I have been in the presence of genius.

I mentioned two weeks ago that Jennie and I are in Chautauqua, NY. We’re serving as hosts at the Disciples of Christ guest houses, our denomination’s gift of affordable housing for pilgrims from across the country who are soaking up a week’s worth of worship, lectures, entertainment, and recreation. My duties include making coffee, taking out trash and recycling, draining the dehumidifier, setting up rooms for worship, presentations, and discussions, answering questions, staying out of Jennie’s way in her dawn to darkness upkeep of kitchen and laundry, and being of whatever help I can to Diane Ballard, a Central Christian, Lexington, member who, accompanied by her husband Dan, is doing a stellar job as Host and Administrator. 

In exchange for my doing the above, I get to sit in the company of genius. This is a good gig.

Julie Parsons, another of our Central, Lexington, members, is here this week. Julie and I chatted on Sunday morning in the hour between my emptying the dehumidifier and setting up chairs for the worship service. She told me her oldest son, Stephen, is in Thailand giving a talk. 

He is applying his prodigious computer acumen (my words, not Julie’s) to the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition that is employing the brightest digital minds worldwide to figure out a way to read the Herculaneum scrolls.

According to a National Endowment for the Humanities news release,  

“The [Herculaneum] scrolls are from a cache of more than 1,800 charred and carbonized papyri discovered in 1752 at a villa in Herculaneum thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Buried and protected by volcanic ash for thousands of years, the Herculaneum scrolls represent the only large-scale library from the classical world that has survived in its entirety. The papyri are known to contain significant philosophical and literary texts from ancient Greek and Roman scholars, but attempts to unroll them have invariably damaged or destroyed them, turning the coal-like relics to dust. For more than 270 years the remaining, intact papyri have been unreadable – making them one of the most tantalizing mysteries in archaeology.”

 Stephen, under the tutelage of his University of Kentucky professor and mentor Brent Seales, has developed groundbreaking software that enables researchers to plumb the interior contents of the charred scrolls that resemble charcoal logs (See photo below) without having to unroll them. Think of programming an x-ray machine that can extract some of the long lost and thought-to-be irretrievable treasures of the ages. He’s unlocking a 2,000 year old mystery.

Julie told me all this without braggadocio or bravado. How a proud mother can do that is no small feat, a reflection of Julie’s quiet humility.

Read it for yourself at https://www.neh.gov/news/students-decipher-2000-year-old-herculaneum-scrolls.  See Stephen explaining his work far more eloquently than I can at https://www.neh.gov/news/students-decipher-2000-year-old-herculaneum-scrolls. 

When Julie told me of Stephen’s little side-gig scouring the remnants of a volcano by computer, I was suddenly acutely aware that I’ve been sitting in the presence of genius these past several days. In addition to hearing about Stephen’s work second-hand, I’ve had first-hand exposure to other geniuses at work. To wit:

• Feryal Ozel.  As a child in Turkey, she was gifted a book that had a picture of an atom in it. “At that moment,” she said, “I knew I wanted to be an atomic physicist.” (Sheesh. I wanted to be mailman). As she grew up, she turned her attention from the small to the large and became an astrophysicist. Dr. Ozel told 3,000 of us how she and her team figured out how to photograph the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Then she showed us the computer-generated graphic. Plus, she explained it in a way I could understand. Genius.

• Frenchman Laurent Ballesta has dived beneath the ocean’s surface in locations at depths and for lengths of time no one has ever dived before … and took pictures!  From deep beneath the Antarctic ice cap to an unexplored reef off the coast of France to I forget where else, he and his team have discovered life forms previously unknown or, in the case of the prehistoric Gombessa fish, thought to be extinct. His life’s mission? Solve scientific mysteries, overcome diving challenges, and capture unprecedented images. Genius.

• Canadian Alison Criscitiello is an ice core scientist and high-altitude mountaineer  who scaled Mt. Logan, the second highest peak in North America (19,551′), and extracted a 1,072-foot-long ice core, the study of whose thousands of years of layers, like the rings of a tree, hold invaluable data about climate change over the eons that may inform our future stewardship of the planet.   

I’ve been in the presence of artistic genius as well.

• Kate Hamill, playwright and actor, premiered her play The Light and the Dark, the story of Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the most acclaimed painters of the 17th century. She rose from being the victim of sexual abuse by a male artist to a legacy of work painting women in hues of courage, strength, and self-determination.

• The Rev. Laura Everett, last week’s preacher, interpreted five Bible passages through the lens of textiles. That’s right. Adam and Eve’s sewn-together fig leaves. Tamar’s tearing of her robe after having been raped by her stepbrother. The white robes of those who “have come out of the great ordeal” in Revelation 7:14.  Hers were absolutely brilliant interpretations that a non-seamstress, ham-fisted male like myself would never have had his mind and heart opened to were it not for her exegetical genius. 

• This week, the Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III is in the pulpit. His soaring oratory, enthralling content, and ebullient delight in the gospel has stirred the entire amphitheater with a joyous contagion. Said my friend and respected preacher colleague Rick Frost after Dr. Moss’ Monday stemwinder, “I’m 82 years old and I’ve never heard anything like that!”

• Novelist Amy Tan’s (The Joy Luck Club) yearlong exploration of the birds in her backyard, learning to listen to them, learning how to paint them, and telling us about them. 

• Sandra Clark, CEO of StoryCorps (Our mission: to help us believe in each other by illuminating the humanity and possibility in us all — one story at a time). Poignant. Humorous. Ennobling.  

• Cassandra Trenary, a ballet dancer who pirouetted and plied (and all the other French words connoting graceful movement) for the better part of 45 minutes in sync with a complex symphonic work masterfully performed by the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra.   

• National treasure Wynton Marsalis’ hour-long lecture, a verbal symphony harmonizing history, musicology, sociology, philosophy, and spirituality– how music in general and jazz music in particular is capable of gathering our disparate human family and cultures into a chorus of longing, celebration, and hope. Tonight we get to hear his magnum opus, All Rise, performed live with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, youth musicians from CHQ’s Music Festival Orchestra, and members of the Buffalo Philharmonic.

Too many are cowed by voices and movements hell-bent on destruction. Being in the presence of genius fills me with hope. What all these brilliant bodies, minds, and souls have in common is they are investing themselves in the common good. They are construction workers in the best and fullest sense of the word. By their brains, brawn, and bold audacity of their labor, they are building a better world. They are winsome sources and forces for the good: uniting, affirming, uplifting, delighting, illumining, encouraging, and edifying.  

I am hereby posting a sign along the byway we are travelling this election year.

Behold: Geniuses at Work.

 So, keep your chin up.  And whatever it is you’re gifted to do, do it well, do it benevolently, and do it with gusto. As somebody said, “Everybody is a ten somewhere.”

That’s enough. Gotta roll the recycling bins to the curb.