Sy Garte Leaves Atheism at Lab Bench

The gel had just set when Sy leaned over the bench and muttered that the bands refused to line up with any model we had drawn the week before. The lab was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the faint click of the timer. I passed him the pipette without asking what he meant. He adjusted the voltage, watched the dye front move, and said nothing more for twenty minutes.

We had worked side by side for three years by then. Most evenings ended the same way, with notes scribbled on the back of old autoradiographs and coffee gone cold in paper cups. Sy never talked about his parents or the meetings they had taken him to as a boy. He talked about the data and about how cleanly the equations described the reactions we measured. When the numbers failed to match, he treated it as a problem of technique, not of larger assumptions.

One afternoon he brought a book on quantum mechanics into the lab and left it open beside the centrifuge. I asked if it was for a grant proposal. He shook his head and pointed to a paragraph on the uncertainty principle. The words did not sit easily with the picture of the world we used every day in our experiments. He closed the book after a few minutes and returned to loading samples, but the question stayed on the bench between us.

We began to walk the corridor after the last run finished. He spoke about the civil rights marches he had heard about growing up and about the clergy who had stood on the front lines. The story did not fit the version of history he had been given as a child. He said the contradiction bothered him more than he expected. I listened because the hallway was long and the building was mostly empty by then.

A colleague from another department invited us to a lecture one Thursday evening. The speaker was a physicist who also attended a local church. Sy sat in the back row and took no notes. Afterward he asked the man a single question about the origin of the fine-structure constant. The answer led to coffee and then to an invitation to a service the following Sunday. Sy went once, then again the next month.

He began to carry a small paperback New Testament in his briefcase. It stayed closed for weeks. One morning he opened it during lunch and read a few verses from the Sermon on the Mount aloud. He said the language reminded him of the folk songs his parents had sung when he was small, except the words pointed in a different direction. He did not ask me to agree or disagree. He simply closed the book and returned to the spectrophotometer.

The experiments continued. We published two papers that year on enzyme kinetics. Between runs Sy would sometimes mention the Book of Acts and how the account read like a set of laboratory notes rather than the propaganda he had once expected. The detail that struck him most was the way ordinary people kept records of what they had seen and heard.

By the time he turned sixty the conversations had shifted. He spoke less about contradictions and more about the people he met at the church. The same hands that once shook at political rallies now passed him a bulletin and asked about his week. He described the service as quiet, almost ordinary, yet the ordinariness itself felt new.

One Friday he told me he had decided to be baptized. The service took place in a small brick building near the river. I stood near the back with two other colleagues from the department. The pastor used ordinary water and ordinary words. Sy came up from the pool, dried his face with a towel someone handed him, and shook hands with the people in the first row. No speeches followed.