Van Gogh lost his mind wrapped in the deep wringings of his own soul but he made a lasting impression of the heavens that has captured our imagination through the ages. I invite you to look at his Starry Night painting again and you will understand why (you need not go to Amsterdam to see the original; you can view so many images of it on the Web). It is the only painting where I have actually seen people silently shed tears looking at it in the Van Gogh Museum. Van Gogh’s expression of his soul’s meaning was born in the language of light, in his painted stars against the landscape of an inhabited earth. His heaven was portrayed so closely to the earth that they almost touch each other. Not only were the heavenly bodies painted as if they spoke; Don McLean in his song Vincent, sang his musical impression of the painting — "whirling clouds in violent haze" — with the heavenly bodies speaking in the nuanced language of light — in hues and color — from tender to cobalt blues, reticent creams to raging yellows.
There was no obvious wringing of soul when I visited someone who also made the stars speak to those of us who are bound to the earth, even in terms of the direction of our wonderings. There were also no canvases nor easels around but I knew I sat before a point of light in the person of Fr. Victor Badillo, 75, the Jesuit astronomer who headed the Philippine Astronomical Society and the Manila Observatory for almost two decades, when I visited him in his hospital room at the Jesuit Residence at the Ateneo de Manila. I found it curious that I was going to talk to a priest to ask him how he felt about a different kind of heaven — the cosmos. I had a happy reason to do so. In June this year, the International Astronomical Union, the authority responsible for naming small heavenly bodies, has bestowed the honor of naming a "minor planet" (Asteroid 4866), 13-30 kilometers wide, after him. Fr. Badillo spoke to me in a soft voice and a manner subdued but like all scientists I know well into the moonrises of their lives, he had a characteristic child’s sparkle in his eyes and smile, undiminished by the passing of youth.
"It is beyond my wildest dreams," replied Fr. Badillo when I asked him how he felt about the honor. "I think others deserve the honor much better because I am only an amateur astronomer," he continued. I told him about this amateur astronomer now in his late 80s who has become the inspiration for a film called "A Sidewalk Astronomer." I have read about this sidewalk astronomer who spent all his life coaxing people on the streets of San Francisco to take a peep at the heavens through a telescope he invented with the cost and technology that is within the reach of amateur astronomers (called the Dobsonian telescope). Fr. Badillo then said to me: "Dobson. His name is John Dobson. I have met him." I was so pleasantly surprised that his name rang a bell in Fr. Badillo’s memory tower. I should have guessed that they did meet since they belonged to a group of astronomers who not only looked at the stars but inspired and worked to tug at others’ minds so that common people, ordinarily discouraged by the science and the distance of the stars and other heavenly bodies, will be encouraged to look up and consider their place in the vast cosmos.
Fr. Badillo has a doctorate in Physics from St. Louis in Missouri and was guided to the stars by a 1971 invitation from an American embassy official, Philip Wyman, who founded the Philippine Astronomical Society (PAS). Being told that I am the widow of a physicist, he told me, "You know how it is, we physicists, among all the other kinds of scientists think we can understand everything so when Philip wanted someone from the sciences to join his efforts, he invited a physicist." Fr. Badillo said that in jest but my personal experience with physicists made me suspect that there is a layer of seriousness and truth in that statement that I cannot altogether dismiss. In two years after that invitation from Wyman, Fr. Badillo headed the PAS and the Manila Observatory for the next two decades. During that time, they had members from all walks of life, from all collars of work, who were bound by a common desire to let the heavens speak to them through their telescopes. The group met regularly and talked about what they saw on those clear nights that they engaged their instruments with the same curiosity that drove Aristotle, Kepler and Galileo to look up.
Fr. Badillo mentioned the first observatory in Manila and I asked him why there was an observatory built in a low-lying area and he corrected my notion of observatories as places that were only meant to observe the heavens. He said that the original Spanish notion of an observatory was really for the most obvious and broadest purpose of all: to observe Nature. And this included all kinds of natural phenomena and not just the heavens. I once had a reader who dropped me a note once simply asking: "Is there a place where those who wonder can wonder together?" In that old classic observatory in Manila that Fr. Badillo spoke of, we could have all found a home for our collective wonderment. I think we should resurrect these kinds of places so that we not only get our fuel or wounds from the daily shellings of media headlines. Places like observatories and scientists like Fr. Badillo who breathed life and inspiration to them turn the cold science that often repels the ordinary man into the kind of science that Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of that is as an "extension of man, on all sides, into nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him."
Asked if he were confident that astronomy for commoners will continue even when he is now retired and ill, he says with firm but soothing conviction: "There are others who are still looking up." Then he went on to tell me about the younger Filipino astronomers now who still keep cosmic vigil with their own astronomical finds. I commend these star-seekers persisting in culture like ours who often makes us forget that we are creatures who can look up as well as down.
Close to the end of my visit, I began to think that as if for every heavenly body that he spotted in his telescope all his life, Fr. Badillo was given a portion of light to keep for himself because he now shines from deep within him. His face reminds me of the "weathered faces lined in pain" the song Vincent spoke of but this time, soothed by his own deeply cultivated wonder that he, being made of starstuff, as we all are, has the gift to gaze into the stars themselves and in his own placement of his eye on the lens of his telescope, have the universe thinking of itself, contemplating a feast of lifetimes and sharing it. Thank you, Fr. Badillo, for bringing the stars closer to our experience of what it means to be starstuff now alive in this hallowed blue planet.