions from the ECLAS 'Stories of science and faith' team.
The project Equipping Christian Leadership in an Age of Science has been working for over a decade to equip Christian leaders with the tools, context and skills they need to engage confidently with science in their ministry and personal faith. As part of this project, ECLAS has been writing a series of short resources for churches and individuals interested in learning more about the relationship between science and faith. Linked to different seasons of the church calendar, and ideal as the basis for small group study, they provide new perspectives on how we think about science, faith, and the connections between them. The three stories in this series are shortened versions of some of these.
1. Steering by starlight
The Cree people, indigenous to Canada, tell a winter story of the Fisher and the Sky Bear. The tale begins in a time of perpetual ice and snow; the warmth of summer has been stolen and locked away in the high, cold sky. Determined to retrieve the Earth’s warmth, the Fisher climbs into the sky along with his companion, the bear. During their daring mission, the Fisher is struck by an arrow; but before falling, he leaps into the heavens where he is transformed into a star alongside the bear, the two of them taking their places in the Plough constellation.
This story reflects the deep connection that the Cree people share with the created world. Each spring, the bear reappears in its constellation, signalling the return of warmth; while in autumn, the bear is wounded, and the reddening leaves fall from the trees. Within the Christian faith, the annual return of the Star of Bethlehem signifies light and renewal. Indeed, C. S. Lewis’s famous re-working of the gospel narrative echoes the Cree story in having Narnia held captive in eternal winter prior to its restoration by Aslan.
The stars have been seen as guides, offering comfort, meaning and direction, across many different times and cultures. Escaped slaves in North America travelled under the cover of darkness, plotting their course to safety according to the constellations. Lovers parted by war take comfort in the fact that they see the same stars at night. Over the centuries, the wise men’s pursuit of a single star was transformed into complex techniques of navigation based upon the mapping of the night sky. And yet the simple sense of guidance under the single canopy of God’s creation remained.
The connection between the intimacy of God and the immensity of the cosmos is captured in a pair of verses from the Psalms:
He heals the broken-hearted,
and binds up their wounds.
He determines the number of the stars;
he gives to all of them their names. (Psalm 147:3-4)
2. What Mary and Elizabeth knew
Luke’s gospel tells the beautiful and affecting story of an encounter between Mary, still trying to make sense of her stunning news from the angel, and her cousin Elizabeth, in the sixth month of her own pregnancy. There is an instant and powerful connection between the two women. Elizabeth’s very body testifies to the power of God as it registers the first movement of her own, late-life child. We imagine Mary with her hand on the bump: yes, I feel it too. When pregnant people meet, there can be an unspoken understanding between them, born of the shared experience of the profound changes that are unfolding within. Neither the partners of these people nor their doctors can quite understand what they really, truly know.
In some times and places, the lack of medical empathy has had terrible consequences. In eighteenth-century Europe, as men took over the profession of midwifery, female practitioners were pushed out. For those who could not afford the attention of a doctor, their only source of help was lost. Pregnant women were reduced to objects, illustrations in medical textbooks. Their experiences, their voices, were lost; they no longer knew their own bodies. White women were told that pain was the result of their anxiety. Black women were assumed not to suffer much pain at all. Research shows that Black women continue to suffer worse birth outcomes than white mothers, ignored and disbelieved by medical professionals when they raise concerns about what their bodies are telling them.
In response to these injustices, projects have been set up around the world – from Uganda to the US – that provide peer-based support to birthing women. The results show that adding peer-based support to conventional medicine brings dramatically improved birth outcomes for women and babies, not least in the emotional and psychological experience. These inspiring interventions, against their backdrop of racial and gender-based wrongs, echo the great hymn to justice that Mary sings in the Magnificat. Thanks to these women and their allies, medical science is changing, slowly, to reinstate something of the embodied, peer knowledge of which Luke’s gospel speaks.
3. Counting for Christmas
The census called by Caesar Augustus, precipitating the dangerous journey of Mary and Joseph, is a compulsory scene in any nativity play, almost akin to a boo-hiss moment in a Christmas pantomime. Yet the churches in which we worship have also been engaged in gathering population data over the centuries - data that is now being put to new and surprising use.
Church records of baptisms, marriages and deaths far predate the census-gathering efforts of modern governments. In early seventeenth-century London, Parish Clerks were charged with the task of publishing weekly mortality reports, compiled from church ledgers. Their labour created a unique picture of life and death in the city, granting historical visibility even to the poor. A tantalising parish record from London, dated April 1665, records one Margarit [sic], daughter of a doctor, as perhaps the first plague death in the British epidemic of 1665-66.
Church records allow today’s researchers to study fertility rates, social mobility, and the changes of large groups over long time periods. Their data has yielded new insights into the course of past epidemics and pandemics, with possible lessons for the present. Meanwhile, the ledgers of missionary churches around the British Empire tell a sombre medical story: the transmission of European diseases - smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis - to indigenous peoples. On Walpole Island in Southern Ontario, the ancestral home of the Odawa, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples, Anglican parish registers reveal that, between 1850 and 1885, more than three in five deaths were due to diseases carried by the incoming settlers. Such tragic data, however, is now also used to understand and improve the health of living First Nations peoples across Canada, enabling researchers to disentangle the social and economic factors that continue to shape community health profiles in the aftermath of colonialism.
Without knowing it, crib service congregations may themselves be sitting in a kind of census bureau, only metres away from dusty yet extensive records. And just like the census in the Christmas story, the Church’s data collection can testify both to human injustice and to unexpected sources of healing.
Charlotte Sleigh is Professor of Science Humanities at University College London and Associate Priest in the parish of St Martin and St Paul, Canterbury. She is also a research consultant for the project Equipping Christian Leadership in an Age of Science.
Sarah Qidwai is a Postdoctoral Research Associate for the project Equipping Christian Leadership in an Age of Science at the University of York. She is a historian of science and religion whose work explores cross-cultural encounters, missionary science, and knowledge exchange in the nineteenth century.
