Whenever I find it possible, I listen to Krista Tippett ’s weekly hour-long NPR program, Speaking of Faith. Each week Tippett interviews someone whose life and witness is a testimony to faith, ecumenically defined. Yesterday Tippett interviewed geophysicist and spiritual thinker Xavier Le Pichon during a program entitled "Fragility and the Evolution of Our Humanity — A Geophysicist's View." Here’s the beginning of the interview:

Ms. Tippett: Xavier Le Pichon is a pioneer on the field of plate tectonics. He was a formative figure at one of those junctures where science not only radically revises its own assumptions but changes the way all of us see the world. When he began his life as a scientist in 1959, the prevailing view among geologists is what we know call "fixist." There was no knowledge of tectonic plates beneath the ocean with fault lines and constant motion that across time had configured and reconfigured the earth's crust and entire continents.

Mr. Le Pichon: The earth was considered a place where everything was static. You know, things were moving up and down but never laterally. Actually, the earth is an extraordinary living being with the motions of the oceans and continents continuously changing, evolving, and this was a tremendous shock.

Ms. Tippett: Still a practicing scientist, Xavier Le Pichon is also a lifelong Catholic. Since 2003, he has lived in an intentional community he and family helped found to provide retreat for families caring for a loved one with mental illness. Before that, for nearly three decades, he and his wife raised their family of six children at the original French L'Arche community, centered around people with mental disabilities. This aspect of his life was foreshadowed by his previous adventures at great universities and exploring the depths of the world's oceans in submersibles.

Near the conclusion of the interview, Le Pichon spoke briefly about his prayer life:

Mr. Le Pichon: And I then discovered later on the love of the suffering people, which I found could not be separated from the love of God. Actually, I could not go to God unless I went through these people. And all this is, in a sense, incompatible. Somebody once asked me, "How do you maintain unity in your life? Aren't you schizophrenic?" And my answer was, "It's through prayer. I spend a lot of time in prayer." I pray at least one or two hours a day. And it is through the prayer of God that has taken people into this extremely different field. I think it's the power of God that when you ask him he lets you unify things that apparently cannot be unified.
As I listened, it stroke me as quite remarkable that Le Pichon, a world-reknown geophysicist, should openly say that he prays “at least one or two hours a day,” that in his prayers God has taken him to love suffering people, and that in prayer God lets him “unify things that apparently cannot be unified.”

Le Pichon prays an hour or so every day. While I don’t know how he prays, I suspect that a good portion of his daily prayers is taken up with the Church’s traditional Morning and Evening Prayers. As a Roman Catholic he may well call his prayers The Liturgy of the Hours. If my intimations are correct, Le Pichon surely uses the Psalms as the foundation of his prayers. By building his prayer life on the Psalms, Le Pichon is called to remember the poor, the weak, and suffering again and again as he daily murmurs or perhaps quietly sings the Psalms in his home. Remembering the weak and suffering in this way has led him, as he says, into an “extremely different field,” that of living within an intentional community whose vocation is to serve the mentally ill.

As a Christian Le Pichon finds God’s creative love for an evolving world a reason for awe and wonder. Again, while I don’t know exactly how Le Pichon prays, I suspect that sitting in Silence before such a mystery plays a considerable role in an appreciation for his True Self and his understanding as to how we humans have evolved under God’s care.

A world-famous geophysicist who has introduced us to the study of plate techtonics intentionally lives with those who suffer from mental illness. Remarkable! Through prayer God has given Le Pichon the desire and ability to unify two supposedly different ways of thinking and living: scientific examination and prayerful listening. Le Pichon is a witness to what a radically expanded understanding of prayer can do.

If you’d like to read the transcript of the entire interview, visit http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/fragility/transcript.shtml.