The discoveries made since the heart of the atom was opened have irrevocably changed our view of the universe and creation. Our great radio telescopes are picking up echoes of that primal act of creation which expanded to become all the stars in their courses. It would seem that the beginning of all things came from something so incredibly tiny as to be nothing, a sub-subatomic particle so infinitesimal that it is difficult even to imagine. So science brings us back to a God who created ex nihilo. And who then took that early primordial soup, that chaos, and made from it night and day and galaxies and solar systems and all creatures great and small.
There are many theories today which I find immensely exciting theologically, but I want to sit lightly enough on it all so that if something new and perhaps contradictory is revealed I won’t be thrown off-center, as were Darwin’s frightened opponents, but will go on being excited about the marvellousness of being—of snowflake and starfish and geranium and galaxy. There is nothing too small or unimportant (and surely when he was sold into Egypt, Joseph was small and unimportant) to make a difference.
Much of what I read in the way of quantum mechanics and particle physics and the new theories of chaos and topology and fractals is over my head. Never mind. The fact that they are difficult doesn’t stop me from continuing to grapple with new ideas, because all ideas ultimately come from God who made it all. There’s a fascinating and as yet still unexplained little mathematical problem noticed first by Paul Dirac (and there’s a joke about Dirac: “There is no god, and Dirac is his prophet”): Numbers with the order of magnitude of one followed by forty zeroes keep appearing, to everybody’s surprise. For instance, the ratio of the huge electromagnetic force between two particles to the much weaker gravitational force between them is one, followed by forty zeroes. The number that would equal the mass of the universe is one followed by forty zeroes multiplied by itself. The present temperature of space requires the expansion rate at the birth of the universe to be one followed by forty zeroes. Now, that is all certainly above my non-mathematical head, but it still intrigues me.
Why forty? At this point nobody seems to have any idea. I have never before thought of forty as being a number of any particular significance. But wait. After Noah boarded the ark it rained for forty days and forty nights. Moses and the Hebrew children took forty years to cross the desert to the Promised Land. Moses on Mount Sinai talked with God for forty days. Elijah was fed for forty days by a big, black bird. Jesus, after his baptism, fasted for forty days. And after the Resurrection he stayed with his friends for forty days before the Ascension. Paul, evidently impressed by the potency of forty, said that he had received forty stripes but one.
And in Pharaonic Egypt, the period of mourning was forty days. In the Middle Ages in Europe someone seeking sanctuary was protected for forty days.
And I was married for forty years.
A potent number. One day we may understand why it is turning up so frequently in the mathematics of the universe, unless we try to hang on to our present state of knowledge as the church tried to hang on to the old theory of planet earth as the center of the universe.
It was pointed out to me by a young astrophysicist friend that gravity, too, plays a significant part in planetary life. Our gravity is at exactly the fine-tuned strength that will permit the evolution of planets which are capable of supporting life. If gravity were a fraction weaker, all stars would be red dwarfs; if it were a fraction stronger, all stars would be blue giants; and suns like ours, strong young suns with planetary systems, would not be possible, and there would be no sentient life whatsoever.
Does this seem to be in conflict with creationism? Why? If God is omnipotent and all powerful, can’t the Creator create in any way that Love chooses, and so expand our metaphor? The important thing is that the universe was made by Love, and belongs to Love.
My astrophysicist friend showed me some complex scientific charts which he was taking with him to Amsterdam, where he was in charge of a planetology conference. At the bottom of one of these charts, black with equations like c=2.998 X 1010 cm s-1 (and that’s one of the simpler ones) he had typed out, “He showed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazelnut, in the palm of my hand; and it was round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: what may this be? And was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.”
It is a great comfort to me to find a highly respected astrophysicist quoting Lady Julian of Norwich in a series of scientific diagrams to be presented to other scientists.
Sometimes it is the acuteness of pain or anxiety that heightens our awareness of God’s creation. Not long before Hugh died I went on a walk with two young friends who were planning their wedding, and who were deeply affected by Hugh’s illness. One of them picked up a tiny blue eggshell, recently vacated by a fledgling. And for us there in the little shell was all of creation. A hazelnut. A robin’s egg. The Milky Way.
Paul Dirac believes that all of the seeming coincidences in the makeup of the universe reveal a deep connection between microcosm and macrocosm, between astrophysics and particle physics. And physicists are actually asking, “May it be that life is of real importance to the universe?” John Wheeler takes an extreme anthropic view, feeling that we human beings are needed by the universe, that there has to be “observer participation” in order for the universe to be sustained.
Are we as important as that? It could be a pretty ego-swelling thought, plunging us back into the smugness of the old sandwich theory, with the universe totally earth-centered. Or is the anthropic theory, instead, ego-shattering? What have we human beings done with our participation in the great work of Creation? Are we being co-creators with God? Or are we being destroyers—consumers? Can a consumer co-create? Are we honouring God’s Creation, when our greed causes us to pollute our planet?
And here is an extraordinary thing: Among some right-wing, fundamentalist Christians it is seen as a sign of atheism or communism to care about the ecology of the planet God has given us to live on. I find that difficult to comprehend. How can Christians view stewardship of what God called good, very good, as being unChristian?
A longing for peace, too, is seen as atheist or communist. God help us! I have lived in a century of war, and I long for peace. The psalmist cries out,
My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace. I am for peace; but when I speak, they are for war.
“Peace I leave with you,” Jesus said. “My peace I give unto you.”
How can we reject that peace?
Perhaps those who view as atheist or communistic a concern for the planet or a longing for peace are also unable to see God’s creation as greater than we expected. In a book on particle physics the writer, a physicist, remarked that the universe seems to be far more “imaginary” than formerly had been believed.
Which leads to the question: Whose imagination?
If it is the scientists’, if it is our human imaginations alone, then I don’t think I trust it. But if it is God’s, if everything that is is held in the mind of God, then our “observer participation” makes considerable sense. There are hints all through Scripture that God calls us to work with El on the great story of Creation, because the Maker of the story is constantly coming in and being part of it, helping us along in the great drama, and going to such lengths to be part of the story that the Power that created the universe willingly limited Elself to the form of a tiny baby.
The Word: the Word that loved us so much that it enfleshed itself for us at Christmas, hallowing our humanness, strengthening us to be what we are called to be.
Christmas fills me with utter awe. The incredible sacrifice of all Power and Glory in coming to be part of the human endeavor leaves me breathless. How can we have trivialized this amazing action of love by letting the media turn us into consumers! Christmas should be greeted with the silence of awe and wonder, since the great and mighty Word leaped into the womb of a human girl, and was born as all of us are born.
> In my Goody Book I’ve copied out these unattributed words:
Trumpets! Lightnings! The earth trembles! But into the Virgin’s womb thou didst descend with noiseless tread.
And, again,
No longer do the Magi bring presents to Fire and Sun, for this child made Sun and Fire.
This is a story so wildly incredible that the world has tried to tame it, but it cannot be tamed, and we, like the Magi, are called to observe, contemplate, stand there, bring our gifts, and offer them. At our best, our offerings make us more human. At our worst, they make us less human. When religion causes judgmentalism, suspicion, and hate, there is something wrong with religion. It has become dehumanizing, and therefore it is bad religion, and we become once more a horror and a hissing and an everlasting reproach.
War dehumanizes. Hate, fear, revenge dehumanize. There has been too much dehumanization in this century. Two thousand years ago Jesus came and called people to become more human, to pull us back to the Image in which we were created. And that is still our calling.
It is our very humanness which enables us to observe and contemplate and, ultimately, to hallow or to affirm holiness. The more human we are, the better we are able to understand who is doing the calling. It is not an abstract principle of creation. It bears no resemblance to that “humanism” which puts man back in the center and has no need for God. Were not Adam and Eve called to observe and contemplate? Yet after they ate the forbidden fruit, they became self-conscious, thinking only of their nakedness rather than the loveliness around them.
Why did it matter to them that they were naked? Why didn’t they look at their beautiful created bodies with joy? What caused them to feel shame? Shame was not an appropriate response. How did the tempter manage to stir up guilt feelings? Guilt for their nakedness, rather than for dishonouring their Maker’s request. It was false guilt, certainly, blinding them to the real. What God made was perfect and to be rejoiced in. Was their shame the beginning of all our sexual confusions and repressions and lusts?
When they stopped responding to God’s calling them to observe and contemplate all that had been created, they could no longer hallow.
To observe and contemplate what God has made is an act of joy. The moment Adam and Eve felt shame they lost the joy. Where there is no joy the presence of God is obscured.
Thomas Traherne writes,
You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more so, because men [male and female] are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, and in good as coming from God…you never enjoy the world.
This is a perfect description of how we human creatures are called to observe and contemplate. To enjoy thus is to shout, “This is holy!” To enjoy thus is to be enjoyed by God!
It seems odd that those who take the anthropic view seem not to have noticed that we have made a mess of it, with our lack of joy, our overblown sense of self-importance. How could human creatures who have truly observed and contemplated a child, any child, then blast that child with napalm? How could anyone who has ever loved anybody plant a bomb in a plane and wantonly kill several hundred people? How could human creatures who have truly observed the beauty of the planet, who have enjoyed the world aright then proceed to foul it with greed and stupidity and pollution? With the ugliness of inner cities which surely bear no resemblance to the Celestial City? With strip mining and deforestation and smoke belching from factory chimneys—and how much of the increase in cancer comes from polluted food and air and water?
How did we get a Pentagon and a stock market and state mental institutions? (When I was a child there was no Pentagon.) Have we people of this planet gone mad?
But it is not too late. We are given a second chance, a whole series of second chances. God is indeed merciful. It is not too late to mend the terrible damage we have done—not single-handedly, but simply in our own lives, in our own living and in our dying. We have cleaned up the dying Hudson River and a dead Great Lake. If we will, we can.
What have the advances in technocracy done to our humanness? I am all for technology when it is used with wisdom. It is technology which enabled the eye surgeon to give me sight. But it is technocracy that dehumanizes.
There has been more change in this century than in all the preceding centuries put together. It is difficult to be observers and contemplators in the face of constant movement, of shift and flux. On the news not long ago I heard that a third of our purchases in the next decade will be objects which have not yet been invented. This produces uncertainty, and uncertainty produces fear, and fear produces rage. Young school-age friends of mine in New York have been beaten up, more than once, by other boys—not for money, just for anger, as racial unrest grows.
The last Christmas Hugh and I had together I wrote this poem for our Christmas letter:
Observe and contemplate.
Make real. Bring to be.
Because we note the falling tree
The sound is truly heard.
Look! The sunrise! Wait—
It needs us to look, to see,
To hear, and speak the Word.
Observe and contemplate
The cosmos and our little earth.
Observing, we affirm the worth
Of sun and stars and light unfurled.
So, let us, seeing, celebrate
The glory of God’s incarnate birth
And sing its joy to all the world.
Observe and contemplate.
Make real. Affirm. Say Yes,
And in this season sing and bless
Wind, ice, snow; rabbit and bird;
Comet and quark; things small and great.
Oh, observe and joyfully confess
The birth of Love’s most lovely Word.
We need to take time to step back, to observe, to contemplate. We need to acknowledge with as much honesty as Judah that Christianity has been so judgmental and so unloving that it has turned many people away. Where are our heroes and heroines? What do we call “role models” today? How do we stop being a horror and a hissing and an everlasting reproach, and instead become a joy to our Creator and to each other?
John Heuss, in his article, “The True Function of a Christian Church” writes, “It is customary for all of us to lay the blame for public indifference to religion at the door of the secularism and materialism of our age,” of our longing for the fleshpots of Egypt. But then he goes on to say that the church is no longer offering a living, loving alternative. “Perhaps our contribution in these days is not so much the evangelizing of the world as it is the Christianizing of the Church itself.”
Let us never forget that Christianizing starts all the way back at the beginning of Genesis, when Christ, the Word, shouted the galaxies into being. Jesus lived with us for a short lifetime, but Christ is with us always—was, in the beginning, is now, and always will be.
In Daniel, when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are in the fiery furnace, King Nebuchadnezzar says,
“But I see four men in the furnace! And one of them looks like the son of God!”
So there was Christ, in the furnace with the three young men, although Christ was not yet known by that name. God did not take them out of the fiery furnace. God was in there with them.
As God was with Joseph in Egypt.
Immediately after the birth of Tamar’s twins we read:
And Joseph was brought down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him from the hands of the Ishmaelites who had brought him there.
And the Lord was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man; and he was in the house of his master the Egyptian. And his master saw that the Lord was with him, and that the Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand.
And Joseph found grace in Potiphar’s sight, and he served him, a
nd he made him overseer over his house, and all that he had he put into his hand.
And it came to pass from the time that he had made him overseer in his house, and over all that he had, that the Lord blessed the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake, and the blessing of the Lord was upon all that he had in the house, and in the field.
The Joseph who could successfully manage Potiphar’s large estate had certainly matured from the conceited child whose only duty was to go check on his brothers when they were tending their flocks. He had learned a great deal.
It must have taken considerable time from the moment when Potiphar bought himself another slave, to the time when Joseph was put in charge of everything that Potiphar had: months, perhaps years.
Joseph had to observe and contemplate. For him, Egypt must have been what is now called “culture shock.” He had grown up as a nomad, with a tent for his home. Potiphar lived in a stone palace. Potiphar who, as an Egyptian, probably worshipped many gods, was not only tolerant of Joseph’s God, but saw that this God was taking care of Joseph. Perhaps he was willing to accept Joseph’s God into his pantheon of gods. We are not told what Joseph thought, only that God blessed him.
From our small hotel balcony in Cairo Hugh and I looked down at the modern city, dazzled at the view of the Nile, and even more dazzled as we looked across the city to the silhouettes of the pyramids—shadowy triangles in the distance. Below us on the street we heard the constant honking of horns, from cars caught in a never-ending traffic jam, made worse by an occasional horse or donkey cart moving at its own deliberate pace. The ancient and modern worlds seemed as tangled as the traffic.
There’s a great fascination to Egypt, with its rich history, largely known because of its complex religion. When I was a child growing up in New York on 82nd Street, my short cut to the park to play hopscotch or skip rope was through the Metropolitan Museum. This was in a gentler day when museum security could afford to be loose, and it often took me an hour or more to get to the park. My favourite place was the Egyptian wing where I was free to wander through the reconstructed tombs. At that time one of my most reread Bible stories was that of Joseph and his dreams and his experiences in Egypt, and the Egyptian section of the museum made it more real for me.
Sold into Egypt Page 8
