Here's an article I wrote for the Calgary Herald on how a Foldscope paper microscope helps us bring the spirit of advent into sharper focus:
“Thank you for coming to our class and giving me a Foldscope.”
These are the words of a 9-year-old student on the autism spectrum who rarely risks initiating a conversation—spoken after a class presentation that I gave on the Stanford University developed Foldscope (a portable, affordable, paper microscope that can be used by anyone, anywhere, anytime).
I wonder if the Stanford engineers had this autistic child in mind when they developed the Foldscope. It seemed to me that this simple visual ‘fidget-spinner’ was the perfect gift for a young highly focused mind.
Over the past two decades I have worked with many scientists who were on the spectrum—who vocationally leaned into their unique capacity to focus and empirically observe. Seeing this child’s delight, I wondered what they might discover one day.
Perhaps you remember the moment: the first time you used a magnifying glass or looked through a microscope. The giddy feeling as the hind leg of a honeybee came into focus or gasping at the horde of tiny creatures dancing in a drop of pond water.
Where would science be without magnification? Think about all the good that has come into our world because we were able to see small things.
When my granddaughter first used her Foldscope, she was delighted. Her first reaction was to make it her own and she ran around our house searching for a specimen to create a slide. Focussing on a magnified feather, she shouted, “It’s amazing, it looks like a forest!” Then she ran to her grandmother to share her epiphany.
Her excitement reminded me of the Christmas story, where one small thing changed everything. A child is born. People couldn’t help but share the news—shepherds, adults, and children too! That seven-year-olds would have run to their grandmothers to share the good news is a compelling thought.
For Christians, this is the season of Advent—a time where we anticipate the birth of Christ.
Advent synchronizes us with the great Christian tradition of sacred time. It’s an antidote to our short-attention-span world that can help us regain our senses. One of those senses is sacred sight. Imagine seeing the story of the birth of Jesus with new eyes. Even as magnification can bring unseen worlds to light, Advent can be a life-illumining lens—especially for those yearning for more.
When I first tried a Foldscope, I couldn’t get it to work. I adjusted the specimen slide, squeezed the paper microscope more tightly, but still, couldn’t see a thing. Then I remembered the light. Once I turned toward it everything brightened, and I saw color, shape, and pattern!
St. Paul once wrote that, “Everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light.” (Eph 5:13, italics mine) When God’s light shines on the physical universe, it becomes a light. The cosmos becomes an illumining book that we can read—filled with God’s wisdom, glory, and light. This makes whatever you can imagine looking at through a microscope—a blood cell, a butterfly wing, or a human hair—an illumining pointer to the world-making mind of God.
As he engaged the glory of the universe through a different kind of lens—a telescope—the great mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler believed that he was thinking God’s thoughts after God. For Kepler, God had everything to do with everything—from the infinitesimal to the infinite.
To see things as they are, we need the right lens and the right light.
The day after I gave my Foldscope presentation to that grade three class, I was handing Foldscopes out to a graduating university biology class. While their questions about science were more advanced, their child-like wonder was the same.
I can still see these students, young and old, holding paper microscopes up to the light, smiling from ear to ear and with rapt attention. Holy seeing moments—of a kind that we’re all meant for.
“Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.”
Isaiah 60:1
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