On my front door I have a small plaque with the words that Carl Jung posted on his front door in Zurich. They are also on his tombstone: Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.”
IN THE BEGINNING
All things are made of atoms. This is what physicist Richard Feynman, reduced the scope of scientific theory to. Atoms are everywhere and they constitute everything. And they are very long-lived. Bill Bryson, in his book, *A Short History of Nearly Everything, writes that every atom you posses (has) almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to become you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Kahn and Beethoven and any other historical figure you care to name (p. 134).
Atoms are mostly empty space and what we think we are experiencing as solidity is actually an illusion. The entire mass of an atom is in the nucleus, which is basically a proton with some neutrons packed in to give it weight. A proton is something so small that a little dot like this on this (i) can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them (which is the number of seconds found in a half-million years). This dense nucleus at the center is only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom, yet as one scientist puts it, If an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would only be about the size of a fly—but many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral. Put another way, if you can conceive of a millimeter line (approximately this: - ), an atom is one ten millionth of it. That millimeter line is what a sheet of paper would be by comparison to the Empire State Building (p.135).
Atoms are so tiny that. . .half a million of them lined up shoulder to shoulder could hide behind a human hair. . .There is a “roominess” here that is echoed in the atoms that are created in this flash of energy—a unexpected “spaciousness” in the irreducible platform for everything else in Creation: the atom.
Bryson relates how when two objects come together in the real world, say billiard balls, they don’t actually strike each other. Rather, as physicist Timothy Ferris explains, “the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other. . .(and) were it not for their electrical charges, they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.”
So this means “when you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at the height of one angstrom (one hundred millionth of a centimeter) or as he writes, “your electrons and its electrons are implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.” Electrons, with their negative charge, are able to fill in every bit of space in their orbits around their nucleus (with its positive charge) simultaneously, and there are always an equal number of electrons as there are protons. Electrons actually ARE everywhere at once.
How electrons keep from falling into the nucleus is explained by the quantum theory that says matter/energy comes in a little packet called “quantum.” A “quantum leap” explains how an electron moving between orbits would disappear from one and reappear instantaneously without visiting the space in between. (Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize in 1922 for this.) Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle of 1925 asserts that subatomic particles instantly “know” what the other is doing by it’s “spin” quality.
Electrons only appear in certain orbits because they only exist in certain orbits. Each electron is like a spinning fan with “blades” that seem to be everywhere at once. It doesn’t have a hard shell around it, but rather a fuzzy cloudiness. With their whirling blades filling up every bit of space around their nucleus, they appear and disappear without notice, because however it happens, “subatomic particles can instantly ‘know’ what the other is doing. And once the spin quality of a particle is recognized by its “sister” no matter how far away, it will immediately begin to spin in the opposite direction but at exactly the same rate.
Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” of matrix mechanics (or wave mechanics) is that an electron is a particle, but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty is that you can know the path (wave) an electron takes as it moves through space, or you can know where it is at any given moment (particle). An electron can pop into existence from nothing and science can track the path it takes. But tracking it disturbs the path. Any attempt to measure one will unavoidably disturb the other. As Dennis Overbyte has observed about this immutable property of the universe: ”An electron doesn’t exist until it is observed.” Or put it another way, “Until it is observed an electron must be regarded as being ‘at once everywhere and nowhere.’”
With the help of the CERN particle accelerator and others like it, science can now affirm that the atoms’ predecessors were particles. Particles are the “stuff of stuff” that came into being in the very, very short Particle Era that started approximately 0.001 seconds after the Big Bang, which happened approximately 13.7 billion years ago. “Particles are slippery” Bryson says with his delightful humor. “Finding a particle takes concentration, because they are here then gone in as little as 10-24 seconds” and that “even the most sluggish, unstable ones hang around for no more than 10-7 seconds.” He notes that “every second the Earth is visited by 10,000 trillion, trillion tiny, almost massless neutrinos (that are mostly shot out by the nuclear broilings of the sun.) Virtually all of them pass right through the planet and everything on it—including you and me.”
At three minutes after the fusion of the Big Bang “singularity” and the resulting particles ceased, the matter was 75% hydrogen atoms and 25% helium atoms by mass. Some 500,000 years after atoms formed, photons were flying free and became cosmic microwave background. (What would we do without our microwave ovens?) Then, 200,000 years after atoms formed, stars and then galaxies began to form, and are still forming and reforming today.
Atoms are the perfect example of “recycling” or “reincarnation.” Nobody actually knows how long an atom can survive but one brave soul, Martin Rees, suggests it is probably about 1035 years. To get a grasp on the math: 1043 is one 10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a second—this is the estimated time of the original Big Bang when SOMTHING lit a particle or something like it, that all important “singularity” that became all of what we can perceive as “what is.”
Science has helped us find a unifying theme to creation: increasing complexity. From particles to atoms, to molecules of more complex and diverse components bound together into larger structures that display “emergent” properties. Emergent properties have complex features not present in the components, but only appear when they are assembled in a specific way. Bryson writes “you could study the properties of hydrogen and oxygen as long as you liked without being able to predict the properties of water.”
In the scientific community the discussion is still ongoing of where the singularity came from that started creation: Is it a relic of an earlier collapsed universe that would make us just a part of eternal cycle of collapsing and expanding universes? Or is it possible to get something from nothing? Or did other forms too alien for us to even think about transition into what we call space and time?
The questions seem to be the same in both scientific and the religious communities. Who/What is God. Where/How/When does God exist? If God is love, why does evil exist? If God is omniscient, omnipresent, al loving, why does evil exist? tragedy? wars, slavery, injustices of every manner exist? In the end it is all Mystery to us. And we simply confess that “God is God” and we are not.
But it’s just as hard to imagine even the limited “facts” about the atoms of which we are composed. We all are entangled atoms but still nothing actually touches anything else. There’s more space within the atoms than there are atoms.
BETWEEN THE ATOMS
It’s in the interstices of the atoms within the matrix where everything arises. All of this is the foundation of what I mean when I use the phrase “Good Stuff.” Something new and unexpected emerges from the meeting of two significant problems/events/people/or groups of people in the “roominess” between their atomic properties. Just as water is miraculously formed from the coming together of atomic elements number 1 and 16 in specific amounts, so the meeting of two people results in the birth of a “spiritual baby.” Something new emerges, for good or ill. But whether for good or evil, there is always a pushback from the “status quo.”
Richard Rohr gives voice to this wisdom from a Christian perspective in explaining how the scientific understanding of “increasing complexity with emergent properties” dovetails with the ancient understanding of who/what the “Christ” is. In a Daily Meditation Rohr writes: Perhaps the reason it is so hard for us to see the evolution of the Cosmic Christ in our individual lives and in the arc of history is that this groaning and this giving birth (see Romans 8:22) proceeds by a process of losses and gains, and the losses are very real. There is no doubt that history goes three steps forward and two steps backward, but thank God there always seems to be a net gain. Even though we continue to see war, racism, classism, genocide, and ignorance, violence is actually declining. We may be more aware of the world’s suffering now than ever before, but as compared with previous periods in history, we are living in a relatively peaceful time.
He continues: Historically and to this day, it seems that when a new level of maturity is found, there is an immediate and strong instinct to pull backward to the old and familiar. Thankfully, within churches and society at large there is always a leaven, a critical mass, a few people who carry the momentum toward greater inclusivity, compassion, and love. This is the Second Coming of Christ: Christ embodied by people who know that hatred and greed are always regressive, and who can no longer live fearfully or violently. There are always some who have touched upon Love and been touched by Love, which is to touch upon the Christ Mystery. This is the shape of “salvation.”
Rohr continues: Teilhard de Chardin writes: “Everything that rises must converge.” In other words, higher levels of evolution are always a movement toward greater unity. Along the way there will be differentiation and complexity, but paradoxically, that increased complexity moves life to a greater level of unity, until in the end there is only God who is “all in all” (see 1 Corinthians 15:28). If it isn’t moving toward unity, it is not a higher level of consciousness.
But along with differentiation and complexity there will also be an equal pushback, fear, and confusion. We see this in our current political climate in America and much of the world. The United States has suffered eight years of nonstop gridlock and opposition to any creative governance. It mirrors Newton’s Third Law of Motion that “every action elicits an equal and opposite reaction.” Today many people are reverting to tribal thinking, denial, fear, and hatred, rather than turning to compassionate, creative solutions to real challenges of poverty, climate change, and the many worldwide forms of injustice.
Gateway to (meditative) Silence: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. (Center for Action and Contemplation, “The Pattern of Evolution” adapted from “Christ, Cosmology, and Consciousness: A Reframing of How We See”)
Salvation is the miracle of “good stuff” coming out of nothing particularly good in and of itself. It light from the darkness; hope from despair; a door opened; a pathway made when there was no way; water from a rock in a desert; the gods consorting with the humans. The evolutionary process of creation has room for resurrected hope, a weaving a “growing grace” throughout the history of Creation’s evolution wherever/whenever it may lead to.
From a singularity, to a galaxy, to a particular star we call Sun, to the third planet from the Sun we call “Mother Earth,” to the specific combination of chemicals that produced the first “life” on Earth (urethra), to the sea bed creatures swarming around the volcanic vents, to land crawling reptiles, to the shrew-like mammals that were able to develop because the dinosaurs were wiped out, to the rise of the early hominids, to the dominance of the particular hominid—homo sapiens and their emergence from East Africa to the geography of our globe, to the globe-trotting, electron-exploring human beings we have become today, Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. Good stuff!
WHAT IS THE MATRIX OF GRACE?
The Matrix of Grace is God’s presence, like that unfathomable atom, made visible, within the writhing agony and joyous ecstasy of life, the fiercely brutal struggle for to be “king of the mountain.” It is both the LOVE that torched the singularity that got the whole Shebang going and it is the womb where the world is embraced by that LOVE that will not let us go as we keep emerging into . . .whatever we are becoming. Like an atom, God’s grace can be observed (particle) or its path can be traced (wave), paraphrasing Overbyte’s comment about electrons. Perhaps “God doesn’t exist until God is observed.” Or put it another way, “Until it is observed God must be regarded as being ‘at once everywhere and nowhere.” But if it is our compassionate, forgiving, loving acts the only where or when that God is seen, then how much more import do our lives of self-giving love have? How can we sit around and wait for a Messiah, when we may be the very ones that others are looking to?
The Matrix of Grace is the spiritual and emotional power that comes packed inside of the physical “quanta” of our atoms. It is the lens by which we can see that each of us is unique, yet we all bear the DNA of our Creator. Each generation is passing, yet all are alive within the eternal NOW of the Matrix. Life has died, life has risen, life will come again.
With the help of the CERN particle accelerator and others like it, science now can affirm that the atoms’ predecessors were particles. Particles are the “stuff of stuff” that came into being in the very, very short Particle Era, which came at 0.001 seconds after the Big Bang. Bryson points out that “finding a particle takes concentration, because they are here then gone in as little as 10 to the minus 24 seconds” and that “even the most sluggish, unstable ones hang around for no more than 10 to the minus 7 seconds.” In short, he writes “particles are slippery” and that every second the Earth is visited by 10,000 trillion, trillion tiny, almost massless neutrinos (mostly shot out by the nuclear broilings of the sun. Virtually all of them pass right through the planet and everything on it—including you and me.”
At three minutes after the Big Bang, there are protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos, but antimatter is rare. That is when fusion (nucleosynthesis) ceases and matter at this point is 75% hydrogen atoms, 25% helium atoms, by mass. Some 500,000 years after atoms form, photons fly free and become microwave background. Then 200,000 years after atoms form, stars and then galaxies begin to form.
Bryson points out that there is a unifying theme to creation: increasing complexity. From the particles, to the atoms, to molecule of more complex and diverse components that are bound into larger structures. These structures display “emergent” properties: that is they have features not present in the components but only appear when they are assembled in a specific way. As Bryson points out, “you could study properties of hydrogen and oxygen as long as you liked without being able to predict the properties of water.
This is what I mean by “Good Stuff.” There is always space for emergent properties to come from components bound into new and creative linkages. What we bind ourselves to in our daily choices can affect the future of the generations to come. If we bind ourselves to the power of compassion, we can help chart the emergent properties of creation into becoming more compassionate, more focused on living in the moment, and more mindful that we here today are diverse, emergent structures. I strongly believe that who and what we bind ourselves to will effect the future. The ancient wisdom that has accrued from our ____ years as homo sapiens tells us that it is wise path to bind ourselves to the power of compassion as we help chart the course of creation.
There is a Buddhist practice of “Tonglen” that helps us learn a way of holding suffering and awakening compassion. This paradoxical way of living is possible because we all are entangled but still not touching. Bill Bryson relates how when two objects come together in the real world, say billiard balls, they don’t actually strike each other. Rather, as physicist Timothy Ferris explains, “the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other. . (and) were it not for their electrical charges, they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.”
Bryson says that this means that when you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at the height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), or as he writes, “your electrons and its electrons are implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.” They are able to fill in every bit of space in their orbits simultaneously; they actually ARE everywhere at once. At the same time, electrons only appear in certain orbits because they only exist in certain orbits.
The size of an atom is the “width of a millimeter line: half of them lined up shoulder to shoulder could hide behind a human hair. The protons (positive charge) are packed in the nucleus and have a positive charge. The neutrons are also packed in the nucleus, but have no charge and only add weight. The electrons (negative charge)—spin around outside nucleus. No matter the atomic weight, protons are always balanced by equal number of electrons. Bryson says that protons give an atom identity while electrons give it personality.
WE HERE TODAY ARE DIVERSE, EMERGENT STRUCTURES: WHO AND WHAT WE BIND OURSELVES TO WILL EFFECT THE FUTURE. IT SEEMS A WISE PATH TO BIND OURSELVES TO THE POWER OF COMPASSION AS WE HELP CHART THE COURSE OF CREATION.
In ancient Greek there were two words for time: chromos and kairos. Chronos is that which marks the days and years of our lives. Kairos is a span or moment of indeterminate time where everything happens at once. This is known as the kyrotic moment of fulfillment. We human creatures experience time and place as sequential movement, but the NOW of the Matrix of Grace is both an eternal place and an everlasting time for the matter and energy of the cosmos.
The matter and energy of the cosmos are interchangeable; matter can be converted to energy and vice versa. Energy/matter was set in motion as a subatomic speck inflated within a trillionth of a second by a Power that set it off with a Big Bang. That “sparked speck” continues to inflate by gravitational ripples at a rate of speed beyond our ability to imagine. And from it has come the fabric of time and space as we know it. This inflationary process eventually produced the makings of the chemical elements that evolved into multi-billions of solar systems and galaxies of energy/matter, and perhaps even into other universes.
Scientists with the most sophisticated tools believe we can observe only about 5% of matter and energy. Our Universe appears to be held together by a “scaffolding” of the 95% of energy/matter from the Big Bang that we cannot observe, although, like God’s grace, we can “observe” its unseen influence on those things we can see. To put it mildly, there’s a lot going on in the Matrix.
Science Writer Bill Bryson, in *A Short History of Nearly Everything writes on page 399: DNA exists for just one reason—to create more DNA—and you have a lot of it inside of you: about six feet of it squeezed into almost every cell. Each length of DNA comprises some 3.2 billion letters of coding, enough to provide 103,480,000,000 possible combinations, “guaranteed to be unique against all conceivable odds,” in the words of Christian de Duve (Nobel Laureate biochemist). That’s a lot of possibility—a one followed by more than three billion zeroes. “It would take more than five thousand average-size books just to print that figure,” notes de Duve. Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff you carry around with you. If all of your DNA were woven into a single fine strand, there would be enough of it to stretch from the Earth to the Moon and back not once or twice but again and again. Altogether, according to one calculation, you may have as much as twenty million kilometers of DNA bundled up inside you.
Your body, in short, loves to make DNA and without it you couldn’t live. Yet DNA is not itself alive. No molecule is, but DNA is, as it were is especially unalive. It is “among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world,” in the words of geneticist Ricahard Lewontin. That is why it can be recovered from patches of long-dried blood or semen in murder investigations and coaxed from the bones of ancient Neanderthals. It also explains why it took scientists so long to work out how a substance so mystifyingly low key—so, in a word, lifeless-could be at the very heart of life itself.
It can all begin to seem impossibly complicated, and in some ways it is impossibly complicated. But there is an underlying unity in the way life works. All the tiny, deft chemical processes that animate cells—the cooperative efforts of nucleotides, the transcription of DNA into RNA—evolved just once and have stayed pretty well fixed ever since across the whole of nature. As the late French geneticist Jacques Monod put it, only half in jest: “Anything that is true of E coli must be true of elephants, except more so.”
Every living thing is an elaboration on a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments—each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications, and providential tinkerings stretching back 3.8 billion years (to the development of hominoids). Remarkably, we are even quite closely related to fruit and vegetables. About half the chemical functions that take place in a banana are fundamentally the same chemical functions that take place in you.
It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.
All life is one. We live and move and have our being in an “underlying unity” within God’s Matrix wherein all of life is one and everything is possible. As poet Emily Dickenson writes, “I dwell in possibilities.”
It is the interstitial spaces, the emptiness within the Matrix that allows for the possibility of new forms of being to arise from old life. Resurrection is not an occasional miracle popping up in a sacred text here or there; it is the very nature of the Universe itself to use and reuse everything, everyone, and every atom of energy/matter.
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