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.

Anyone else up for taking another look?

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.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12iAfEfKADKrgVUQSrRYK9QQrZGTKMKtt/view?usp=sharing

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.

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 is the 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.

What’s not to love about that?

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)

Line: A perfectly straight, continuous path that is infinitely long, and has no width or thickness, representing a path of points extending forever in opposite directions…[also refers to marks, cords, queues, or sequences in various contexts].

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In mathematics, lines connect any two dots. Lines have no end and really no beginning, extending beyond the limits of imagination – that’s why arrows are added to their ends in mathematical problems.

If you begin at a point on a piece of paper, you can draw lines moving out from that point in different directions (technically, they are rays, not lines – but let’s not quibble). If you draw a landscape using the lines as guides, you get perspective – depth, three dimensionality, appears in a two dimensional space. If you are an artist, something of the wonder of whom/what you draw is offered to all who see it.

Spiritually speaking, everything begins in God – the origin of all life and lines. Scripture and icons draw lines, verbal and visual, from that beginning. They depict perspective (depth, dimensionality) that offers us something of the wonder of God. Maybe, just maybe, they draw us into the wonder of God, leaving behind on our very lives something that just may offer a glimpse of it to others.