THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 14, 1994 TAG: 9412140026
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JAMES SCHULTZ, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 213 lines
NIGHT NOISES ECHO in the mind of Michael.
The thud of the car door. The footfalls on the walk. The front door opening, closing.
Then - his father's drunken, hating words, the slaps to the head, the hurtings.
Peace came in morning. Michael took refuge in the school room, the world calmed by the marks of black pencil on blue-lined white paper. Inside his head was the quiet of the hunt; answers stalked, answers snared.
Years later, the son wept at his father's funeral. He was so angry he almost didn't attend.
``He did some very bad things to me,'' says Episcopal priest and particle physicist Michael Musolf. ``He was such a gifted man. And this disease took it all away. In the midst of that service I cried harder than I ever had in my life. I realized what a tragedy this was.''
God calls upon us all to love and to forgive, Musolf says. So he has taken his wounds, scars and faith to the streets. Nights and weekends, ``Father Mike'' brings God's word to Park Place, one of Norfolk's poorest and most violent neighborhoods.
There is yet another life for Musolf, one that seems so far removed from his ministry that it might as well be on Mars, or on the moon.
By day, he is one of the country's leading theoretical physicists, working at the internationally acclaimed nuclear research laboratory, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) in Newport News. And Musolf is an Old Dominion University professor, teaching physics twice a week.
There is, he points out, no real separation between these two seemingly disconnected lives.
``Physicists tend to think the cutting edge of the universe is right at their fingertips,'' Musolf says. ``A lot of one's humanity can be sacrificed in the pursuit of this all-important knowledge. God is just as present and real in the face of an inner-city child as in the workings of a proton.''
Musolf, a 33-year-old native of Portland, Ore., has, with community leaders and parents, created a mission church in Park Place, in a building loaned out on Sundays by a computer company. He leads other adults in the counseling of teens, urging them to stick to their studies, teaching tolerance and respect and offering nonviolent ways of resolving conflict.
Musolf has also founded the Park Place Homework Club, a supervised safe haven where third-, fourth- and fifth-graders can finish the day's schoolwork without interruption.
``Some of those children are harder than hard,'' says Patricia King, a retired public school administrator and reading specialist who has worked closely with Musolf. ``I think he's really making a difference with them.''
Scientific careers ride on meticulous attention to detail. Breakthroughs are few and far between, but when they come, they can forever change a career, an entire discipline.
Those who know Musolf believe he is among a handful of young physicists poised to take one of these great leaps forward. Indeed, Musolf received the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator's Award for 1993-'94, one of only a dozen young physicists in the United States to be so honored.
``There's no question that Mike is one of the two or three best young people in the field of nuclear physics. Maybe the best,'' says Wick Haxton, a theoretical physicist and director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington in Seattle. ``He knows nuclear physics. He knows atomic physics. He knows field theory. Plus he has an interest in experimental physics.
``It's very unusual to find someone of that breadth.''
Musolf wanders pilgrim-like in a land of minute particles called quarks, thought by many researchers to be the fundamental building blocks of matter. Sometimes lost, sometimes found, he searches for a better understanding of a certain type of quark - called ``strange'' - in a branch of physics few outsiders can hope to understand.
``Every once in a while, someone has one of these `ahas.' They chip away and suddenly hit a vein of gold,'' says Nathan Isgur, head of the CEBAF theory group. ``This opens up whole new vistas for everyone: a breakthrough. One of the reasons we hired Mike was because we felt and continue to feel he's completely capable of a breakthrough event.''
It's a little after noon on a Sunday at Shoney's on 21st Street in Norfolk. Mike Musolf's nine teen charges, boys and girls, are antsy to get to the goodies at the breakfast buffet.
As they enter, they're noisy, a little raucous, and teasing. A couple of the kids cluster at a gum machine, fiddling with the knobs, checking for change. Several more stick their fingers into the coin return slots of the pay phones before taking a seat.
``Let's say grace,'' Father Mike insists, his baritone surprisingly resonant for someone 5-foot-8, 135-pounds.
``God is great. God is good. Let us thank You for our food,'' the teenagers chime, more or less in unison.
Then it's off to the food bar and back to the table where plates are soon brimming with scrambled eggs, sausage, slabs of French toast swimming in syrup, blueberry pancakes, muffins, bacon and a variety of other brunch-time goodies.
Most Sundays, Musolf brings the teenagers here after church services. Then it's on to some afternoon activity, like a movie or, in warm weather, the beach or Mount Trashmore. The kids bring along a few bucks, but it's Musolf and the adult chaperones who underwrite the excursions.
In between, the talk is of God, of how to live a good life, how to respect oneself and respect others.
``I learned about this from Father Mike,'' says Tray Hart, 15. ``See, Jesus was a good man. I would like to be like Him. It's hard to live by the word of God. But you can achieve the goal if you put your mind to it.''
Alton Vaughan, also 15, listens in. Alton volunteers that he wants to be a clothes designer. ``I want to be somebody in my life,'' he says. ``My dad didn't raise me to be somebody.''
When Musolf looks into these faces, he needs no mirror. He sees himself, young and vulnerable, searching and hurting.
``I want to help these kids develop a vision for themselves and their lives different from the vision the culture of the street offers,'' Musolf says later. ``I want them to know they are loved and valued by God, that they are entitled to a life of fullness and joy. I want to heal the woundedness that is there.''
Musolf's own healing began when he was about 8, when his mother fled her marriage, rescuing him and a younger sister and brother from their father. Later she would marry again, but this time to a kind, supportive man.
Life was hard the first few years, as his divorced mother struggled to support the uprooted family. They lived for a time in a cramped apartment. Later, when the mother remarried, they moved into a comfortable suburban life.
Musolf, meanwhile, excelled as a student. He became an athlete, a runner, swimmer, lifeguard and swim coach. He was a drum major in his high school band and a clarinet player who won a state competition and went on to play a concert with the Oregon Symphony.
As a teen, Musolf felt drawn ever more closely to some kind of life in the church. By 15, he had been baptized Episcopalian.
``Given my background, I could have easily ended up as a runaway on a street,'' Musolf says. ``The abuse was pretty holistic abuse. It was violent. I've been through the worst. It's only because of God's intervention in my life that I am where I am.''
God came fully to Musolf in the fall of 1984, when Musolf was a 22-year-old undergraduate physics and math student at Princeton University. Musolf had spent the previous summer working on skid row in Los Angeles, work that he could not shake from his mind.
During church services one autumnal Sunday, Musolf says he had a vision of a broken and suffering world. Christ stood astride Earth, healing and reconciling.
From then on, the path was clear.
Musolf completed his Ph.D. in physics in 1989. Beginning post-doctoral work at the the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, he enrolled in seminary school. When he was hired by the Newport News physics lab in 1992, Musolf moved to Norfolk and completed his religious studies at ODU.
He was ordained an Episcopal deacon in June of 1993, and ordained a priest this past January, beginning his ministry at Christ and St. Luke's Church and subsequently expanding it to include Park Place.
Back at Shoney's, the young jurors have reached a unanimous moral verdict on Musolf. Jermaine Coley, 14, sums up the group's sentiments.
``Mike is nice, man,'' he says. ``He's going to heaven for real. He'll be one of God's best.''
In the beginning, according to physicists, was one intensely concentrated point, the seed of all that now is. When that seed burst, shattering the void with energy and light, the universe was born.
In his spartan office in Newport News, Musolf muses on the progeny of time's birth. He sits quietly with a legal pad on his desk, on which mathematical equations are neatly scribbled. A single desk lamp provides modest illumination.
``For me, physics is like hiking. You work really hard, sweat, climb hills,'' Musolf explains. ``It's tiring and uncomfortable. Then you get to a vista. You want to throw up your hands and praise God. You're in the presence of the divine, of God, of God's beauty of creation.''
Just as the universe was shattered by light, Musolf would like to shatter comfortable convention. His is the determined, if soft-spoken, certainty of the activist, just this side of zealotry. But he laughs easily, appearing tolerant even in the face of his conviction.
``Jesus was very radical. They had to execute him because he was so radical,'' Musolf says. ``I'm trying to be a faithful follower of Jesus. That implies a holistic radicalness.''
He admires certain of the liberation theologians, those who call for profound rethinking and restructuring of moral and economic standards in order to vanquish poverty and material suffering.
Musolf is a third-order Franciscan monk dedicated to living in the world with others, but otherwise following the tenets of St. Francis of Assisi.
Francis, the son of a prosperous 12th century Italian textile merchant, renounced his inheritance and devoted his life to simple living, worship of God and service to the poor.
``There's something to demanding responsibility (from the poor),'' Musolf says. ``There has to be an equitable distribution of, and access to, resources. And there's not.''
Technological achievement and material success, Musolf believes, will not make people whole or fulfilled. To grow, we all must somehow slake our profound spiritual thirst.
``We've lived in this era where we thought that science could be our salvation,'' Musolf says. ``We can fire rockets into space and heal eyes with lasers. Now we've found the fruits of science cannot by themselves save humanity.''
Who, or what, then, will save us? Musolf smiles and answers good-naturedly with a word: ``God.''
He continues: ``I'm very hopeful about the possibility that people can become more God-like: growing in love and compassion, open and responsive to others' needs and pain.''
Musolf shies away from prophesy, whether it is of his own future, or of the Park Place ministry he has begun. He says he wants to involve enough Park Place residents so that his mission church will become self-propagating. Then, he says, whatever happens to him assumes little importance.
``I make no predictions. Bad strategy,'' Musolf says. ``I've been wrong too many times. In the end, there's a lot that will surprise us.''
Darkness falls, and Michael Musolf is back again on the streets of Norfolk. He goes without fear, with God, seeking those whose souls are alone and afraid. ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN
ABOVE: Episcopalian priest and particle physicist Michael Musolf
holds a service with Jermaine Coley, left, and Vernon Byrd
attending. Musolf has, with community leaders and parents, created a
mission church in Park Place in a building loaned out on Sundays by
a computer firm.
Photo
Twice a week, Episcopal priest Michael Musolf teaches physics at Old
Dominion University.
by CNB