He searches for sources of interference, which can come from something as simple as a spark plug or an electric fence. And when Niday runs across illegal wireless signals or other electronics, he asks residents to desist.

“We just go in and ask them to turn it off, and leave it off,” he said. “People are usually pretty cooperative.”

If they don’t, he can send a report to the Federal Communications Commission. In 1958, the FCC created a 13,000-square-mile quiet zone to shield radio telescopes in Green Bank and Sugar Grove, W.Va., from harmful man-made interference, allowing scientists to study sounds emanating from galaxies all around the universe.

Cellphones, Wi-Fi, radio, even certain electronics are all regulated. And there’s not a single cellphone tower to be found for miles. The entire U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone straddles the border between Virginia and West Virginia.

Bob Sheets has spent his entire life living in the shadow of the giant telescope -- literally. It’s visible from nearly every window of his home, and looms over his field of cows.

A retired English teacher from the area, Sheets is quite aware that people might consider him “road kill on the technology highway,” as he puts it, but says the National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a great neighbor. He doesn’t think outsiders mind much either.

“Most people that come to visit are happy to turn their cellphone off and get away from it all for a while. It seems to reduce their anxiety,” he said.

The remote town of Green Bank sits smack in the middle of the Allegheny Mountain Range, situated in a valley in the mountains that is naturally protected from many of the radio signals flying around.

It’s the closest community to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which runs the Green Bank Telescope. One-and-a-half times taller than the Statue of Liberty, the radio telescope listens into space.

Telescope director Karen O’Neil explained: “We listen to galaxies, not just our own, and by doing so, try to understand how these galaxies were formed.”

Michael Holstine, operations manager, says it takes on some of the biggest questions of our time -- and the quiet zone is the perfect place to do it.

“We‘ve been able to peer back to just after the Big Bang, 13.9 billion to 14 billion years ago,” he said. “We need quiet to gather all the signals that are being supplied to us by the universe. Green Bank is just about the quietest place in the country.”

Dementia
Their world is real to them

The time is here, something dreaded in point of fact,
he is entering a phrase wherein he will become very confused,
paranoid, combative and  filled with deep fear, anger and rage,
then, the caregiver has to help as best as can be done,
a war of sorts, between the ones caring for,
and the one being helped but does not know it,
worlds in collision, a horrible time, but something real,
that has to be gotten through,
so shutting down helps, though I personally hate it,
yet how else can it be done, this dealing with human pain,
confusion, dementia, that only gets worse as time goes on?

For the world of the demented is real to them,
just as my world is to me, I just have others who agree with me,
communication difficult if not impossible and it only gets worse
for those in confusion with no way out,
this seeking to reach out to assuage their pain,
 but it is impossible for the one suffering,
so help is given the best it can, being seen as something different
by the one receiving aid.

It is a human situation, a painful one, in a life often filled with pain,
is there no end to this dance? 

Yes there is; death is not always the enemy, it can be the bringer of peace,
and those who have faith, something more.

When a man constantly looks and looks at himself in the mirror of his own acts, his spiritual double vision splits him into two people. And if he strains his eyes hard enough, he forgets which one is real. In fact, reality is no longer found either in himself or in his shadow. The substance has gone out of itself into the shadow, and he has become two shadows instead of one real person.

Then the battle begins. Whereas one shadow was meant to praise the other, now one shadow accuses the other. The activity that was meant to exalt him, reproaches and condemns him. It is never real enough. Never active enough. The less he is able to be the more he has to do. He becomes his own slave driver-a shadow whipping a shadow to death, because it cannot produce reality, infinitely substantial reality, out of his own nonentity.

Thomas Merton
No Man is an Island

May the Gifts of the Holy Spirit
bring fire to the earth
so that the presence of God
may be seen
in a new light,
in new places,
in new ways.

May our own hearts
burst into flame
so that no obstacle,
no matter how great,
ever obstructs the message
of the God within each of us.

May we come to trust
the Word of God in our heart,
to speak it with courage,
to follow it faithfully
and to fan it to flame in others.

May the Jesus
who filled women
with his Holy Spirit
fill the world and the church
with new respect
for women's power and presence.

Give me, Great God,
a sense of the Breath of Spirit
within me as I...
(State the intention
in your own life at this time
for which you are praying.)

Amen.

Joan Chittister, OSB

Precisely in this light, the Psalm becomes a luminous hymn that the Christian Liturgy raises to the Risen One on the festive day that commemorates the Passover of the Lord.

2. Psalm 110[109] has two parts, both of which are characterized by the presence of a divine oracle. The first oracle (cf. vv. 1-3) is addressed to the sovereign on the day of his solemn enthronement "at the right hand" of God. that is, next to the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple of Jerusalem. The reminder that the king was "begotten" by the Lord was part of the official protocol for his coronation, and acquired for Israel the symbolic value of investiture and protection, since the king was God's lieutenant in the defence of justice (cf. v. 3).

Of course, in the Christian interpretation, that divine "begetting" actually takes place and presents Jesus Christ as the true Son of God. This is likewise what happened in the Christian interpretation of another famous royal-messianic psalm, the second in the Psaltery, where one reads this divine oracle: "You are my Son. It is I who have begotten you this day" (Ps 2: 7).

3. On the other hand, the second oracle in Psalm 110[109] has a priestly connotation (cf. v. 4). The office of king formerly also included ritual functions, not only according to the Levitic priesthood but also following another connection: that of the priesthood of Melchizedek, the sovereign-priest of Salem, the pre-Israelitic Jerusalem (cf. Gn 14: 17-20).

In the Christian vision, the Messiah becomes the model of a perfect, supreme priesthood. The Letter to the Hebrews, in its central section, exalted this priestly ministry "after the order of Melchizedek" (5: 10), seeing it fully incarnate in the person of Christ.

4. The first oracle is taken up several times in the New Testament to celebrate Jesus' messianic role (cf. Mt 22: 44; 26: 64; Acts 2: 34-35; I Cor 15: 25-27; Heb 1: 13). Christ himself, before the high priest and the Hebraic Sanhedrin, was to refer explicitly to our Psalm, proclaiming that he would henceforth "sit at the right hand of divine power", as it also says in Psalm 110[109] (Mk 14: 62; cf. 12: 36-37).

We will return to this Psalm on our journey through the texts of the Liturgy of the Hours. Now, at the end of our brief presentation of this messianic hymn, let us reaffirm its Christological interpretation.

5. Let us do so with the syntheses that St Augustine offers us. In his Exposition on Psalm 109,which he gave during Lent in the year 412, he describes the Psalm as a true prophecy of the divine promises regarding Christ. The famous Father of the Church said: "It was necessary to know the only-begotten Son of God, who was to come among men, to take flesh and become a man through the nature he took on: he was to die, to rise again and to ascend into Heaven, where he was to sit at the right hand of the Father and fulfil all he had promised among the peoples.... All this, therefore, had to be prophesied, had to be foretold, had to be signaled as destined to occur, in order not to give rise to fear by coming like a bolt from the blue, but rather to be anticipated with faith and hope.

This Psalm fits into the context of these promises; it foretells in clear and explicit terms the coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, of whom we cannot have the slightest doubt that he was the Christ proclaimed" (Exposizioni sui Salmi, III, Rome, 1976, pp. 951, 953).

6. Let us now address our prayer to the Father of Jesus Christ, the one King and perfect and eternal Priest, so that he may make us a people of priests and prophets of peace and love, a people that praises Christ, King and Priest, who sacrificed himself to reconcile in himself, in one body, the whole of humanity, creating the new man (cf. Eph 2: 15-16).

Blessed John Paul II
8 August 2004

[downloadable copy]

Psalm 110(109)
The Messiah, king and priest
Christ’s reign will last until all his enemies are made subject to him (1 Corinthians 15:25)

The Lord's revelation to my Master:
"Sit on my right:
your foes I will put beneath your feet."

The Lord will yield from Zion
your scepter of power:
rule in the midst of all your foes.

A prince from the day of your birth
on the holy mountains;
from the womb before the dawn I begot you.

The Lord has sworn an oath he will not change.
"You are a priest for ever,
a priest like Melchizedek of old."

The Master standing at your right hand
will shatter kings in the day of his wrath.

He, the judge of the nations
will heap high the bodies;
heads shall be scattered far and wide.

He shall drink from the stream by the wayside
and therefore he shall lift up his head.