Bearing Witness

Here is a thing of joy and beauty, an act of devotion that combines a specific form of Christian meditation with glorying in a Creation that spans billions of years. It's a common thing for science fiction fans to create artworks for display and sale in arts shows at sf conventions, and for one such convention early this year Teresa Nielsen Hayden created several pieces of jewellery -- including two rosaries for Darwin, rosaries crafted from beads of fossil material.

One rosary, The God of the Burgess Shale, was purchased by two other fans as a birthday present for a third -- who happens to be Brother Guy, the Jesuit who is curator of the Vatican meteorite collection. As detailed in the post The Secret Lives of Fossils, the rosary made of fossils is now in the meteorite display case at the Vatican Observatory -- an appropriate spot, as one of the pieces used to make it is not a fossil, but a piece of meteorite.

The comments are worth reading, particularly @46 on The Secret Lives of Fossils. I don't really grok rosaries, but some of the comments gave me a much better understanding of their use as a meditation tool, particularly Abi's comment @75.