Episode 205 (Transcript): The Spiritual Nature of All Things | A Conversation with Kaylee McElroy

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Tara Larson, for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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CW: Hello, I'm Cynthia Winward.

SH: And I'm Susan Hinckley.

CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of this week's episode is The Spiritual Nature of All Things, A Conversation with Kaylee McElroy. Welcome, Kaylee!

SH: Hi, Kaylee.

KM: Hi, there.

CW: We are so glad to have you, especially about this topic. I think Susan, I can safely say, Kaylee is definitely smarter than both of us. And we're going to get to that in a minute. What her, what her degrees are in, but yeah, Kaylee, why don't you go ahead and give us a little quick intro about yourself for a few minutes? Anything that would bring context to the conversation we're having today. Anything you want our listeners to know. Yeah, we just want to hear a little bit about you.

KM: Well, first of all, I want to say that there are different types of smart, and I am glad that there are a variety of people with all sorts of different types of smart. So–

CW: Thank you.

KM: I might be more smart in this one area, but that's just one area. So, I grew up in the church and I went to BYU. I didn't know what I wanted to study. So I declared a double major in physics and classical civilization.

SH: As one does.

KM: As one does, right? And part of that for both of them, it was because I like to start at the beginning of things, and physics is the basis for chemistry, and chemistry is the basics for biology, which really explains the ecology of our whole planet. And then the planets are studied by astronomers. And so that astronomers get trained in the physics department. So it just kind of comes full circle, right? So physics seems like a good place to start. And then classical civilization, that's the study of ancient history and myths. So once again, if I'm going to study history, I want to start at the beginning.

Eventually, I decided that I was never going to teach myself physics, but I could teach myself ancient Greek if I really wanted to. So I decided to bump the classical Civ down to a minor there. And I also really liked the hands on component of working in a lab. I did the BYU thing and got married. We moved for me to go to grad school and one of my lab mates from BYU had family in our new area and they just kind of took us under their wing–at one point the mom brought her ward's young women to come and see my lab, and it wasn't until then that I realized that moving for the wife to go to school was an unusual thing. That's kind of what clued me into it–I was just doing life. I knew that I didn't want to have babies quite yet, and getting a real job sounded like a scary grown up thing to do, and both of those are terrible reasons to go to grad school. I would not recommend going to grad school for those reasons, but it worked out for me. I defended my thesis a few weeks before my oldest was born, and then I did the stay at home mom thing, and that actually was a really easy transition for me. I know that's not for a lot of women.

SH: Really? Okay.

KM: And part of it was because I had so much support from both the church community and the broader community.

CW: Really–

KM: I had a ton of support. So it was amazing.

CW: Where were you for graduate work?

KM: Michigan State University.

SH: Okay.

CW: Okay. So that just happened to be like a very supportive place for Latter-day Saint women with ambition? I don't know…What was it? That's interesting.

KM: Well, the ward, there was playgroups that the ward organized. There were quite a lot of moms. Some of them were in school. I wasn't the only one, but the ward was large. And there were baby story time, there was the birth center where I gave birth had a mom's group–there was so many things. I had friends that we would meet up at the children's museum every week.

CW: Nice.

KM: It was really great. But by the time I had my youngest, all of that was gone. And it was really hard. Church was–the wards had been divided. It was small. It was like, well, if you want to have a [00:05:00] thing, make it yourself. So, it was hard. So we'll talk a little bit more about this, I think, later on–that period of my life.

CW: I hope so.

SH: Okay.

KM: And I attended Midwest Pilgrims for the first time when my youngest was a baby. And pretty soon after that, I started submitting guest posts to the Exponent II blog. And I've been a permanent blog–perma blogger–there since the fall of 2020. And I also work as a physics instructor.

CW: Wonderful.

SH: Wow.

CW: I have a question for both of you because I had never heard of Midwest Pilgrims until I became friends with Susan. So this is, this group has been around for a long time and it's kind of expanded past the mid— like what exactly is it, Susan or Kaylee? I just know that some of our listeners like myself probably are like, wait, what's Midwest Pilgrims? But it sounds like it was a a group of progressive, Susan, LDS women?

SH: We're just going to call it a group of LDS women. How about that?

CW: Okay.

KM: And I think it started in like the 70s or something.

SH: Yeah. It's been around for a long time because I started going in the early-ish 80s, so.

CW: Okay.

SH: Yeah. It's been around for a long time.

CW: So, Kaylee, it sounds like you found that group, and then you started participating there?

KM: Mmhmm. I had a friend who would go every year, and she would always talk it up, and, and I was the first friend that, that actually came with her, so she was happy about that.

CW: Okay.

SH: Well, and that leads us to where I encountered your work, Kaylee, because I was among the, I don't know, 50, 75 women who were lucky enough to be at Midwest Pilgrims last spring and be sitting in a beautiful leafy green chapel on a Sunday morning and hear you give the Sunday sermon. So, I seem to recall that I came up to you immediately after and said, “I want you on our podcast.”

KM: Yes. And I said, “That sounds terrifying.”

SH: Uh huh. I think that's exactly how it went. So now we've broken you down.

CW: Susan also texted me, Kaylee, and said “I found someone I want to interview. She's a physicist.” And I said, “Great, because I know nothing about physics,” but I have, I've watched almost every science episode of Nova, I have seen the planets documentary three times, so I think I understand a few of these things. I'm definitely fascinated by it. So yes, this topic of the spirituality that's even found, or not even but maybe especially tied to our natural world, I find deeply fascinating.

SH: Me too. I have to admit that I have some serious holy envy for your resume, Kaylee.

CW: For sure.

SH: So I'm excited to have this conversation. A couple of years ago, my husband and I listened to a series of lectures called the Philosophy of Physics. And it was my favorite thing actually, that we have done in quite a long time because it kept being made clear to me how much crossover there was between my religious interests and the things that physicists were pursuing, right? There was, it just, they kept converging in these conversations. It made me want to go deeper into both of them. So I'm going to actually let Albert Einstein introduce the conversation today. And he said this:

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms, this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.”

So, I have a feeling that you know exactly what Einstein was talking about there, Kaylee.

KM: I, I definitely agree that, that physics and spirituality converge. Yes.

SH: Well let’s talk about it.

KM: So, I've recently, well, I don't know recently, but last year I read a book called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli.

SH: Mmhmm.

KM: And it, it would be something that you could read with a book group that appreciates a kind of a brainy read. And plus it's really short. Book groups always like short books, right? This one, the audio book, is only about two hours long.

CW: I just downloaded it just because I saw it in your notes. And so I, I downloaded it from my library to listen. So, thank you already for making me aware of that.

KM: Yeah. I remember thinking that it does a really good job of distilling the core concepts of these really big mind bending physics ideas without all the complicated math. And I found [00:10:00] the last chapter particularly to be really spiritual. So a couple of quotes that stood out for me was, “The world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships.”

SH: Oh, my favorite word, relationships.

KM: Yeah. Just, physics talks about the importance of relationships. That's crazy to me. And then another one was, he said, “Myths enrich science and science enriches myth.”

SH: Well, there it is. That's how these things–that's why these ideas excited me right there. So you picked really good quotes to explain me to myself. Thank you.

KM: And another book that I thought listeners might be interested in is Art and Physics by Leonard Schlein. And I read this one a long time ago, but it talked about how big breakthroughs in physics were often preceded by new art styles, and that there was a correlation between the ideas expressed in art and the ideas discovered in physics, which was fascinating to me because it helped me—it gave me an idea to, I never would have thought to use physics to help me understand some weird art. So, I thought it was an interesting idea–the tie between science, which we often think of as like a totally separate thing, but how it relates to the humanities.

SH: Well, there's a saying I love that is, “Art asks questions. Ask good ones.” And so I feel like all three of those things, art and science and religion are in the business of asking big questions, right?

KM: Yes.

SH: Not always necessarily answerable, but it's the pursuit of them that manifests in things like religions and art and science. So it makes sense to me. We will link to those books in our show notes, of course, so that our listeners can find them. And also we will link to the written version of Kaylee's presentation from Midwest Pilgrims in Exponent II, so people will be able to read the written version of that. But I want to dive a little into the things that you talked about that day. How did you choose what to discuss at Midwest Pilgrims? Let's start right there.

KM: So I went to Midwest Pilgrims the year before and I was getting to know someone. She asked me what I studied and she asked if I thought physics was a spiritual discipline, and I had to just kind of stop and think about that.

SH: So you, had you not thought of that before? Like, this is the first time you'd encountered that?

KM: Not in exactly that way.

SH: Mmhmm.

KM: So eventually I said, yes. And the memory that came up was a time when my advisor and I were analyzing an image and it was a cross section of a nanowire. And I just felt this sense of awe and wonder at the complex structure of this nanowire and how all the crystals were fitting together. It was kind of amazing that we could even see that structure. So that memory is what came up for me. And then, Rachel Hunt Steenblik happened to attend that year and she made a comment. And before I say more, before I say more about it, I just want to say that I really admire her work. I own her books. When I wanted to write a poem about the divine feminine, I totally borrowed her style. She's done a lot to teach me about the divine feminine, and I really appreciate that. But at Pilgrimage, she made a comment about Heavenly Mother that made me feel like she was putting God in a box. And a box with Heavenly Mother in it is twice as big as a box with Heavenly Father in it, but there was still a box. And I feel like a lot of women that were in that space have spent a lot of time trying to get God out of the box that Mormonism tends to put God in.