Matt D’Antuono on Learning about God from a Radio Experiment

"As a high-school physics teacher, I was embarrassed to say that I had never built a simple radio from the few parts that are necessary. So I was happy to work with a student after he finished the AP test to attempt a working radio. We pieced together the parts from what we had in my physics lab, and my student even made one of the parts simply by wrapping wire around a cardboard paper-towel tube. In the end, we only had three small parts, a pair of headphones, some wire and a large metal stake. We drove the stake into the ground as a ground wire, we threw some wire over the branch of a tree as an antenna, and we put the headphones on. There was no battery or other power source. It shouldn't have come as a surprise, but it did when we finally heard a radio station. My student and I traded the headphones back and forth in amazement as we listened to a local radio station.

"As I reflect on it now, that radio serves as a metaphor for the spiritual life. The simple fact is that the radio waves had been there all the time and are still there. We just could not pick up on them until we had the right set of equipment tuned to the right frequency. God's loving presence is always there, closer to us than we are to ourselves, but we are not aware of it if we are not oriented the right way."

In a recent commentary, writer Matt D’Antuono reflected on how we choose what we tune in to in our spiritual lives and, thus, what we turn into.

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National Catholic Register: Blogs: Matt D'Antuono: What I Learned About God From a Radio Experiment (15 SEP 19)