The human is capable of experiencing both deep and lasting awe and fear, the vastness of which gives or takes all meaning. The experience comes in the night when looking out over the vastness of a broad valley or cowered in a tight room on the side of the earth.

This knowledge of nature is painfully inter-related and overflows into the human person and societal relations we have, from landslide disasters to killer diseases, to the struggle for sustainable living. This allows us see how knowledge and action can systematically respond to the needs of others. This is science without walls, a science of relation, of surprise, and of great awe.

For some, it can still grow cold in this universe and fall short of total meaning, for as we have the capacity to sense the unknown in many ways, we also plumb the depths of eternity in others. The depth of awe and fear, meaning and mortality as a person can be moments of elevation or total desolation of the human spirit. Knowledge is part of the human experience and sense of the good. When the meaningful pervades, we are met by moments in life with great peace and assurance in the face of adversity. We can know this more specifically in moments of grace in recognizing the life of Jesus the Christ as inseparable from our experience and as a personal relation in eternity. We develop rituals and rights, physical and time-bound, to give visible meaning to fidelity and compassion, faith and forgiveness. Grace builds on nature.

Taken from this end and worked backward, a life lived with the spiritual dimension open is constantly affirmed by the knowledge of things and of how this knowledge deepens human relations, their meaning and meaningful actions. We see the use of science as participating in the active knowledge and growing in human society seamlessly relating to meaning, mortality, and eternity that fills the person - the human spirit - giving full expression to the human soul or human compassion for life.

This is why some Jesuits are scientists.