An Easter Homily

I am currently sitting in the library and, until about 60 seconds ago, I was taking a practice MCAT. All was quiet, and only a handful of other doughty souls were studying here on a beautiful Sunday morning. Enter two campus security personnel. The crackle of their walkie-talkies and casual conversation are reminders of the fact that Goucher's library has designated Quiet Zones, and I am not in one. I cram down my noise-canceling headphones and try to tune out the interlopers: hydrolytic cleavage and mitosis demanded my undivided attention.

Still, the officers were chatting only twenty feet away, so I couldn't help but notice when the conversation shifted from someone needing to open a locked room in the student center to biblical exegesis. "Over the years, you see," one guard explained, "the text has changed. Like, i's and t's. Sometimes, you know, a t gets crossed that wasn't before, so the word is different. Which is why you need to go back to the original text to get the true meaning. Most people," he continued, "just follow the text... without thinking about it." "Blindly?" his companion suggested. "Exactly. Blindly. But you need to really understand the original meaning."

I took off my headphones. I wanted to hear clearly when he started quoting Luther or Trithemius. But he had apparently run out of sermon in that direction, so he swerved, taking a new tack: "You got to have faith. When you look at the structure... of a tree, or when you look at the complicated structure of a cell, you know it couldn't have evolved. There had to be a creator, and that creator had to be infinite." (I'm paraphrasing here, because his actual words are rapidly melting from my memory, but I think that was the gist of it.) His companion made a soft noise of assent, or perhaps feigned interest, and thanked him.

The itinerant blue-light preacher bid him adieu and ambled out of my silent-once-more sanctum; his flock of one walked off in the other direction, into the stacks. I got back to my MCAT: "The concentration of the protein cyclin rises and falls during the cell cycle as shown in Figure 1. What mechanism could account for this oscillation of cyclin protein concentration?" 'Divine intervention' was not one of the answer choices.