I interviewed John Kartje in early September in his office at Saint Ben’s on West Irving Park Road. The photo is a digital montage by Paul L. Merideth.
Another thing I would point to, when I started high school was the year that Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos was launched. I actually lived in his dorm at the University of Chicago; that’s where he was a college student. Not by choice–I mean it was just coincidence. He was a good astronomer, but the guy was a real poet. He used Beethoven for his sound tracks. This was music I hadn’t heard before, and at Bishop Noll I began reading Shakespeare, who uses a lot of astronomy in his writing. And everything kind of opened up there for me. By the end of high school I knew that astronomy was what I wanted to do.
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So I did OK in college, got a NASA scholarship to pay for grad school, and then worked as a postdoc for two years. What I worked on, in the broadest sense, was the formation of galaxies. What we believe now is that at the center of most galaxies are very massive black holes. As stuff falls into the black hole it radiates energy. Think of rush hour, everyone trying to get into the entrance to an el platform or something. As people get closer and closer together they bump into each other, and if you had a thermometer and took the temperature of the crowd right by the doorway, you’d find it’s hotter than it is two blocks up Wabash Avenue. As dust and gas and stuff begin to fall into the black hole, they do the same thing: they come together, they knock off each other, they create friction and heat. But instead of just being a few degrees hotter, the temperatures are just enormous. I mean millions of degrees, billions of degrees. And so when we look at very young galaxies, we oftentimes see microwave radiation, visible light, X rays, gamma rays–some of the most energetic particles in the universe we see coming out of these things. They often look like a jet coming out of the center of the galaxy.
That was certainly a defining moment in our family. But I think it was also a defining moment for me personally, in the sense of realizing that life comes with no guarantees. Not in a gruesome way or a macabre sense, but just that none of us know when our number is up, so to speak. And that attitude was kind of fixed at that point, and it’s always made it if not easy at least easier for me to do things like make changes or face decisions. It’ll sound a little strange to say, but it was kind of a liberating experience, having that perspective on time, or a lifetime. When I made decisions to do things like, number one, go to graduate school for science, when I knew the odds of being able to actually support myself in that were probably relatively slim, it didn’t feel like such a risky thing. And then similarly the decision to do this, to walk away from that and go to seminary. While it wasn’t the easiest decision I ever made, I didn’t have the baggage that I sometimes sense with other people.
Even with those of us who are living I think there’s a sense that we’re tapping into something larger than ourselves. And again I go back to the experience of love. I mean, we say that God is love, and that’s a Christian insight; we don’t say God is loving, we don’t say God is the best lover, we say God is love. I’m the youngest of seven children. One of the advantages of being the youngest is you get to watch all your siblings go through everything ahead of you. And as each one of them became parents, I can’t even begin to describe the transformation that I saw in them. What does it mean to live for the sake of others? I think parents, good parents, that’s a never-ending road for them. And I can see it in other things: you know, what are marriages that really seem to do well? It’s when no one person is doing all the giving or doing all the taking. The people can sacrifice for the sake of each other.
