A Stone for a Pillow

by Madeleine L'engle

  The computer, unlike subatomic particles, or biblical stories, is deterministic. It does not ask questions. It gives answers, sometimes useful ones, sometimes not, as when it “thought” I was leaving from Portland, Oregon.

  The computer is either/or. Yes/No. There is no room for perhaps, or on the other hand. There is no room for complexity which draws us into contradiction and paradox.

  The computer is here to stay. I can’t afford to put my head in the sand, like the ostrich, and hope it will go away. Ultimately, when word processors become a lot more portable than they are at present, and suit my needs better, I’ll likely write with one. I already have a six pound little electronic typestar, which is even more sensitive to my fingers and my mind than the heavy old electric typewriter. But I don’t want the computer to change my way of thinking without so much as a by-your-leave.

  The indeterminacy of both Bible and physics is symbolically far more creative than the determinacy of high technocracy.

  Fritjov Capra, in The Tao of Physics, quotes atomic physicist Robert Oppenheimer: “If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether the electron is in motion, we must say ‘no.’ ”

  He also quotes from the Upanishads:

  It moves, it moves not.

  It is far, it is near.

  It is within all this.

  And outside all this.

  There appears to be a tacit assumption that the world of particle physics and the world of eastern mysticism (Hinduism, Buddhism) are compatible, but not the worlds of particle physics and Christianity. This is not only blindness on the part of those who claim this, it is a misunderstanding of Christianity. Christianity is an Eastern religion. It is to our shame that we have westernized it, imposed on it our forensic thinking. But if we go back to the Gospels and the good news Jesus brought us, the contradictory, paradoxical elements of the new physics fit most compatibly with those of Scripture.

  “Before Abraham was, I am,”

  Jesus proclaimed. He spoke with Moses and Abraham on the mountain, overriding chronological time. When Moses asked God, “What is your name?” God replied,

  “I will be what I will be.”

  The Athanasian creed surely cannot be understood in terms of Western logic: God the Father incomprehensible. God the Son incomprehensible. God the Holy Spirit incomprehensible…

  That is surely oriental, rather than occidental thinking, or rather, it is truly cosmic thinking.

  Listen to the Lord speaking in Isaiah 55:

  For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

  neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.

  For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

  so are my ways higher than your ways

  and my thoughts than your thoughts.

  For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven

  and return not thither but water the earth,

  making it bring forth and sprout,

  giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

  so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth;

  it shall not return to me empty,

  but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

  and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.

  Then there is Hildegarde of Bingen likening herself to a feather on the breath of God, and Julian of Norwich seeing the entire universe in “the quantity of a hazelnut.” Henry Vaughan “saw eternity the other night like a great ring of pure and endless light.”

  In an equally “eastern” mode of thinking, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing wrote thus: “Heaven ghostly, as high down as up, and as up as down, behind as before, on one side as another. Insomuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then that same time he were in heaven ghostly. For the high and the next way thither is run by desires and not by paces of feet.”

  Beyond cold rationalism, such a way of viewing heaven’s reality reminds me of the words of Saint Paul as he spoke to the people at Corinth:

  The foolishness of God is wiser than men….God has chosen things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are….For we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God….What no eye has seen, no ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, God has prepared for those who love him.

  This is for me a happy and comprehensible understanding of heaven. It is by accepting all the “contra-dictions,” these indeterminate non-answers, that we are given an intuition of heaven. If we do not recognize it now, by “a true desire,” it will be all the more difficult later. Heaven is nothing we can seek through our own virtue; it cannot be earned; it is a gift of the God of love. When we are self-emptied enough to make room for this love, it is not as a result of our own moral rectitude or willpower. But it is sometimes given to us, this lovely emptiness, and then the Holy Spirit can fill it, with prayer, or music, or a poem, or a story. Or, sometimes, it goes beyond all these to the greatest gift of all, being filled with that which is beyond all symbols, with God’s Presence.

  And then we are, far more than when we are filled with self-probing, self-centeredness, or self-righteousness.

  Gregory of Nyssa expresses this in language which is just as difficult as the language of particle physics, but which is rich indeed:

  Abraham passed through all the reasoning that is possible to human nature about the divine attributes, and after he had purified his mind of all such concepts, he took hold of a faith that was unmixed and pure of any concept, and he fashioned for himself this ikon of knowledge of God that is completely free from error, namely the belief that God completely transcends any knowable symbol.

  We are closest to contemplation when we move into, through, and beyond symbol, but during most of our lives we need symbols, such as this of Saint Bonaventura: “God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference nowhere.”

  Numbers are symbols, powerful symbols. Combined with letters of the alphabet, as equations, they can change our way of looking at the universe.

  Einstein’s most famous equation is E = MC2: Energy equals mass plus the speed of light squared—a symbol so potent that the depths of its implications have not yet been plumbed. And, like all symbols, it can draw us closer to God to whom all numbers belong, or it can be a barrier between us and the Creator.

  I had a letter from a young woman who asked me seriously whether or not the number 6 belongs to the Devil. I replied that if everything belongs to the Creator, then so do numbers, and the Devil can’t take over a number unless we are willing to give it to him. Where did she get the idea that number 6 belongs to the Devil? From 666?

  According to Revelation 13:18, 666 is the number of the beast:

  If anyone has insight let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.

  The beast is often assumed to be Satan (the sum of the letters in Nero Caesar in Hebrew adds up to 666). But even numbers, when abused, can be redeemed, and ultimately 666 will return to God.

  Slowly I have learned the beauty of numbers, particularly as I studied harmony and counterpoint on the piano and learned the intricacies of the fugue. Through music I have come to see numbers as a way of giving glory to God, and I would rather dwell on the bright side, not the dark side, of a symbol.

  In Jacob’s day, numbers were for counting your camels, your sheep. And the stars were a symbol of numbers beyond the human capacity to count.

  Jacob came from a small, insignificant tribe on a sparsely populated planet. Yet he, like his father and grandfather, was told that his descendants would be as the stars of the sky, as the grains of sand. In God’s eyes, insignificance doesn’t even exist. If something is, then it is significant.

  Particle physics has a similar sense of the absolute significance of the very small, the so incredibly small we can’t even imagine such
smallness.

  In Particles, Michael Chester writes, “Not only does [the neutrino] have zero charge, it has zero mass. The neutrino is a spinning little bit of nothingness that travels at the speed of light.”

  I love that! A spinning little bit of nothingness! It so delights me that I wrote a Christmas song about it.

  The neutrino and the unicorn

  Danced the night that Christ was born.

  A spinning little bit of nothingness

  that travels at the speed of light

  an unseen spark of somethingness

  is all that can hold back the night.

  The tiny neutron splits in two,

  an electron and a proton form.

  Where is the energy that is lost?

  Who can hold back the impending storm?

  Cosmic collapse would be the cost.

  A spinning nothing, pure and new,

  The neutrino comes to heal and bless.

  The neutrino and the unicorn

  danced the night that Christ was born.

  The sun is dim, the stars are few,

  The earthquake comes to split and shake.

  All purity of heart is lost,

  In the black density of night

  stars fall. O will the heavens break?

  Then through the tingling of black frost

  the unicorn in silver dress

  crosses the desert, horn alight.

  Earth’s plates relax their grinding stress.

  The unicorn comes dancing to

  make pure again, redeem and bless,

  The neutrino and the unicorn

  danced the night that Christ was born.

  Pauli postulated the existence of the neutrino to account for the tiny amount of energy lost when a neutron breaks into a proton and an electron. Energy cannot be lost—and the neutrino, thus far, is the best explanation: a spinning little bit of nothingness that travels at the speed of light.

  We human beings do like explanations, and we’d really prefer them to be simple, if not simplistic. But the postulation of the neutrino is as wildly imaginative as those angels ascending and descending the ladder joining heaven and earth. And each postulation that seems to be a workable one leads on to even wilder uses of the imagination—not the imagination gone insane (though we must accept that possibility), but the imagination exploring all probabilities and possibilities.

  If the neutrino is, it is God’s, and it is as valued by el as Jacob. Or you. Or me.

  The concept of subatomic particles plays havoc with ordinary concepts of time. Chester writes:

  Actually, one millionth of a second is not so brief on a subatomic time scale. Both the pion with its lifetime of one-hundred millionth of a second and the muon with one millionth of a second are extremely long-lasting. Compare these times with the time that it takes a pion to interact with a nucleon, and they are enormous time-spans. Comparing the pion-nucleon interaction to the pion lifetime is like comparing one second to 100 million years. Comparing the pion-nucleon interaction to the muon lifetime is like comparing one second to ten billion years.

  Is that any more formidable to think about than comparing the lifetime of a human being to the lifetime of a sun, or to the lifetime of a galaxy?

  It makes sense only if we think of it all as part of our rootedness in cosmos, our enkosmismene. And it knocks our ordinary concepts of chronological time into a cocked hat. Time, as chronology, makes me dizzy with both lack of meaning and unreachable meaning. We need ordinary, chronological time so that we can, for instance, get to the airport or to the office on time, but here time is only an agreed upon fiction so that we will be enabled to get through the day’s work with as little confusion as possible. And even in flying across the continent, our bodies are agonizingly jolted with time change and jet lag, so that we become aware that our bodies do function in ordinary time.

  Yet, when I think of the pion and the muon, of the great spiral galaxies, and of our own little lives in terms of kairos—of rootedness in cosmos, in God’s time itself—it opens vast vistas which can be awesome, even terrifying (“What a dreadful place is this!” Jacob cries), but less terrifying than it is wondrous, because God’s time is far more real than ordinary chronos, and we are part of both.

  During our mortal lives, however, chronos is not merely illusion. My body is aging according to human chronology, not nucleon or galactic chronology. My knees creak. My vision is variable. My energy span is shorter than I think it ought to be. There is nothing I can do to stop the passage of this kind of time in which we human beings are set. I can work with it rather than against it, but I cannot stop it. I do not like what it is doing to my body. If I live as long as many of my forbears, these outward diminishments will get worse, not better. But these are the outward signs of chronology, and there is another Madeleine who is untouched by them, the part of me that lives forever in kairos and bears God’s image.

  (My mother said, “I may be an old woman in my eighties, but inside me I am still a dancing girl.”)

  In particle physics there is a theory, posited by Feynman, that positrons are electrons travelling backwards in time. The positron, unlike the human creature, is not bound by one-way linear time—the past-to-future track—but can move backwards in time as well as forwards. That’s fine for the positron, but not for the human being. Who wants second childhood in an old body?

  To move backwards as well as forwards is still linear. Kairos is not bound by time at all. And that marvel which makes us unique as well as interdependent is free in kairos.

  As I type these words I am in Crosswicks, where Hugh and I are house- and animal-sitting while Bion and Laurie are away. The mercury is subzero, and the antifreeze in one of the pipes leading to the tower—my over-the-garage study—has frozen, and the tower is a deep freeze, and unusable until the mercury climbs to thirty, and the antifreeze thaws, and we find where the problem is.

  Antifreeze shouldn’t freeze! I am sitting in the corner of the kitchen-dining room where my son has his desk, and through the windows I look past the three tall spruce trees to the sun slanting against the bare branches of a maple and outlining them in gold. The ground is white, and the hills beyond the fields are mauve. These hills are old, many thousands of years old, worn down through the years by wind and rain. The spruce trees, now more than thirty feet high, were given me as a Mother’s Day present more than three decades ago; the dark smudges of the Brussels sprouts plants, the only vegetables left in the garden, were planted last June; the snow fell only a few days ago. In that one glance I have seen a considerable spread of chronology. This is something I might not have noticed before my fascination with particle physics. I read Michael Chester’s book this past summer, often while in the waiting room at the hospital lab between various tests while we were trying to get rid of the aeromonas.

  Particle physicists talk about “strange particles,” seemingly less afraid of that which is strange than are many people looking for a safe religion. Was it because Isaac’s God was strange and anything but “safe” that Jacob was so slow in taking El Shaddai as his God?

  Chester says, “There was a serious problem concerning these new particles. They were all [kaons] created in strong interactions, but decayed slowly to weak interactions. This was very unexpected. Physicists were used to the idea that particle events are essentially reversible. A particle born in the instant of operation of the strong force should not fade away over the vast ages of time (such as one billionth of a second or even one millionth of a second) required by a weak force. Because of this peculiar imbalance, these new particles were given the name of strange particles.” (Scientists can be as upset by the unexpected in the universe as theologians.)

  Chester goes on to say, “Certainly the physical universe is much more dreamlike and much less mechanical than we generally realize.”

  The physicist can and sometimes does say that the physical universe exists only in the mind.

  Whose mind? The mind of the physicist with an
imagination as wild as that of the teller of fairy tales? Haldane says we cannot imagine it. Whose mind, then? The mind of God?

  With our capacity to misuse, abuse, or even annihilate our planet with all we have learned about the physical universe, what are we doing to the glorious designs of the mind of God? It is one of the problems and responsibilities of free will, and, unless we believe in predestination, in a deterministic universe, we can’t let ourselves off the hook of personal responsibility. Though the butterfly may not be aware that it affects galaxies thousands of light years away, we humans are given at least an inkling of the results of our most casual actions.

  A small example is cigarette smoking. If I am in a room where someone is smoking, not only does it irritate my eyes, but I am being made a passive smoker, like it or not, and receiving all the detrimental effects of the cigarette as much as if I were smoking it. We can do nothing in isolation, no matter how much we try to separate ourselves from our cosmic community.

  —

  A true symbol is an open window, never leading to a closed, deterministic world, but to an open, indeterministic one. Symbols are mind, heart, and soul stretchers.

  Recently I was shown a colour photograph of an icon—from Armenia, I think—which absolutely delights me. It is a picture of King David, sitting and holding his harp with one hand. With the other he holds a child who is sitting on his knee, and the caption under the picture reads: King David with Christ on his lap.

  What a glorious reminder that Christ always was! Jesus of Nazareth lived for a brief life span, but Christ always was, is, and will be, and the picture of King David with Christ on his lap is my treasure for this year, a treasure largely in my mind’s eye, because I do not have a copy of the picture of this icon.

  So, like King David, we may hold Christ on our laps, and we will be taught to live lovingly with paradox and contradiction, with yes and with no, light and dark, in and out, up and down.