On October 2, as recounted in his recent blog post, Father John Bok from the St. Anthony Friary and Shrine in Cincinnati, Ohio, was driving to say Mass at a nearby parish when another car swerved and headed directly toward his driver’s side door.
The oncoming car, driven by a teenager who was having an epileptic seizure, hit a bent metal pole and launched airborne over Fr. John’s car, rather than crashing straight into him. Neither the teenager nor Fr. John was injured.
The close call, which Fr. John didn’t even realize had happened at the time because he has poor peripheral vision, was caught on a local funeral home’s security camera and showed to him later by a friend.
The experience, which happened on the Feast of Guardian Angels, gave the former science teacher a lot to think about:
“I drive a 2014 Hyundai Sonata. According to Google it is 4.83 feet tall. Why was the pole standing in that exact spot attached to nothing? By what laws of physics did it lift the boy’s car almost 5 feet in the air and send it over my car? So many questions. I am certainly thankful to God. I will continue to wonder how much God and how much the laws of science played in the experience. And I continue to be amused by the fact that I was oblivious to what happened until I saw the video … As always, God is good.”
Fr. John’s reflection brings to mind the long-standing, loving relationship the Catholic Church has with the sciences. From Copernicus to George Lemaitre (the father of the Big Bang Theory), there have been countless Catholic thinkers over the centuries who embrace the fact that faith and reason go hand-in-hand — or in Fr. John’s case, car launching over car.
