Two of them are in my back yard, perched on the yet-to-bloom forsythia as they wait for their time at the feeder. Traditionally, cardinals are departed loved ones come to visit. Attending a funeral, finishing The Secret of Secrets (Dan Brown’s latest Robert Langdon novel), Palm Sunday ushering in Holy Week, watching the cardinals in my yard: death hovers over my days.
Most people don’t want to talk about death, whether or not they claim and are claimed by a faith. There are a few exceptions – those who have had near-death experiences, those who are dying and have made peace with it, and the enlightened few such as the Dalai Lama. Death is just a part of life to be accepted rather than feared for them. They may not focus on death, but they don’t deny its existence or their own inevitable end. They give death a nod and get on with their day, grateful for and loving what the day brings.
Perhaps I should think of the cardinals as death’s presence gracing my life – acknowledge that death is real and appreciate the winged reminder that I will soon enough be a departed soul. It might make talking about death easier; it might make talking about death a relief.
I sat in the back half of Saint Patrick’s sanctuary, neither friend nor family of the man whose picture and ashes were placed at the front before the altar. I was there for a son who lost his father.
After the usual prayers and sermon came the Lord’s Supper, accompanied by the terms of participation:
A member of the Roman Catholic Church; currently practicing the faith and attending church regularly; having made confession recently.Anyone else should remain in the pews or come up, arms crossed, and receive a blessing.
Neither the son I was there to support nor I met the requirements. He remained seated. I went up for a blessing.
The priests certainly didn’t mean to do harm; most likely, they believed they were preserving the sanctity of the Lord’s Supper. But designating the worthy and the unworthy in this gathering, making family and friends feel unwelcome or uncomfortable while saying good-bye to a loved one is harmful. Ironic, considering Jesus didn’t seem nearly so picky about the people who joined him for dinner – and a person’s worthiness or unworthiness seemed to rest in their compassion toward others more than in their denominational credentials.
On my walk back afterward, I pondered the words of the priest: death leads to everlasting communion with Christ. Considering the brevity of the years we spend in this life, taking into account the eternity that embraces us in death, wouldn’t it be wiser to let go of the terms of participation? Instead of keeping the Lord’s Supper for those who meet the terms, wouldn’t it be better to reflect the expansive and merciful love that welcomes us home after death?
Life is too short to hold a grudge over being excluded from the Lord’s Supper, so I let it go. Going up for the blessing was my way of showing love for the family and respect for the rules of the church.
But I wonder how many who remained in the pews, and how many who walked past all those seated on the way up to receive the wine and wafers, will be able to do the same in this time of grief. I wonder about the son.
Theology was considered the queen of the sciences in Europe a few centuries back. The assumption was that every field of study would support the Church’s current vision of the Christian God and creation.
Then came the Enlightenment, a heliocentric solar system, the periodic table of elements, and a Big Bang origin for all of it. Theology wasn’t the queen of the sciences: it was just bad science.
Then came divorce. Science would take care of the how‘s of it all while theology would confine itself to the why‘s. Impartial observation would offer answers to the former, morality codes and religious practices would lead to answers for the latter.
That got washed away by the observer effect – that scientific results were influenced by how scientists chose to observe something. (electrons and protons would appear to be particles or waves, depending on the observer’s choices). Heisenberg found that a particle’s position and momentum couldn’t be determined at the same time, and the Uncertainty Principle was born. Scientific knowledge was inherently limited by its own practice – by the limits of the people involved.
Theology, at its best, offers some insight into all this. All of life is God created and God related. It’s from this perspective that humans live, move, and seek answers to the great mysteries of the universe and the soul. God is not a big, beloved object in a humanly constructed world. Humans are beloved creatures in God’s world, held by divine love and living in this mysterious creation.
When we accept that how and what we see are bound to our limited perspective, we lose the illusion of Godlike power and understanding. But with luck, we just might gain the wisdom to see the miraculous nature of all that is, was and ever will be. Whether you look at the stars from your back porch or through the Hubble telescope.
It’s the study of matter, energy, space, and time as a way to figure out how the universe came to be and continues on. From the subatomic to the galactic, physics explores it all. And yet, it was so boring a class that I dropped it in both high school and college. How can that be?
I wish someone had mentioned the big picture of the field at some point when I was still sitting in the classroom. I wish someone had told me that all the equations and models were attempts to understand and hand on a glimpse of the miracle that is this cosmos -writ large across galaxies and small among the atoms. But no one did.
Turning the miraculous and mysterious into something boring isn’t just happening in a physics classroom. It happens in confirmation classes, where creeds and dogma are trundled out like how-to manuals rather than what they are: a specific group of people’s best attempt to hand on their life changing experience of God. Religious studies classes, seminary courses, even Bible studies – none are immune from well meaning people sucking the life out of them along with the air out of the classroom.
I think it’s time to start over, to let go of the dull packaging that has surrounded so much mystery. It’s time to take another look with an open heart, a curious mind, and an adventurous spirit.
I made a mysterious and miraculous substance this morning. It’s two parts corn starch and one part water.
Oobleck is a non-Newtonian substance – a rare thing that is both a liquid and a solid, depending on how I interact with it. If I gently dip my fingers into it, it’s a liquid; if I smack the top of it with the palm of my hand, or squeeze it, it’s a solid. If you have corn starch in your cupboard, give it a try.
This is my prayer life in a nutshell. When I approach it with opposing force, it’s impenetrable . When I try to squeeze answers or results out of it, it hardens in my hand. When I approach it gently, it surrounds and envelops me…
Ology, attached to the end of a word, means the study of. It comes from the Greek word logia, meaning words or sayings.
Logia means sayings or words, a collection of writings, sayings, or oracles. It’s a common enough term in theological studies and philosophical traditions. It’s related to the Greek word, logos.
Logos means the word, the source, the rational principle that underlies things. The Word. It’s also one of the names given to the man Jesus, the incarnation of the source (God), and the principle that underlies all life.
Descent Into Hell
Biology is the study of life; most of us, happily or unhappily, ended up taking it in high school. If we pull a six degrees to Kevin Bacon, Biology moves from -ology to logia to logos in three degrees. If we take it back to the original root, then Biology isthe word of life.
If we approached biology, and all the other ologies, as the word of instead of the field or study of, perhaps we would let go of the teenage boredom that still blinds us and see it for what it truly is: a window into the sanctity of all life.
I can recall a lot of my early life because I moved from place to place. The trash cans floating down the street after a flood were in Mississippi, so I was three years old (1967). Christmas with my grandparents was right before I turned four, during the weeks between Mississippi and Hawaii (also 1967). I was four when I used to see Mr. Yokoyama (1968) walk to work – that was in Hawaii. Stopping at a Texas rest stop to have a drink of water happened when I was barely five (Winter 1969)- it was during the drive across country on the move back to the mainland. Where I was and when I was are easier to determine because the wheres changed every year and a half.
sp TI ac ME e
But there were some years when too many moves in too short a time blur together. My sister and I were in three different school systems in three different states one year – and ended it in a return to one of them to finish the school term. I lived in four different places in two states between my first and second semesters in seminary. Few of the details from those times are solid enough to grasp, and all that remains is a cloudiness that hangs between two more distinct times and spaces.
StPiAmCeE
Space and time are intertwined, sometimes offering clarity and sometimes made more obscure because of that entanglement. Sometimes this melding anchors my life, sometimes it unmoors it. Either way, it reveals just how profound spacetime is in life.
There’s a lesson here, if I care to learn it. This life grows in particular space and time. The walls and roof that keep me warm, the chairs drawn up to the table for a meal, and the spot I occupy when I pray are where I seek God, and where God meets me. The ordinary time that finds me at work, making dinner, or gathering myself for prayer before anyone else is awake is when I encounter neighbor, self, and God. It makes it a lot easier to let go of the illusion that none of the particulars really matter; it also makes it a whole lot easier to love those particulars, imperfect and ultimately transitory as they may be…
My high school chemistry teacher, Helen Steele, was a source of revelation: she taught me about molecules. A quick definition: Molecules are composed of atoms, which are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Molecules are the fundamental components of matter.
That’s amazing in itself, but learning that wasn’t revelatory. It was when she pointed to the enormous lab table at the front of the class and said this: that table is mostly empty space because space makes up the vast majority of molecules. The table that weighed several hundred pounds was mostly made up of the space between protons, neutrons, and electrons – just as the cosmos is largely made up of space between planets and galaxies. It’s in this place in between the invisible molecular level and the vast cosmic scale that the space is hidden in the solidity of a table.
For the rest of my tenth grade year, every time I saw that lab table, I knew I was in the presence of the mysterious, that Mystery created and surrounded that scratched, charcoal colored piece of furniture. Learning about how molecules came together or separated into new combinations, and how those combinations of mostly-made-of-space molecules manifested into salt, water, soil, rock, and everything else I could see just added to the mystery of it all.
Life, in all its many forms, is composed of the empty space between and among the atoms that come together in molecular structures. Even now, my heart beats faster just thinking about it. And that empty space, that space between, is a sacred one. That’s the vision of reality that Helen Steele offered.
I never told her how important that larger view of the world was to me, and I never shared it with my classmates or other school friends. It didn’t seem like something they would understand or value. I left a different kind of empty space between myself and them in keeping silent about it.
One January morning, seated in a science classroom at the University of New Hampshire, geology professor Cecil J. Schneer would offer a similar glimpse of the Mystery – this time in the History of Science. At the end of the first class, I let go of being embarrassed by how profoundly his lecture moved me and I thanked him for the revelation. I sent my words into that empty space, and a connection was created. I think it’s one of the moments that nudged me toward seminary and a the work of pointing out to others the mysteries that surround and fill life.
For more information about molecules, check out McGill University’s Office for Science and Society: What is a Molecule. (www.mcgill.ca)
According to Isaac Newton, absolute time exists independently from anyone perceiving it, and it progresses at a constant pace throughout the universe.
According to Albert Einstein, time is not absolute, but intertwined with space and affected by gravity and speed (he also believed that the separation of past, present, and future was a “stubbornly persistent illusion”).
Stephen Hawking held that time began at the Big Bang, along with everything else.
The arrow of time moves from the past toward the future. There is no reversing of time’s arrow.
In my everyday life, time behaves as Newton’s independent dimension. It marches on, regardless of what’s going on in my life. I age a year at the same rate, whether I’m twenty going on twenty-one or eighty-four going on eighty-five. The clocks keep ticking and I move from cradle to grave.
But at the extremes – subatomic or cosmically large – time gets wonky. It’s so married to space that it becomes one half of a compound name: spacetime (space/time, space-time, you get the drift).
But scientists aren’t the only ones vexed by time. Philosophers and theologians were dealing with this headache long before modernity: is time an internal sense of duration, or an ordered relation of events? Is the time I experience, which isn’t quite so orderly or constant [sitting in traffic for 20 minutes feels a lot longer than watching a 45ish minute episode of Doctor Who (Okay, the old ones were 25 minutes, but you get the Time And Relative Dimensions In Space drift)], as real as the time that passes in orderly minutes and hours? How does God fit into time, stand outside of time, create time, enter time, redeem time, sustain time? What about past, present, and future – are they real, or something that helps me keep what I’ve done, what I’m doing, and what I might do in some kind of order? Yikes!
But if I take a deep breath, then really consider time, something emerges out of all this talk – something as profound as it is simple: my time is limited. Whether time exists in creation or outside it really doesn’t affect the reality of my own personal expiration date. My moments pass and cannot be regained. Soon enough, I’ll return to the dust from which I was made.
A lot of things I might consider important drop away when I accept and embrace the limited time I have on this earth. Letting go of jealousy, sarcasm, and one-upmanship becomes easier. Loving what does count – love, kindness, joy, others – just might get a little easier, too.
