Z: ZIPPED (DNA)

DNA, the cell’s genetic macromolecule, is a marvel because of its ability to ZIP UP massive amounts of information in a compact, elegant form. The sugar-phosphate backbones that run anti-parallel to each other house an interior library from which any amino acid can be read and assembled into protein! It is truly amazing: this coded macromolecule runs life and makes the complex simple. The arrangement of the bases into threes called codons translates via cellular code-breakers into every protein that structures or catalyzes living function! (Even now as I write it, I marvel as if it is brand new.)

The human genome (DNA in just ONE human cell) consists of three billion base pairs contained in 46 chromosomes. Estimates of the length of the uncoiled DNA in one cell range from two to three meters. An estimate of the total DNA content of the human body would be: 70 times the distance from the earth to the sun. All of this means that the information in DNA is effectively “ZIPPED” up very, very tightly for storage in a molecular architecture that makes this all work. The design has to accommodate a plethora of information, but also keep it accessible. (It was the computer long before computers.)

To replicate itself or to expose the information contained in its library for protein synthesis, DNA, powered by enzymes that it has previously coded for, UNZIPS itself in sections, exposing the code at the center to be copied or read. Appropriate portions producing a protein (genes), like books being checked out of a library (or downloaded from Amazon?) yield their secrets long enough to be read, and then re-zip and recoil. This is “on-demand” genius! The nucleus is a lot like a massive hard drive of information and the cell is an expert operating system accessing it with rapid speed—only the parts needed in the moment!

Think of it: The immune system that gloriously goes to work to fight off disease gets called out of genetic storage, in a sense, in response to a pathogenic invasion. Increased white blood cells counts, antibody production, and all the other cascade of response that ultimately makes you well again does not come from thin air. The vast array of creative defense results from millions and millions of “un-zippings” which access the needed immune treasures of the DNA code for copy and production! It isn’t just heredity on the generational scale that DNA carries! It is ALL the functions of daily living zipped up!

For all its immense and unfathomably complex information duties, the double helix had to be the shape of DNA. This twisted ladder sheltering the base pairs in between makes it all possible. But, I will hearken back to the X-ray crystallography post and remind you that there was a time that no one had seen it. It is one thing to know the chemical composition of things by percentage, but quite another to SEE how the molecules are actually arranged.

On this, the last post of the A to Z blogging challenge, I have done my characteristic marveling at the natural world—what John Wesley called the “general revelation” of God--and not yet told you where I am going with it in terms of analogy. I suppose that is because it is open-ended. DNA is not a metaphor but an example—an extremely profound example of how information is densely packed into things we stumble over everyday. The universe is your genome to be explored and unzipped, and there are amazing architectures of form and function to be understood all around us. The wonder never ceases.

And right here IS where I turn to the spiritual. Backed up by Scriptures declaring things like, “The Kingdom of heaven is within you,” or, “Christ in you the hope of glory,” or “Out of his belly will flow rivers of life,” which speaks of anyone who believes, I will say that I honestly believe that our own spirits, in the hands of God, are repositories of massive amounts of life-generating information. We are full of spiritual DNA. I believe that the vast inner frontier should be regarded with equal wonder that the wonders of the world afford.

It is tragic that some people approach exploring inner landscapes with a sense of burden, defensiveness or even foreboding that manifests as avoidance. To be given a spirit made in the image of God is a wonder-filled playground to be investigated! We should be alive with curiosity about how this wondrous invisible stuff—the inner stuff in the world where God lives—works itself out in our prepared lives. We should be UNZIPPING our INNER DNA and making copies and proteins off of it regularly. (I think here of the parable in the Bible where the master was displeased with the man who buried the talents in the ground rather than employing them! Some people guard their spiritual DNA so carefully in fear—it is MUCH MORE ROBUST than that!)

God proved He knew how to make enduring genetic substance in the physical realm. Could perhaps that display of genius cause us to trust in the mechanisms of life operating in our spiritual beings that are at least as effective and reliable? We really just need to cooperate and unzip!

The biggest promise in the whole Bible to me is that of Jeremiah 31:33 which is repeated in the book of Hebrews. This is where God guarantees that this new covenant will not be one of law. It is the definition of grace itself. God promises here to write, or we could say CODE, His truth right into our hearts, making it authentic to us--not some outward imposed, awkwardly foreign thing. (He promises to zip it right into our motivations, rather than just gluing on the exterior where behaviors dance!) Because I discovered this early on, I have related to Scripture this way and it has been a joyous journey. I remained largely immune to legalism, except now and then when I doubted my own DNA!

God makes His truth YOUR VERY DNA so that growing in Him is never anything but unzipping your true identity. And it stretches to the sun and back countless times. You can never be bored discovering what it inside you—you just can’t. You are information-dense, spiritually speaking. You are fractals of coded wonderment folded up on themselves waiting to be read, decoded and revealed…and used. AND, if you are facing a challenge, there is a veritable arsenal of high tech spiritual weaponry available not from outside you, but from within. (The ability to forgive is one of the most powerful and it IS inside you—when you feel you can’t do it, you just haven’t unzipped that part yet.)

One of my least favorite things Christians do is moan about what supposedly happens when they “pray for patience”. It is an old, old song in Christian circles, how people pray for patience and then endure ridiculous trials as God supposedly teaches them that skill. There are so many corrections to be made with this hyper-linear theology that I need a DNA molecule to contain them, but I’ll try to summarize what I feel is the missed truth. Patience is in your spiritual DNA, available to you when you became one with Christ. His genome becomes yours at that point (else good luck trying to become patient in your own strength). If you feel you “need more,” in response to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, you can intentionally focus on that bit of the DNA—unzip it and meditate on the fact that the very patience of God is abiding inside you. Probably because you focus on that reality, the contrast that appears between your inner world and the pressures of the outward one will increase in your consciousness. Your reticular activating system may cause you to take note of the challenges more poignantly in the coming days. But, clearly, the patience you seem to acquire will NOT be produced by the challenges, but rather by the DNA your inner man carries—which will, like a spiritual immune system—rise to the occasion providing you not just with a teeth-gritting, tongue-holding kind of patience but rather with an incredibly fly-above-it kind that clearly came form another realm!

When we don’t see the genius of the design of something, we attribute a lot to what I call “ju-ju magic”. (DNA and heredity was somewhat ju-ju magic until we saw the design. Praying for patience in the way that riles me up is a Christian version of the same—some black box of speculative working that makes God look less genius than He actually is!) Hear me well, as I close this particular A to Z journey: The message of the UNI-verse is two-fold. First, we will never run out of marveling moments if we have our hearts open. There are burning bushes everywhere for us to turn aside and see—REALLY see—breathe in and view the invisible God! The mystery abounds and we can spend our lives chasing it. BUT, this mystery is not just ju-ju magic—it is not just “Oh well, God is mysterious, so you never know…” The mystery is elegant wisdom displayed for our discovery throughout every layer and level of existence! It is beauty of design and order and arrangement AND FUNCTION that takes our breath away like the sight of Solomon’s kingdom did to the Queen of Sheba! God wants to unzip it before our eyes for the enhancement and enjoyment of our experience of worship! God calls us to KNOW the UNKNOWABLE and to modestly fathom the unfathomable. And that call points us immediately to SPIRIT, crossing that thin line between realms and landing us back in the only place we can understand and escape the speculation that mere reason affords. That is the message of the Uni-verse. God is Spirit and they that worship Him must do so from their very DNA.

Y: YELLOW (COLOR)

In addition to being the title of a Coldplay song, yellow is the portion of the visible light spectrum that spans the wavelengths from approximately 560 to 590 nanometers. Or, I should say, yellow is the color we perceive when an object reflects light of these wavelengths, while absorbing all the other colors. When you perceive yellow, you are actually seeing reflections of yellow: the “yellow” object is actually absorbing everything EXCEPT yellow. We often assume that you are what you take in, but when it comes to color, this is not true. They “are” the color they don’t take in! How’s that for appearances being deceiving? The ultimate metaphor: We really ARE what we REFLECT!

Isaac Newton wrote a book called “Opticks” in 1704 in which he set much of the record straight about color, prisms and light. Before Newton, it was known that certain clear crystal shapes could produce what was essentially a micro-rainbow, but it was believed that the color spectrum generated came from some function inherent in the prism, not the nature of light itself. Newton declared that that wasn’t so, showing that the prism was simply revealing what was hidden in the light itself. Spectral color was an essential quality of light and a prism simply channeled it through appropriate refractions to make it apparent. Newton’s work would actually influence metaphysics, as revelations of the true nature of light always seem to do. We humans just intuitively sense that light itself is the metaphor of all metaphors for broader realities.

Multi-colored is a big idea in my life. Rainbows around the throne descriptions of heaven help me avoid boring or sanctimonious versions of piety that push all things toward the middle. Old King James English words like “manifold” describing the wisdom of God, inspire me, and I have traced them deep (as deeply as I can) to yield other lovely old world descriptors like “motley” or “multifarious” or “variegated” (summoning images of flowers in vast gardens or bird or butterfly colorings or a violently blazing sunset over the ocean). These words strike a chord deep in me, assuring me that this God I have fallen in love with is indeed the AUTHOR, not the executioner, of variety and color--and excitement! It is a great encouragement to me when I read Hebrews 12:23 and its description of Zion (the heavenly home of all believers), realizing that the words “general assembly”—which evoke pictures of men in suits sitting in judgment of my colorful ways—could also be translated as something like, “festal gathering.” (I’ll let you supply your own contrasting imagery here!)

Recently I attended a seminar in which the leader asked us to close our eyes and consider: if God were a color, what color would He be? People testified to seeing nothing, or black, and I’m certain that the cloak of religious disapproval had obscured their view (which was the point of the exercise). I know that others who had come to know the love of the Father imagined white: bright, shining, radiant, and pure. Me? I told you I have this lifelong relationship with “multi-colored”! I see God—or at least His workings in my life—as dynamic “pulsings-forth” all over the spectrum—blazing out in every possible hue of color (and there’s not one that I don’t enjoy). I am fascinated by orderly (or chaotically) arranged COLOR and I am thrilled with what Isaac Newton set the world right about: white light is simply a perfect harmony of all the possibilities for color!

People blog to safely float their honest admissions out into the vast expanse of cyberspace like a Celtic coracle on the sea, or like an “electronic message in a bottle”, hoping for a receptive heart here and there. Here is my multi-colored honesty. Sometimes in church, I hear people declaring white light so boldly that I feel alienated from it. Simple statements of the “turn or burn” nature, so linear and causational, seem to blind me. I want to do right, be right, seek righteousness, but sometimes the lines I hear drawn from A to B don’t seem that direct. (Please hear me—I’m not trying to mess with absolutes—this is about application, and mostly about ACCEPTANCE of myself.) For me, the bright white light statement, “If A, then B….” has a million subtle, glorious shades, hues and meanderings through a variegated garden that only ENHANCE its truth (rather than subtract from it)! But sometimes, when I have voiced my multi-colored considerations, I have been dismissed as a rebel, or patted on the head as a sideshow (send her to the “artsy corner” and place her at a table in the coffeehouse)!

One day, in a blaze of LIGHT, I realized that this struggle to conform need never be my story. I realized I am not the one separating the pure white of God’s glorious love into all those colors I desperately need and joyously receive—they are already IN THE LIGHT! I am just acting as a prism, filtering what is there through my own diffracting tendencies and they can just as easily be reassembled back into the universal white. I am not creating an alternate spectrum—God is the white light and the multicolored, interchangeably, or better, simultaneously! The simple statement, “If A, then B….” contains all the swirly tie-dye splotches of my joyous application in between, whether or not any of them get pointed out! I got it!: It’s a UNI-verse!

I was born in 1960. I grew up with a generation who had grown weary of artificial light and had therefore chosen to seek color via psychedelic counterfeits. The prism on Pink Floyd’s album cover that is still being produced on t-shirts today is an iconic reminder of that generation and its sometimes-tragic quest. A few years ago, I was standing in a bookstore marveling at the plethora of new age self-help books that now seek to assuage inner hunger, when one of the most wistful songs of the Pink Floyd catalog, “Wish You Were Here” came on the store sound system. In that rarefied bookstore environment, where I think it followed Bach or Handel, I began to hear it in a way I never heard it in the 70’s. It seemed as if the words were a call from God, saying to a color-seeking generation, “I wish you were HERE: where I am; I wish you could be with Me in my prismatic designs, seeing my throne decorated with rainbows of covenant and my dazzling displays of mega-gemstone doors and cosmic displays of dancing light. I wish you were seeing that I am not the God of the monochromatic, but the God of the perfectly harmonized multifarious spectrum. I wish you were WITH ME—beyond the barriers of human ideas about religion and safely cradled in the only Heart that can handle you, ignite you and fulfill you.” And then I felt the multi-colored purpose for my own life, as I wept--literally wept--there in the New Age book aisle of the Barnes and Noble in Omaha, Nebraska. As the Psalmist said, “You, Lord: you light my candle!” (You illuminate the prism inside me and make me a kaleidoscopic dispersion of your light!)

X: X-RAY CRYSTALLOGRAPHY

Crystals are fascinating because their macroscopic shape (think of a piece of quartz) is a larger fractal of their orderly arrangement on a microscopic level. A crystal is a repeating lattice of atoms. In the big everyday world, if you shine light through a lattice, patterns of shade result as the light is diffracted. If the wavelength of light is on a scale that matches the atomic distances in a crystal, patterns are also generated, and those patterns reveal the structure of the crystal itself. The electromagnetic radiation that accomplishes that task is outside the range of visible light. The one-angstrom range wavelengths of X-rays do the trick, and in the early 1900’s, X-ray crystallography--investigation of atomic structure through beaming X-rays at crystals--was born.

In the 1950’s, it became apparent that X-ray crystallography could also be used on large proteins and bio-molecules, which had a much more complex repeating arrangement than the repeating lattices of crystals. Proteins and nucleic acids are wonders of structure and function—tiny but dense repositories of information residing in each one of the trillions of cells in your body. In the case of proteins, the order of the amino acids building blocks dictates a three-dimensional structure for the molecule that affords its entire function, in the case of enzymes yielding shapes crucial to run the reactions of life! And, in the case of DNA, I count the structure as a bona fide miracle. And like all miracles, DNA was once only a mystery, especially in terms of its structure, and X-ray crystallography provided the evidence that cracked the code.

Rosalind Franklin was a British X-ray crystallographer working at King’s College on the structure of DNA in 1952. James Watson and Francis Crick, not too far away at Cambridge, were seeking to build a model of DNA. Though some knowledge of the chemical composition had been generated, the scientific community still lacked a viable structure for the amazing molecular keeper of the generational code! Without Dr. Franklin’s knowledge, one of her X-ray diffraction photographs, now famous as “Photograph 51” (Google it), fell into the hands of the ever-scavenging pair of Watson and Crick! The photograph turned out to be the Rosetta Stone of molecular biology. Rosalind Franklin had begun to suspect that the massive molecule was organized as a helix, but no one had envisioned the double helix with the base pairs in the middle until Photograph 51 bounced into the informed imaginations of Watson and Crick. Ultimately, a beam of X-rays shined on a DNA sample in a secluded lab changed the world—no, really, I said, CHANGED THE WORLD! Someone photographed a diffraction pattern and today we can see the invisible. In fact, it was “invisible light” that taught us who we actually are.

Watson and Crick, along with Dr. Franklin’s colleague, Maurice Wilkins—the man who “leaked” Photograph 51 to them—were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery, but in a twist of fate, Dr. Franklin died of cancer only four years before the presentation (Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously). It seems that her own DNA participated in keeping her away from the revolution she helped generate. (And no doubt her gender in those days had played some role in exclusion.) The ability to generate the glimpse wasn’t enough without the ability to interpret it.

I often compare the words of Scripture to DNA. Scripture contains the words of the Spiritual genetic code—the information necessary to synthesize new spiritual product as well as to inherit all that is ours in the family line, spiritually speaking. Scripture is an orderly, repeating miracle, but like DNA prior to 1952, can also be a confounding mystery! People have shined all kinds of the wrong wavelength light on it and come up with all kinds of misleading “data”. But it requires X-rays of the appropriate high-energy wavelength (light of the Spirit) to hit the lattice of Scripture and finally generate useful diffraction patterns that array themselves in our life.

So, if we take this crystallography analogy to the limit, as I often do, what is Photograph 51? What is that key that spiritual thinkers need to be covertly (or not so covertly) shown for a whole new world to open? That is clearly one thing: the spiritual view of the cross. Photograph 51 applied to spiritual things is the central role of a death and resurrection on the part of the Son of God that is far, far more than just an act of sacrifice for generosity’s sake (though it is that, too). The real Rosetta Stone of Christianity is the DIFFRACTION PATTERN OF THE CROSS—It is not just in theory, but rather in fact, a real transaction through which the very life of God was made eternally and immediately available to us. It is, “a death in which there is no life” so that we can step into “a life in which there is no death.” It is THE masterstroke of genius from a God whose wisdom cannot be contained as it rolls out through the human genome!

The cross is not just a snapshot of a sacrificial act intended to evoke pious emotion: it is a code-break to spiritual reality! We required a Savior that was far more than sentiment! The cross is Creator dying for Creation to fully restore paradise lost—with all its unlimited and divine (and astounding) possibilities.

Something kept Rosalind Franklin from seeing what Watson and Crick in their voracious searching energy almost immediately saw. Did her methodical nature cause her to lose the forest for the trees? Had she grown to familiar with the slow process of research and was she too cloistered by her dark stone lab walls (I’m guessing here)? Obviously her photograph was important and her work was valuable and perhaps her methodical way would have yielded the blazing truth by process of elimination. But Watson and Crick had something else going for them—they had prepared a place of expectancy for any and all data they received. They were consumed with a quest and confident in their own ability to be the first ones to crack the code! It was almost “fun” to them, while it seemed more like “work” to the dedicated Franklin.

Yesterday, a Christian friend asked me a question about quantum physics. She said, “Has quantum physics shown us that the expectations of the observer play a role in determining the outcome of an event?” I answered her this way, “Science itself will not give us that subatomic particles (small components of reality) act according to our ‘expectations’. We people of faith include that in our truth, and rightly so, but the science itself won’t give us quite that much. What science does say, however-and it is just as good--is that the OBSERVER is actually a part of the system that pulls reality into manifestation from its “unmanifest” state!” Watson and Crick had observed Photograph 51 with an INTENTIONALITY (popular buzzword for good reason). They WANTED to be a part of the system with every fiber in their being, while Dr. Franklin nobly cherished the scientific goal of remaining aloof from it! Their annoying intentionality determined HOW they observed the diffraction pattern and they ultimately changed the world!

Science claims—no, prides itself on—impartial judgment, but is there any such thing, really? Is there meant to be? It seems the very universe is telling us no! When invisible rays shine on unfathomably beautiful structures like redemption, bending the light into personal possibilities patterns throughout our inner worlds, how can we remain aloof and methodical? There are always more structures to be seen, codes to be broken, mysteries to be unveiled as miracles, and world-changing discoveries to be announced, even if they don’t seem of Nobel laureate significance. It seems unfair that Rosalind Franklin wasn’t more celebrated, and history has to some degree corrected that, but, then, Watson and Crick knew how to see the unseen, at least in this important case.

So, where are the Photograph 51’s of your life? What patterns have been generated by the spiritual light that has hit you? Have you REALLY observed them, or are you trudging on methodically, hoping that the data of your every day life will one day mean more to you? Take a fresh look with eyes that see Kingdom realities that are seeking to emerge around YOUR LIFE. Let the X-rays hit the crystals of your particular genetics and decode yourself and your purpose!

W: WORMHOLE

Wormholes are hypothetical shortcuts through time and space. Though they have never been actually observed, they are valid predictions, given the math of general relativity. At least in theory, one can move from one location to another without crossing the distance between them. And that theory is not just a concept: it is backed up by that gatekeeper of the sciences and best friend of quantum physics: mathematics! We cannot say that wormholes do not exist.

There are a few things in my life that I feel I have always known, even though that cannot be the case. I was captured as a spiritual thinker so early on that the thought of transcending spacetime limitations just didn’t seem that odd to me when I heard about it. I suppose I felt like I participated in a wormhole of sorts every day I communed with God. “Heaven” never seemed like a far away place to me, but rather a here and now reality, albeit another dimension. I understood the shortcut: how in a moment I could go from tired, human analog struggle to digital immediate power breakthrough, as if I just tunneled through to another realm! (I adopted the saying, “Nothing, nothing, nothing…POW!” for the way God seemed to burst in at times in my understanding.)

I thought of the famous Old Testament story of Jacob’s ladder: a portal that opened between heaven and earth, revealing to the wide-eyed Jacob the fact that he might not be the master of his own fate as exclusively as he had believed. Jacob would later say of the location of the incident, “Surely God is in the place and I knew it not.” Why? He hadn’t yet found the wormhole. Later Jesus would declare Himself to be the same kind of ladder between heaven an earth—the same portal for heavenly energies to be transferred, meaning the wormhole was now EVERYWHERE, not just at a place called Bethel!

By the time I heard of wormholes, I also had already come to understand that spacetime was no barrier to the healing of past personal hurts. I had experienced and talked to many others who had also experienced an encounter in which some incident was revisited, with a healing outcome replacing the injury. These were not just projections of the imagination, but real “events” of a different kind than we are accustomed to in the natural. It seemed so logical to me that a Savior would actually SAVE—from the real traumas life had inflicted on us—those misshaping forces that kept us limping through life long after time has distanced us from the offending cause. Heaven—the place where every tear is wiped away—can show itself NOW in the wells of deepest pain.

Once, as I was musing on a particular event in my own past that I suspected was still generating discomfort, I felt the thought rise up inside strongly: “There’s a portal in your pain!” Then, I immediately pictured myself “diving” into the event headlong, only to find another realm of complete freedom in the spacetime beyond it! I got it: The event need not limit me; instead, my very need could be my motivation to transcend the event and find a whole world of spiritual truth that replaces the natural dire predictions of dysfunction!

What looked like a black hole suddenly became a wormhole! One of the best preaching messages I ever delivered was called, “There’s a Portal in Your Pain.” This thought went public, but it came from a very personal place indeed. I finally dove (in a way I can’t explain) right into the middle of an abandonment, rather than avoiding it. At the other end of the tunnel, I tumbled out into a safe place of total Divine acceptance! It was like Jodie Foster in the movie Contact, only it was an encounter with a real and perfect Father, not a contrived image of my earthly one!

When I was studying for that particular message, I discovered an amazing piece of science that still wows me. It is the atmospheric equivalent of wormholes: portals that open up in the earth’s magnetic field on a regular basis! These little “Bethels” are unstable and unpredictable, forming and dissolving, allowing a brief “flux transfer event” between the earth and the sun! One scientist described them as “bursty”. Every eight minutes, one of these portals opens up allowing solar winds to blow particles into the earth’s magnetosphere. As few as fifteen years ago, no one believed these portals existed, but now the evidence is incontrovertible.

What if these bursty portals are just a faint picture of the dynamic and immediate availability of the real Light of heaven? What if all the time, the reality of the Spirit dimension is forming a portal to shoot particulate matter of the spirit kind—insight, wisdom, revelation, truth—right past our protective layers? What if there is heaven to earth contact swirling, forming and dissolving in tangible tubes where the Wind forcibly blows substance our way? One scientist simply said of the magnetic portals, “They’re real.” What if that same conclusion awaits all of our skepticism concerning spiritual things?

I was once criticized by an older minister for being “too resistant to the limitations of time and space,” and he actually added that this tendency was only going to make me more miserable as I grew in years! I suppose he was trying to lovingly dose me with reality as he saw it and generate some sense of practicality that he felt I was missing. His dire prognosis confused me, as it also did a younger man in the room, who later took me aside and said, “Isn’t that how we are supposed to be? Less and less hindered by the considerations of time and space and more and more filled with the possibilities afforded by spiritual living?”

I suppose you would expect such from the younger guy, who hadn’t yet encountered the bumps and bruises of what we all too frequently call “real life”. And yet, many, many years on, I wonder if these space-defying; time-bending PORTALS of heaven to earth contact are not responsible for actually keeping me young? I wonder if the jaded predictions of calcification into earthbound thinking may have been AVOIDED, not exacerbated, by my tendency to ride on the next available wormhole right out of the problem and into God’s world of Spirit-provision! It doesn’t even require a machine, like Jodie Foster’s—have OPEN HEART, will travel, in Spirit…

Yes, I’ll own that criticism. I am far too resistant to the limitations of time and space! Far too resistant to be contained by the simple causational definitions of identity afforded me by circumstance alone! There is a ladder/portal/wormhole to another realm of identity called the Kingdom of God. You don’t physically go there when you pray or worship—it opens up on you! Surely this is the fountain of youth, no matter what your age or stage.

V: VISIBLE LIGHT

Electromagnetic radiation is the ultimate waveform, or mixture of waveforms. It is energy travelling through space at the speed of light. But, electromagnetic radiation is actually a combination of two waves, or fields, one “electric” and one “magnetic”, which travel at right angles to each other, always in phase. Envision energy requiring no matter to be propagated travelling at the fastest speed in the universe in the form of two perpendicular pulses, and you have the wonder that is EMR! (That was easy, right?)

The math of the electromagnetic spectrum bears out the wonder, as the simple multiplication of the frequency of the wave with its wavelength always yields the speed of light. In other words, there is a form of energy travelling through the universe at all times and places that varies in wavelength and frequency but always travels at the same (exactly the same) speed, that of 299 792 458 meter per second. We could say that all the energy travel of the universe shares that speed but is parceled out between various wavelengths and frequencies. Some are higher “energy” and some are lower “energy” but all are the same “substance” shifting up and down a scale of delivery! (Someone has compared it to a piano keyboard and that might be useful: It is all the same tonal product, but the notes definitely differ.)

So, is the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum LIGHT since it moves at the speed of light? That is where the word “visible” comes in to play. Our human eyes only detect the range of wavelengths between 380 and 760 nanometers, which is estimated to be only 2.3% of the whole electromagnetic spectrum on a logarithmic scale, or only 0.0035% on a linear scale! Just below that range, we process infrared radiation as heat, and above it we process ultra-violet radiation as cell damage! But as far as doing that familiar activity we call “seeing”—light, for us, only occurs in that tiny, tiny portion of the whole of the cosmic energy that constantly ricochets around the universe. 99.9965% (if we use the linear scale) of the energy being transmitted at the speed of light is unavailable to our visual perception! Is it still “light”? You be the judge.

Obviously, we have used the genius wired into our humanity to learn to harness these other forms of “light” over the centuries. The low energy radio waves have come alive with music, news and traffic reports in our hands, and their neighbor on the spectrum, microwaves, account for why people don’t spend hours in the kitchen any more. And on the other higher energy end of the spectrum, we scarcely marvel any more at the harnessing of x-rays in the medical profession. Because of technology, the invisible portions of the spectrum are now a part of our daily reality. We outsourced our seeing to machines we built, which in a way counts as seeing on our part! We can now cooperate with energy that is invisible—which should really be cause for marveling.

One of my most unique memories from high school was a fellow student who pretended to see the invisible. Charles greatly relieved our 7th period boredom in “typing” class (it was way before “keyboarding” was a thing). His eccentricities never scared anyone, back in that innocent day. He was unusual on purpose, it seemed, in full grasp of his faculties, and we young hippies of the teenage variety, never poked fun at him but rather enjoyed his version of strangeness. It kind of went with Pink Floyd. Charles often wore a cape to school and he claimed that he could perceive cosmic rays. (Cosmic rays are technically not part of the electromagnetic spectrum because they have mass, while EMR does not, but that doesn’t matter for my point here—I include it only for the sake of good science as well as for the value of knowing random facts for party conversation!)

Charles would sit in front of us while we typed at our primitive IBM Selectrics and periodically (especially on Fridays) declare with a playful gleam in his eye, “there’s another one,” referring, of course to the cosmic rays that only he could perceive. (He enjoyed imagining a super power that had a measure of scientific base—for all I know, he may be a successful science fiction writer somewhere today!) Though Charles’ application was bizarre, the dreamer in me already knew that there were many, many, if you will, invisible rays of light of a real nature beyond the fluorescence of our high school classroom. I laughed with Charles and my friends, but I was on a growing quest of my own to see the unseen realities and rays of truth dancing everywhere! And I myself would wrestle with a life-long temptation to fit in, while what I might see might ultimately cause me stand out.

The obvious point about visible light versus the rest of the spectrum is also the most profound: Just because you can’t see it with your physical eye organ doesn’t mean it isn’t real. We once thought light was only what we can see, but it turns out there is a whole, and very broad, spectrum of energy expression dancing through spacetime at the characteristic speed of light! Our senses are limited, but the expression of light is not. The universe is not hiding from us: it is, rather, calling us to expand our comprehension and powers of perception.

We were created in essence spirit beings. The words “made in the image of God,” that are so glibly are quoted in describing man, remain far too naturally moored in our thinking. Jesus made an essential statement about the nature of His Father, one that can both end and begin debates, when He said simply: GOD IS SPIRIT. So to be made in His image is to have the focus, center and home of our being firmly in that realm beyond the sense apprehension—invisible, immortal, eternal SPIRIT. The whole spectrum of light is ours, whether or not we currently have the outward technology to harness it and cooperate with it. This narrow band of perception that we begin with is not our limit, nor our boundary. There is LIGHT available in all kinds of amazing wavelengths.

Religion, used in the negative sense of the word, limits the spectrum of spiritual light to that which is rationally understandable, rather than allowing God to communicate the whole of His vast spiritual wealth, even when we can’t quite process it with the organs of sense (including the brain). I may, in my “rantings” about spiritual truth, appear as strange as Charles to some. I have never worn a cape, but I feel like each one of these writings is a bit like me saying, “there goes another one…” about the fingerprints of the Eternal through His creation. But I am not pretending to see cosmic rays to get attention or feel special. I have a whole spectrum of light beyond the tiny visible range to point to. I believe you actually have wired into you the capacity to SEE more than your physical eyes can take in—the inner technology necessary to SEE spiritual truth. You don’t even have to build elaborate equipment; rather just develop and discover the latent or atrophied spiritual abilities that are your heritage as a human already. The last great frontier of human existence is not the space out there, but the space within—the land of the Spirit. (And, here’s a hint: The entrance of His words gives LIGHT…. Psalm 119:130)

U: UNIVERSE

As difficult as it is to comprehend shape in the subatomic world, it might be just as difficult at the very large scale. The shape of the universe is still being debated. While most scientists believe it to be flat (this was declared in 2013 with 0.4% margin of error), there are “anisotropies” (directionally-dependent differences) in space evidenced by a microwave probe. These are still sparking discussions about shape, and it seems that relativity conclusion just keeps factoring in: gravity bends space, therefore affecting shape. But when this happens in the 4th dimension where our mental models tend to break down, we are left dependent on complicated math and the drawings that physicists draw from them, hence the complexity.

String theory has projected beyond our universe, asserting that we may be living in a “bubble” of pinched-off spacetime and that there may be multiple “bubbles” where spacetime has been focused into its a universe like ours. Since our bubble contains billions of galaxies and the portion we can observe from earth is about 93 billion light years across, the “bubble” concept might be misleading. We tend to picture bubbles as happy little things floating around in champagne, while this bubble is a swirling dynamo of matter and energy beyond our brain’s comprehension. String theorists are quick to point out that if their speculations would in fact convert the universe to a “multi-verse” in our understanding (while science fiction writers jump for joy at the thought).

No matter its shape, the universe has to keep us fascinated forever with its sheer scale. Remember that it does not only include the galaxies and all the space in between them, but all matter and energy, thereby including every quantum entanglement, subatomic energy/mass configuration, right down to leptons and quarks and all their strange behaviors. Moving up a level, the universe contains countless (literally: impossible to be counted) molecular combinations and re-combinations—the sum total of which we call “chemistry”, adding the prefix “bio-“ if it happens in an organic situation. There are simple combinations of oxygen into the life-sustaining doublet that we breathe, all the way to the amazing zipping and unzipping of the massive DNA macromolecule that has carried the genetic code with accuracy straight through the ages! Those macromolecules and hundreds of cellular cycles, large and small, flow energy through organisms via the systematized and specialized machineries that are tailor-made for efficient bio-function. Through their bodies, living beings, plus or minus a consciousness of it, do things as diverse as locomotion, energy attainment, reproduction, digestion and defense against foreign attack! We are like amazing little walking Manhattan islands, miracles of unlikely efficiency, replete with mind-boggling infrastructure!

We could keep moving up the scale until we returned to the macro level, but the scale itself is the idea here. And I have said it before: I believe the universe is a fractal. It is rough and repeating not smooth and continuous! It has dimension and contour on infinite levels. If we don’t see the “UNI-“ as we traverse the levels (the same fractal or fingerprint repeated throughout), it isn’t because it is absent, but rather because we have defects remaining in our natural sight. We are in a strange position as we chase and analyze the unfathomable and the uncontainable—a worthy pursuit, but one which curves spacetime itself in a way that fries our minds and forces us often into limited conclusions. The real search itself is not even what we think it is: We don’t even really need an end or an explanation—what matters is the process. Searching, in the cosmic scheme, is not so much about changing our knowledge base, but rather refining our perception! Just as every good graduate student knows, real education does not leave you confident you know it all. It actually robs you of that naïve confidence, leaving you humbled, finally having grasped how very much there is you don’t know. Real education isn’t complete until the learner has committed to lifelong learning!

When we summon the literal meaning from its Latin roots, the word “universe” means, “turned into one.” I love to take it a step further by noticing that the word “verse,” which refers to a part of a song, psalm or poem, has the same Latin origin, vertere “to turn”. All of this shouts to my rejoicing heart the following: The universe sings ONE song in billions of spectacularly multi-colored and multi-faceted arrangements! I am comforted and settled in the knowledge that, no matter what flies out of the latest science news, the universe will always ultimately be declaring unity, not diversity. There is not really a “ton” of knowledge to master—we need not struggle with data overload. There is really just deeper and deeper understanding of broad truths to be gained. (Even Einstein didn’t believe in memorizing what could be looked up in books!) Certainly the specifics get complicated, but most of us don’t need to know the specifics. What most of us are chasing is a better understanding of how to marvel at, wonder over, and cooperate with the gloriously unfathomable guiding principles! When we see fractal truths resurface at multiple layers of investigation—chiefly truths like: God is good; He is a Father; His heart is generous—we increase our amazement and our participation! For me, even a multi-verse—if it could ever be proved—would still be a UNI-verse! My Father has “got this” and searching will only reveal Him and His inexpressible, vaster-than-vast wells of GENIUS!

On my first day of undergraduate Microbiology, Dr. Carrie Ireland of the O.R.U. Medical School (which obviously still existed at that time) began her lecture by declaring, “Bacteria are ubiquitous.” I know that that is a very simple statement and most people wouldn’t have had their world shaken by it, but I never forgot the moment. First of all, I’m not sure I had really realized that bacteria were EVERYWHERE! (It was the first day of college Micro, I remind you!) Secondly, my worlds collided somehow when a mighty imagery-rich descriptor that would usually have been used in the literature classroom was employed as the object of a “be-verb” describing an entire kingdom of biological life! I have always marveled that I am as passionate for the arts as I am for science, but too rare are the moments those membranes meet outside of my heart and head! I remember vividly the moment I fell in love with the word “ubiquitous” because it had been applied to the single-celled wonders that would be much of my subsequent course of study!

But the biggest reason I think I loved Dr. Ireland’s opening statement for the semester was that it resonated deeply with something I had come to know about truth itself. Without a formal course in philosophy, I had become an alethiologist, fascinated with not just the content of truth, but equally the NATURE of truth! And one of the hallmarks of truth, I had observed, is that it appears EVERYWHERE! Truth is not only universal, but also ubiquitous—and it is ubiquitous BECAUSE it is universal! It crops up in the smallest and most unexpected of places as well as in the great beyond. Once our reticular activating system is captured by the large concept—and I mean CAPTURED, not coerced, for no forced wills will achieve the necessary heart-vision—then our eyes get directed to the ubiquitous demonstrations of truth in the universe! Again and again, the veil is pulled back for us and we, like Moses who saw the burning bush, find ourselves declaring, “I will turn aside and see this thing…”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees, takes off his shoes.” Wonders are ubiquitous. It is a UNI-verse, unrolling itself to reveal God for those willing to take off their shoes. Turn aside and see. Bend your ear and hear the song, sounding out over and over with entertainment value for BOTH hemispheres of your brain! And, ultimately, refuse to be the ones described in the next line of Ms. Browning’s poem—the ones who won’t acknowledge the holiness of our everyday ground. Immediately following the call, she wrote, “The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries, and daub their natural faces unaware.” Perhaps that is the scariest thing in the universe: the fact that it is possible to miss its ubiquitous wonders and its ever-present Cause and Reason, which would be paradise lost indeed. (But no need.)

T: TELEMETRY

I wanted to be an astronaut as a child, but then, didn’t we all? NASA was like a shiny silver jet fueled incarnation of the words Robert Browning had written a century earlier, “A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?” The astronauts in their suits just made you want to roll up your bell-bottomed jeans, turn up Clapton, and go for it! This rush of imagery and inspiration comes back to me when I watch movies like Apollo 13, where phrases like “flirting with gimbal lock” transport you back to the land of slide rules, pocket protectors, crew cuts, dutiful wives, and the unscathed hope that science could solve all. (A nerd version of Mad Men!)

One of my favorite scenes from Apollo 13 is the “go/no go poll” of the launch status checklist: Every man in a white shirt and thin black tie is asked if they are “go” or “no go” for flight. I suppose I love it because it represents the synergy of the complex moving parts—the colleagues joining forces, each at their station, to unite around a big, big idea! Even though so much of that checklist would be digitized today, there is something gloriously human about the analog version: people at their posts being “polled” and declaring they are “READY” to “LAUNCH”! One of my favorite words from the movie (besides “gimbal lock”) is the word “telemetry” which had a place in that sequence. The official term from the Apollo checklist was the word “TELMU” which stood for a bundle of things, but telemetry was used so often in the movie (and was the entire backbone of the ability to send men into space) that it lives big in my mind’s checklist!

Telemetry simply means remote measurement, or literally, monitoring from a distance. Obviously, in the case of the early manned space flights, data was gathered in remote space and transmitted back to mission control’s mainframes for processing. Telemetry is used in countless other applications as well. Any wireless transmission that relays data from the far reaches back to a central location is considered telemetry. A weather balloon is probably the ultimate example: it exists simply for the purpose of remote measurement.

Telemetry is a compound form of two Greek words. In the Western world, we are far too familiar with the second “meter” part (from the Greek metron,) for we have developed a personal relationship with our ability to measure things! Sometimes that relationship borders on addiction! In a way, the faith that the modern world has in science rests on measurement alone. The experimental method is really no more than an extreme intentionality grid for measuring accurately. We have built a society and a way of life on measurement. We predict, adjust, infer, decide and theorize based on the all-powerful data! In the modern zeitgeist, the metron is all-important.

Our measurement fever and fervor for data collection often subconsciously extends to our inner world. We sometimes (or often) launch personal weather balloons in attempts to monitor our environments and protect ourselves from “bad moons on the rise” (70’s references abound when you write about Apollo). We may also be found monitoring the stations in our own inner “flight control” chamber at times, trying to ensure a safe return from our own failed “moon attempts”. In so doing, we get as frazzled as the fatigued ground control crew portrayed in the movie. We overload ourselves with more data than our little human slide rules (and sometimes even main frames) can handle!

Some of the “remote” things we monitor in our spiritual lives are not far away in space, but rather a different kind of “far”—they are deep inside in that place where Death Cab For Cutie would say “soul meets body”, or where the Bible would say, “joints meet marrow.” There is where our telemetry really stumbles and we really flirt with gimbal lock! We “should” be happy, but our readings don’t line up! We should feel inspired, but instead the data pumps out remembrances of disappointment. Controlling the environment around us is one kind of tiring, but trying to get a harness on the inner readings and correct them is often quite another frustration indeed. When your inner telemetry tells you that you are “off”, you sometimes want to abort the whole launch.

Ironically, there is an antidote for our telemetry problem right in the meaning of the word. The meaning of the first part of the word contains the hope of a better relationship with measurement. The Greek prefix tele- (far) is related to one of my favorite Greek words, teleios, which is translated as, “complete” or “perfect”, and comes from telos (consummated goal). When describing what God does for us, it is a welcome word, but when describing how we should live, it can be very intimidating: “Be perfect; even as your heavenly Father is perfect.” I have no problem believing that God is teleios, but a casual hearing of that expectation out of me triggers all kinds of imperfect response right away. As always, the casual reading is not the end. The Greek language that so easily houses spiritual thought pierces through performance anxiety with its truth: Teleios “is well-illustrated with the old pirate's telescope, unfolding (extending out) one stage at a time to function at full-strength (capacity effectiveness).” (HELPS Word Study) There’s your comfort for bad telemetry: Completeness, effectiveness, maturity and wholeness come in FRACTALS! God’s perfection in us telescopes out in increasing measure while we zoom through this space odyssey! My goofed up reading, real or aberration, need not freak me out. (Still in the 70’s here…)

When your telemetry is telling you that you are imperfect, readjust by all means, but don’t abort the mission. Your completeness comes in stages. Your spiritual growth telescopes out from the inside, engulfing more and more territory around you. The “remote” parts of your life that are sending back dire and alarming measurements only represent more of the scope of redemption yet to be unfolded in and through you. “Be perfect” is not a demand, but an offer and an opportunity, one that could easily be interpreted, “Allow My completion to be fully extended in you!”

Some of us are more like weather balloons than others, more given to data intake during the storm, and more prone to monitor our environment becoming students of the climate around us. Go for it—God wired you the way He wanted you and know that your sensors are a gift. But when the data overwhelms you or leads you to a conclusion that is not commensurate with the hope of glory within, you actually have permission to disregard the telemetry! Sometimes, you might have to break your addiction to monitoring to engage a broader truth of trust. Your signal processing may take some time to change, but you can do it. You really are not your own flight control director! The gloriously human Gene Kranz in Apollo 13, amidst every reason to despair, still boldly declared that no one would be lost on his watch—and they weren’t. There’s a far better Watcher at the helm for you. Even in this scientific age, you can’t always trust your telemetry.

S: SCHRODINGER'S CAT

Erwin Schrodinger created his cat experiment metaphor in 1935 to illustrate the ridiculousness of what quantum mechanics was beginning to say about reality. Though his intention was to highlight a paradox, some would say he accidentally translated the elite-speak of the laboratory into a picture of the central pivot of the quantum revolution! Non-scientists who survived their high school physics courses by applying nice, neat formulas to mass in motion and believing that the world ran on such predictable principles were confronted via this feline (and the Copenhagen interpretation of it) by another version of reality. This version included vast whimsy and wildness. Subsequent discussion of Schrodinger’s cat would lead to an altered worldview—a picture that would forever make the observer a part of the system and suggest that life unrolls in a way that is far more interactive than we have ever imagined.

Schrodinger envisioned a cat sealed in a box with a toxic gas that had a 50:50 chance of being released. (Our heightened animal awareness sensibilities cringe these days, but no cats were harmed—this is a “thought experiment”—a new class of science necessitated by the strangeness of the invisible world.) There were only two possible outcomes for the cat: alive or dead. And here ends the similarity to our everyday experience. The shocking part comes next: No matter the amount of time between the release (or non-release) of the toxic gas, the cat does not “commit” to a state until the door is opened by the observer. Until we “check” to see if “live” or “dead” is the outcome, neither is. Before the box is opened, the cat remains in a state that is the sum of all possible outcomes, EVEN THOUGH the switch of causation has already been thrown! Though there is still controversy and heated discussion about the thought experiment, at least one group of physicists would begin to say that, on a quantum level, it is not the choice to throw the switch that matters—IT IS THE CHOICE TO CHECK IN—TO OPEN THE DOOR—to OBSERVE! This is science that reinvented science! (And they have been reinventing the reinvention ever since.)

I could have easily told you the same story using another “S” word: SUPERPOSITION. That is the word that was used to describe the state of the cat between the release or non-release of the gas and the opening of the door: Even if the researcher goes on a vacation and comes back weeks later before checking in on the cat, the cat will not “choose” a live or dead state until the researcher returns to open the box. The feline will instead exist in a “superposition of all possible states”. Restatements of this idea that read like a self-help book would subsequently emerge from physics labs: “Reality exists unmanifest.” “We live in an observer-determined universe.” And my favorite by John Wheeler, “Reality is determined by the questions we put to it.”

When first I discovered what the laboratory legend of the cat, my glorious naiveté and the natural absence of walls of separation in my idealist mind immediately took me to the words of Jesus. Jesus, while walking in the midst of a world that thought cats died immediately when killed, declared a different reality when He said, “With God all things are possible.” Let me restate that: Jesus walked among a worldview that was all causation, all the time, so much so that one of the questions his own disciples would throw at him would be, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (How’s that for a toxic gas analogy?) And in response to that speculation about what was inside that man’s box, Jesus declared a superposition of states that no one had considered: His answer was, “Neither! This is nothing but a vehicle for the glory of God.” And…then he opened the box (and healed the man)!

Jesus put different questions to reality, questions that asked for outcomes that were deemed impossible by the causation-bound natural mind that had too long dealt with massive and slow matter. Jesus talked about mountains moving, fig trees withering, and all kinds of possibilities that previously existed “unmanifest”. He looked at a few loaves and fishes and saw the infinite fractals of possibility inside them, thereby “observing” the provision to feed thousands. And, most of all, he looked at people and saw potential: potential to see, potential to walk, potential to be whole, both inside and out. He observed the universe with different vision than we have been taught to in our classical physics classrooms.

One of the amazing things about Schrodinger’s Cat (besides the generation of a lot of great pop culture science humor) is that it almost gives the appearance that we can alter the past. That is not what it is saying—it is really connecting the event in the past to the moment of observation. But if this universe is so very interactive, it must be true, on a personal level, that how and when you choose to view the toxic events of the past will determine your present experience. I don’t need to spend time trying to revive dead cats, really. I perhaps need to learn to open the right boxes, or dare to open boxes I have avoided and deal with the contents! (Go watch “Saving Mr. Banks”.)

God created this universe to be far more interactive than we ever dreamed. We hear the word “God” in general and assume for Him deterministic control. But, to really be God, He would need to be far more in control than the classical way of direct cause-and-effect! A God who could only rule the word when folks tow the line would be a weak God indeed! This God is far more flexible in His absolute power than that. God created a reality with infinite possibility to accommodate the human will. He is an interactive genius, granting a scary amount of choice (the one interface between the quantum and classical worlds) to the observers He created and launched out into this cosmic soup. God retains authority while making room for variation, knowing that our personal choices of “alive” or “dead” are uniquely our own. God’s superposition of states for His people redefines itself continually, yielding fresh new crops of possibilities for us every time we open a box. Whether we play the role of the observer or the cat in the box, God is the generator of the system that breathes along.

I’ll close my meditation today with a Schrodinger-related quote from a t-shirt which was this year’s birthday present from a great friend: “Alive? Dead? Open the box already!” Jesus said, “All things are possible….to him who believes.” What if our believing faculties were exposed to a whole range of possibilities before we made our fevered efforts at faith? What if our inner eyes were, as Paul suggested to the Ephesians, “flooded with light”? What if we were possessed with an intense, authentic optimism before we attempted that activity we call prayer? Open the box already—living is a Spirit-endeavor and there is so much more available beyond the limits of your natural eyes.

R: REDSHIFT OR REFLECTION

Since I cannot decide between two “R” words today, I’m going for a double-header, with a shortened version of each of the two, and, as is often the case, I begin the writing without knowing how it will end. I have a sneaking suspicion that the one topic will inform the other and, if so, I can only discover it as I write. I’m opening further the window on my inner world today, allowing readers to discover along with me a synergy between these two seemingly unrelated “R” scientific ideas. This is my own glorious process: I learn as I write!

The first word is REDSHIFT, a frequent idea in complex cosmological discussions of relativity, which actually has its origins in a fairly simple concept known as the Doppler Effect. It isn’t rocket science or astrophysics to note that sound coming toward you (such as a siren) is higher pitched, while sound travelling away is lower pitched. This is because the source of the sound waves is in motion and that motion actually changes the wavelength and frequency the stationary observer receives even thought the source does not change the wavelength or frequency it is emitting. The Doppler effect was a relatively easy one to observe and prove, but the cosmological question that arose was: Is there a similar shift with all kinds of waves emitted from a source in motion?

The answer is yes. The Doppler effect applied to sources of light came to be called redshift, due to the fact that stars in motion away from the earth emit light that we receive as longer wavelength—toward the RED end of the visible spectrum. This optical redshift was first observed with solar radiation in 1871 and simulated with mirrors in the lab in 1901. Objects emitting light and moving away from us shift toward the red end of the spectrum while objects moving toward us do a blueshift. Taken on the largest scale, redshift observance is the basis of much of the expanding universe idea.

The words of Scripture are a large light-emitting object in my personal universe, but, even after all these years, I still notice my ability to “shift” them! I am pretty sure that there have been times that I have “redshifted” God, reverting to the view Moses had in his cleft of the rock experience: a God moving AWAY from man, allowing the view of only His “back parts,” to use the King James wording for Exodus 33. In these times, I hear the promises of the words and sense a glimmer of hope, but I factor in my “honest” assessment of my own humanity, and end up feeling that I am chasing God’s sound from behind while His tone grows lower and sterner in frequency.

It is that small edge of frequency change—that shift in perception--that makes all the difference. I need to encounter the Scriptures and the God of the Scriptures in direct contact to really comprehend the goodness of their promise! They are “God-available,” not “God-achievable”! And, if ANY shift is going to be made in my comprehension of God or His words, it should be a blue one, for the New Testament definitely reveals a God who is in motion toward us, not speeding away!

But this redshift perceptual adjustment related to God is rooted in traces of a natural self-image. And, the notion of self-image brings me to the other R word for the day: REFLECTION.

When light strikes a mirrored surface, it changes direction in completely predictable ways, such that it creates an image for us, seemingly behind the mirror. These everyday optics are woven seamlessly into the fabric of our own self-monitoring, and, clearly, both sexes have demonstrated personal relationships with mirrors and appreciation for the laws of reflection! But, we do the same with our inner world. We bounce our own particular wavelengths off of those who surround us, using them as MIRRORS to reflect back to us who we really are, sometimes accurately and sometimes like horrific funhouse versions—versions that factor in their own histories of distorted light-bending! Reflection can be our friend or our enemy: It is all-important which relational mirrors we choose—and we can choose them.

James, the quieter writer of Bible words, makes an amazing statement about the Scriptures, when he compares them to a MIRROR—and this thought will (I now see the connection) lead me back to redshift! While most people view the Bible and its concepts as a standard, a law, a mountaintop to be aspired to through patient and steady climbing, James compares them to a REFLECTIVE OBJECT. We humans stumble over this profundity—it is just too simple and good to be the case, it seems.

A mirror only reflects what is in front of it. Could James be telling us that, in fact, the blinding glory and moral high ground (especially when it comes to “impossible” tasks like loving your enemy and forgiving your offenders) described for us by the Bible is not just a map to followed, but also a DNA to be expressed? Could it be that the words of the Bible are there to point us INSIDE to the place where God freely shares His own life—an ingredient list, so to speak, of what was really used in His loving manufacture of the real us? (Instead of a list of hard tasks to accomplish and be miserable while so doing…) Is God that willing to grace us? James implies that when you see God, your reflection is there.

REDSHIFT and REFLECTION as I have considered them today both point to our view of ourselves and our place in the cosmic scheme. If we could remove the distortion of performance from the light of God’s words—lose the redshift—how empowered would we be? How incredibly sad that the God who made us and loves us has been also used against us by voices that demand we eek out a righteousness ourselves by effort and strain. Make a blue shift toward the true wavelength of grace (if you like that metaphor) or try an approach to God that sees Him as a mirror not a manual (if that one suits you). Either way, you will discover a world beyond the limits of your history and natural perception.

I will close with an R word of cataclysmic proportion--one of my favorite descriptors of the landscape of the Spirit: RESOURCED. When you see yourself as RESOURCED, you are liberated from the need to be perfect in and of yourself! When you see God’s universe as a place of RESOURCE, you settle into a self-image that is not needy or impoverished, but rather replete with the dignity fitting a creation of God. Whatever you need—even if it is the ability to perform or behave well in those “hard” inner tasks like faith or forgiveness—it is AVAILABLE, moving toward you not away from you! Look in the mirror and see. You are resourced. It is real. It is relevant. It is all found in the realm of relationship. I can’t even believe I’m going here but, yeah, I must complete the “R” theme with the conclusion: you have REASON to REJOICE! (Crosby, Stills & Nash: “…you have no choice….”) This wildly RESOURCED universe is the mystery that the truly “poor in spirit” get to discover!

Q: QUASAR

As citizens of this universe, it just seems we should be aware of its brightest objects. Quasars have been called “cosmic blowtorches”. First identified in the 1950’s, they were then thought to be faint stars, but in fact, there is nothing faint about them. They are massive jets of matter and luminous energy that shoot forth from supermassive black holes. (The faint appearance to the astronomers of the 50’s was simply owing to the fact that the nearest one is 600 million light years away.) Over 200,000 have been observed and some of them are even called “hyperluminous”. One must register respect for an object that inspires a term like that, right? (The creative wording ends there, however: a hyperluminous quasar discovered in 1988 has been affectionately named, APM 08279+5255. I suppose the astronomers can be forgiven since they had 200,000 to record.)

If you have ever imagined black holes with their irresistible gravitational pull into deep darkness with no escape (and of course many science fiction writers have), you now have something bright and powerful to add to that imagination. Supermassive black holes (another coined term necessitated by reality on the heavenly plane) are probably churning at the center of all galaxies. While it is true that nothing escapes a black hole, the stress is so great at the event horizon that there is a mighty “shredding” that goes on there—a stretching to the point of reconstitution! That eddy of energy that takes matter to the edge of its existence—challenges it beyond its ability to remain in its essential form—is what powers the blinding energy of the quasar! The shredded matter is expelled in very dense form at very high speeds, which adds up to VERY high energy, and the aforementioned cosmic blowtorch. The amount of energy has been estimated at 1000 times the energy of our entire galaxy—which makes me want to shout, even to myself, “Did you hear me????” Power unfathomable originated from shredded matter! It’s a bored human mind’s DREAM! (She pauses and wonders why she didn’t choose astrophysics….)

Imagine David, the Hebrew writer of most of the ancient Psalms, looking up at a sky un-obscured by artificial light, knowing nothing of black holes and quasars, and yet thinking to himself, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech; night after night, they reveal knowledge.” (19:1-2) Perhaps the contemplated sight of the balls of burning light blazing through spacetime to reach his eyes—eyes that were quick to see through the appearance and into eternity--caused his thoughts to resonate with the same astounding reality of black holes and quasars that now fuels a global quest for cosmological information! And David innocently reduced it down to God—how primitive and naïve of him? Or not…I’m just as primitive and naïve. (It’s a useful skill—the eastern thinkers call it a “beginner’s mind”.)

I see in quasars a testimony to the rhythm of the ages; the music of the spheres; the warp and woof of the fabric of the universe! Our discovery of them jetting out from the center of supermassive black holes was one giant cosmic joke: but not the cruel kind. It was the humor and irony at the heart of the universe from a loving Origin—the “cosmic mind” demonstrating He is really a cosmic heart, fitted out even with humor and good Father-surprises! It was God telling the rest of the story! Just when we were sci-fi “drunk” on black holes, speculating about their massive destructive power, we discover that the very brightest and most powerful objects of the universe explode forth from the zone of destruction! LIGHT truly being forcefully expelled from darkness! My primitive and naïve beginner’s mind approach right here arrests me with my own moment of mind-blowing power! DEATH AND RESURRECTION---annihilation and reformation—tearing down of the old and forceful expulsion of the new—are the rhythm of the universe!

The message of the quasar for me is this: Everything can be shredded! Nothing of your matter of failure or feebleness need remain. The very molecular consistency of the darkness you have encountered can be converted to an empowering energy that can go the distance and appear in other people’s horizons for their marveling pleasure and illumination! In short, there is not just “hope” (mere, weak, theoretical, far-away and sentimental). NO, there is supermassive, hyperluminous HOPE! Quasars exist and my mind can’t comprehend them. Even people with no spirit-concept admit to their astounding force and luminosity. How much more should I, believing as I do that the universe is actually offering “universal” truth (see what I did there?), take great hope from these brighter-than-bright jets of power created through destruction! I am the richest of all “psalmists,” for I have glimpsed light in the darkest of places.

As I write this in my first A to Z blogging challenge, with “Q” having fallen to me on this particular day, I pause to note that tomorrow is Easter, a day when Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of a Savior. I am sure that there will be a wide range of intensities in hearts around the world (much like the quasar itself—which generate light equally across the broad electromagnetic spectrum). But, no matter the intensity, for each heart that has attuned to it, there will be some real sense of LIGHT coming out of DARKNESS. Christians will be celebrating a personal, inner quasar such as Paul described in the New Testament: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ.” (II Corinthians 4:6) Maybe, just maybe, that’s not just words on a page or a sentimental attachment to a God-idea and a universal hero. Maybe that’s inner cosmology of the hyperluminous variety.

P: PERCEPTION

It is easy for me to wax lyrical about the human body’s design. My graduate research was in Immunology and I still remember the first line of my Master’s thesis presentation: “The human body is equipped with a complete arsenal for the destruction of foreign forms.” My major professor wanted me to remove the line, telling me it sounded like a 1960’s reel-to-reel science film, but I proudly left it in—because I really meant it! Study, for me, was focused marveling!

When it comes to the area of perception, there is no shortage of material for wide-eyed wonder. Our five senses each have mechanisms of data processing that are sheer miracles of design. And the systems report in biochemically to that computer of gray and white matter at the top of our head—a marvel of efficiency that yields for us a workable vision of the world. Our brains synthesize our very own inward hologram of reality, orchestrating the intake, continually tweaking as new data comes in from the sensors. No wonder David said, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made, and that my soul knows well.” Meditator that he was, the shepherd who would later be king revealed through his writings that not only his perception of God, but also of himself, was appropriately filled with wonder.

Perception is a science, but it is also an art. The curious intake organs are composed of cells and structures capable of incredible finesse. Rods and cones in the eyes are fitted out with appropriate chemistry to process color and light. The delicate structures of the middle and inner ear convert pressure waves from sound into distinct percussive realities we can understand (you literally have a “drum” in your ear—how wild is that?). The somatic neurons placed throughout the skin relay messages electrically and immediately to the spinal cord and evoke a response often without even bothering the brain. It’s a veritable symphony of wild informational synergy! (It’s Stravinsky more than Bach, maybe!)

In the data-rich, over-stimulated world in which we live, however, one aspect of perception is of particular interest (especially because of the role it seems to play in attention deficit disorder). We are so incredibly capable of taking in data that we need our attention filtered. The processing must include the tuning out of the unimportant, or irrelevant data. The RAS (reticular activating system) is the system in your brain responsible for that. When you perk up at the sound of your name paged at an airport, while you have tuned out every other name or announcement, the RAS has done its job. It is also the RAS’s handiwork when you see the car you are interested in buying everywhere on the road as if everyone else had suddenly bought one ahead of you—they didn’t; you just tuned in to what suddenly became “yours”, at least in terms of desire!

The RAS focuses our attention on things that WE deem significant—there is a strong element of choice, but, note: this choice is not a direct choice to focus the attention! It is a much more global desire-based intoxication, which seems far more “heart” than “head”, if you will permit me to use that model! Perhaps this is where most people fail in trying to focus their busy brains: they try to focus their thoughts in the moment, dealing with small pixels of attention while our attentive abilities are already stretched to the limit! In the struggle to tie down the loose ends of ever-wandering consciousness, efforts to drill down toward what is important can meet with frustration. It seems as if increased pressure on one small thing in the vast sea of consciousness makes the surrounding brain terrain labeled “urgent” all the more, not less, noticeable!

So here’s a key to directing the focus of your daily perception, and it is going to sound very “Yoda-esque”. Don’t “try” to focus; just fall in love and let the built-in filters of the RAS take hold. Replace fevered efforts of focus with the free-fall enjoyment of passion and pursuit! When you are smitten with love, no one needs to tell you to focus on the object of your affection, for the thought of him/her filters out through the signal processing of every day! When you find yourself wrestling with focus in perception, cut that Gordian knot of struggle and rediscover the power of your mysterious heart to guide your attention. Fall in love all over again with your own passions, your destiny, your identity, your GOD! Let your focus flow FROM your heart THROUGH your brain (tell your head to outsource!).

The miracle of all perception, and of all humanity, as well as the thing that keeps me in hot pursuit of truth, is that it is NEVER just attainable through objective data alone! The universe has a way of squirming out of too much “pinning down”! This element of mystery is beautifully illustrated by the role our expectations play in our perceptions: We assemble the world we long to see! The universe runs not just head-matters but also heart issues! Love, a choice and inclination of the heart, has biochemical, and organizational, effects on the rest of my life. I am marvelously programmed to fall further in love with what I set my affections on (provided I leave them there, but if they have slipped, there is a “reset” button)! I am wired to flow as a unit toward what my heart longs for!

As the coach famously said to the high jumper trying to break his own record, “Throw your heart over the bar and the rest of you will follow.” It can be true for our attention and focus as well. A favorite Proverb: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for out of it flow the issues of life!” My translation: Set your passions without measure and then watch your genius design facilitate those passions as your God-wired filtering directs your attention to the details of the big picture you are pursuing. Those are not just motivational psychobabble words: I’m convinced through years of living. When you are looking for the good, you find it, not with effort and struggle, but with trusting flow. And I must throw in just one more quote from that Book of Books, but from the New Testament this time, “To the pure, all things are pure….” Titus 1:15 New frontiers await our perception.

O: OPEN SYSTEM

The universe itself is a fractal: it is a massive SYSTEM, but it exists in multitudes of smaller systems, and cannot be understood without a large measure of “systems thinking.” Whether the discipline is physics, biology, sociology or even economics, there are always systems in play, reminding us that the movement and meaning of the whole far exceeds the definitions of the individual parts. Systems are never alone, however. They perform their interactive business in a broader environment and most always interact with that environment, exchanging energy and matter. It is the relationship with the environment that determines whether a system is OPEN, CLOSED or ISOLATED. A closed system cannot exchange matter with its environment, only energy; while an open system is free to exchange both. An isolated system is locked up, with no matter or energy coming or going to the environment around. (But truly isolated systems are hard to find and harder to create!) The analogy to people is obvious, for certainly each of us is our own system. Our environment consists of our circumstances and relationships—both of which we constantly signal-process to form conclusions according to our own inner filters (our acquired knowledge and experience). We need boundaries to remain separate from our environment and maintain our integrity as separate entities. But we also need the exchange of matter and energy with others because, no matter how much we like to think we are, we are actually not so self-sustaining. When environmental input overwhelms us, or when direct attacks from the environment occur, the result is PAIN, and we (intentionally or subconsciously) CLOSE down in an effort to keep out some of the offending material. And sometimes, the “burn” we receive is so thorough that we go as far as ISOLATION. Remaining a truly OPEN SYSTEM, able to take in life in full measure, becomes the challenge as we are dealt a few blows. Everything I see in the universe tells me that openness is the way, however. (And remember, your integrity stays in tact—it is selective flowing openness that never violates your own will, personhood or uniqueness.) In fact, it is important to note here that the exchange between the system (you) and the environment (the world) is two-way--bilateral! When we talk about openness, we immediately think about our environment acting on us, changing us, flavoring us, but in fact, that relationship is one of equilibrium where we are as well, influencing the world! How many people want to change their world, but aren’t really ready to OPEN themselves? I want to change the world—I always have. I have a drive to lift it out of its doldrums and inject it with a quantity I call “intense, authentic optimism”. I actually believe that this is a positive journey we are on, even when it is rough and tumble. I believe a spirituality that doesn’t manifest as optimism does not yet know its God! But my battle toward that goal is just like yours. I must choose to remain open! It is harder than it sounds. When you have been surprised by hurtful attacks of matter and energy from the environment (“hurting people hurt people”), staying open becomes counter-intuitive as a response! Sometimes, it takes a wash of an environment beyond the local one to re-open. Sometimes it takes a dose of input from the great beyond! There is a video on YouTube that went viral in the geekosphere (which might be a few million less that the normal definition of viral). It is called “Mobius Transformations Revealed” and, with a beautiful colored ball, it demonstrated four simple mathematical transformations a geometric object can undergo: Rotation (the object turns); Dilation (it enlarges, or correspondingly shrinks), Translation (it changes location) or finally, INVERSION—in which the object literally “inside-outs” itself (and is beautiful—like a flower opening)! The profundity of the video for me lies in the fact that WE, little dancing systems of humanity, so often do only the first three motions, but seldom get around to the fourth—the one that requires real opening. When our environment offends our neatly packaged system, we quite readily spin around a bit in a flurry of anger, enlarge or shrink ourselves with puffed up pride or deflated self-abasement, or even (and this is a big one) change locations to find a safe space--or so we think! But so seldom do we actually respond by unzipping ourselves and actually inverting so that our hearts are beautifully, and nakedly, exposed to the coordinate plane! What a concept: when you get hurt or challenged, go ahead and use the occasion to “inside-out” yourself! Staying open isn’t easy, but it is worth it. We need to regularly check our openness quotient in life. If you find you have become isolated, the first place to begin to reopen is not with crowds of people but with a Person. There is only one place of complete safety and openness and it is, in fact, far more SAFE than our attempts at isolation. I didn’t learn to be an open system because I live a life that is full of wonderful people—I learned it because I discovered a wonderful Father. He Himself is not closed or isolated but rather the most OPEN system imaginable, though religious fear-mongers have not told that tale! My discovery of Him is what makes me and keeps me open in gloriously healthy and flexible ways! I daresay it keeps me young! I long for the exchange of matter and energy that I am appointed to have with my environment for, at the end of the day, I know that no isolated system ever really changed the world!

N: NORMAL CURVE

The familiar bell-shaped curve we call the “normal” is responsible for a lot, both in science and in my life. The normal curve was not developed, but rather discovered as the way things are more times than not. It is the way nature varies, or fails to vary--THE fractal of probability, showing up with so much regularity that its usefulness is unquestioned. Most of the statistics we use in science come from the realization that things—whether they be repeated measurements in an experiment or naturally occurring things like height, weight and strength--cluster around a mean with equal variation in two directions. When we speak of variation from the norm, we speak of standard deviations away from the mean. The fattest part of the curve, one standard deviation away on either side, accounts for 68% of the data and, when we move out two standard deviations, we include 95.45%. In science, data is usually reported with a “confidence level” (often 95%) which means the researcher thinks his stuff is under the fat part of the bell-shaped curve but also must acknowledge that there are indeed those little deviant, variant, odd ends out there. (I hope that you can visualize a normal curve in your mind, for this whole post will make so much more sense if so!) Statistically speaking, this powerful math function allowed us to give definition, and literally a shape, for the concept of NORMAL, which is amazing, really, if you let yourself think about it. I, clearly, have let myself think about it—way too many times!. I am going to turn a corner now sharply and tell you a bit of my love-hate relationship with the concept of normal. Brace yourself: it’s about to get painfully personal up in here. (I guess I’m bracing myself, for it’s my own soul that I am baring here in the vast unknown of cyberspace!) I.Q. is a phenomenon that is normally distributed throughout the population. My mother was a professional educator in a pioneering public program in the early 60’s and had adjunct access to our local university’s education department. When, as a preschooler, I began to read words in her graduate school textbooks, she took me to the local university to be tested. I didn’t know I was being tested: I honestly interpreted it as a day celebrating me, and I remember it with startling clarity and real joy, I think. They asked me questions and let me tell what I knew! What could be better? It was a day built around my knowledge and my fascination with the world—a day I have been trying to re-create ever since! (It might have also been the day I fell in love with performing, but that’s another story.) When the letter came diagnosing my condition, it provided my mother with a Stanford-Binet I.Q. score of 170 for me, BUT, one of the child psychologists in her circle instructed her that it would be better for her NOT to tell me about the high score, so that “I would not feel different.” Doing the best she could to obey the “experts,” my mother hid the letter in a drawer and there it stayed until I was 25 years old and searching for a document at her home. By that time, I had already been through several iterations of deep existential searching, in which I had more or less cried out to the heavens, “Why do I think about things so differently?” without the help of the answer provided in the letter. In retrospect, the letter explained a lot. My place on the NORMAL curve wasn’t in the fat bell shape in the middle, even if I wanted it to be. I won’t regale you here with tales of my tumble through childhood—times when it would have helped to say, “No, Perrianne, this mind you have is a FEATURE not a DEFECT! Even though the kids are laughing at you now for the question you asked, who you are is NOT “ab-normal”! I will also skip the vast (but sort of adorable) sociological research I embarked upon from an early age in an effort to teach myself to make conversation with others—which I did do successfully! (I put my intelligence to work to learn how to connect, and that’s been lovely and miraculous. I daresay, I might be genuinely good at it! It’s an art form I truly learned to enjoy!) I am my own version of NORMAL—a version that draws swirly circles when other people draw straight simple lines—a version that sees eternity in a grain of sand—a version that matters for what I can see and add to the hologram of truth! I have lived my life as a unique version of a “spiritual academic”, like a female cleric/scholar/thinker/(?), but I have done it rooted in a church environment. Though our church and our network are pressing in to do it different (demonstrating true Kingdom inclusiveness), the Bible Belt of America has seemed at times to enjoy whacking off the ends of the normal curve, refusing to give much room for “deviation” and viewing few variances as “standard”. It’s been a wild ride trying to obey the many injunctions to “be yourself” that came from church people while navigating the fact that the “self” I am seemed to them quite, quite unique. (I am blogging through the alphabet now about science, but I could equally do it about Greek words, art history, or even postmodern self-help words. The limiting factor is not my thoughts or inspirations, but rather the presence of potential readers!) It’s a blessing and a curse, or so it seems. One day near mid-life I was pondering my spot on the normal distribution (and by pondering I mean lamenting). I was wishing for the crowded fat part of the curve where people hang out; I was wishing I connected better and more quickly with my communication; I was, probably wishing to be different, which I don’t even believe in doing! I was rethinking my lifelong sociological research and resenting my litany of “fitting in” mechanisms”! All of a sudden, in my imagination, God performed a profoundly elegant transformation: It was as if he took that black bell-shaped line which had been authorized to declare the shape of “normal”, and He rotated it for me 90 degrees! Now from above (His view, if we go 3D about things), I could immediately see that the normal curve is just another line! I am not afraid of a mere line—that’s just a collection of infinite dots! The concept lost its power to make me feel different, for I was just another glorious point on the line! The curve lost its power to equate FREQUENCY with ACCEPTANCE! You can’t tell the difference in the view from above! That simple visual aid settled me back into the RELATIONSHIP that issued the uniqueness in the first place and reminded me of the whole point of living—expressing that RELATIONSHIP in an authentic—personal and unique—way! The intention of the child psychologist to help me feel “OK” about myself was finally accomplished through a wildly circuitous thought-route that had the divine fingerprint all over it! If I could issue one grand apology on behalf of the whole body of Christ, I would. I don’t feel authorized to do so by any “normal” (fat bit in the center) definition of leadership status. But, I am authorized by the fact that I have struggled with simplistic statements of normative Christianity long enough to speak from the far places at the end of the curve---places where I now know God also dances! I hear things differently. The cut-and-dried to me has a thousand rough fractal considerations in it, making it ever so far from cut-and-dried. And in my uniqueness, I have found a God—a Father—who loves me like I am?—yes, but more: who MADE ME on purpose like I am so that He could share parts of Himself with me, joining me often and regularly in my swirly dances of questioning! When HE says to me, “Be yourself!” HE MEANS IT! Sometimes, the church has been guilty of building a platform that fits the curious description in Isaiah 28:20, “The bed is too short to stretch out on, the blanket too narrow to wrap around you.” Forgive us. God is not this “bed” or this “blanket”. His love is spacious and NOT “norm-based”.

M: M-THEORY

The newest addition to theoretical physics is string theory. In the 1980’s, the search for the heart of all matter and energy went deeper than the single point particles that were always assumed and asked, “What if underneath it all, the whole universe beats to the rhythm of infinitesimally small vibrating “strings”? Complex math burgeoned along these lines and string theory became the trendiest branch of physics. However, the topic generated so much interest that no less than five different versions of string theory emerged, each mathematically different. Then in 1984, Ed Witten (the greatest living physicist?) rocked the world (or at least the theoretical physicists world) by suggesting that all five of the theories were just different angles of the same thing, each of them approaching the one central reality from a different mathematical limit, more or less. The name he gave to this new unified view of what underlies all matter and energy was “M-theory”. Ironically—since it is after all a theory purporting to explain everything--the choice of the letter “M” was left unexplained. Witten himself later said it stood for “magic, mystery, or matrix”. In reading about M theory, I have also found many other nominees for the “M”: monster, mother, master and membrane (the last of which does have something to do with the theory). While some of the speculations connected to M-theory seem as random as its name, a few are poignant. Firstly, M-theory exists in eleven dimensions. In other words, for theoretical physicists to define our reality, it takes seven other dimensions beyond the four we know (the three of space plus time). In an oversimplification that ignores size (but then, really, what is size in 11 dimensions?), we could say that 7/11 of reality is undetectable to us but ever present, according to M theory. String theorists speak extensively about parallel dimensions and have now even begun to rethink the Big Bang in terms of colliding membranes between them. But it is enough for me to just smile and say I knew Shakespeare was right when he had Hamlet say, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I also think of a little wooden plaque from my childhood that feels always engraved on my heart: “All I see of God’s world makes me trust him for all I don’t see.” The string theorist might scoff, judging it sentimental and silly to trust that those seven other dimensions are in the hand of Omniscience, but I don’t see it that way. What if those seven other dimensions beyond the few my mind is wired to process actually are the mere edges of His genius? What if their glaring message to us is not, “Hey come figure me out,” but rather, “You need better equipment.” What if the great beyond is the Spirit where we dance in God’s domain and see with our spiritual eyes? (I’m just asking, but yes, with a gleam in my eye as I think of it.) My God speculation has only been enhanced by the fact that string theory added a song and dance to the cosmological story! Instead of just points—focused infinitesimally small “balls” of energy—at the center of it all, we now have these vibrating (dancing) strings! We very seriously and solemnly focused in toward “the theory of everything” and we got, wait for it, music! It’s a lot like climbing the summit only to find the guru up there laughing! The idea of vibrating strings conjures up notions of an evening of good jazz. The vibrations come fast and furious as the players take readings off of each other and improvise and the strings are plucked (or the brass is reverberated). Smile: the universe is a bit like…JAZZ! Stephen Hawking recently set the religious word on fire (and not in a good way) when he said that the new explanations of M-theory, eliminated the necessity of a God for the universe. But, for me, God is the one plucking the strings! It isn’t that I “need” Him to explain it all, but more that I love knowing Him as the cosmic jazz-master! There is a little piece of the Bible that has for years caused Christians to speculate that at the center of it all we would find vibrations. Hebrews 1:3 declares that the Father (in the Son) “holds all things together by the word of His power.” What if we took our morality glasses off long enough to think of the Bible as a spiritual book? What if these words are more than just poetic praise of His majesty? What if the tiny word-packets of truth that give us the idea actually ARE the MATRIX of any other dimensions as well as those our minds perceive? What if God’s words—in whatever form they come--resonate throughout the universe with perpetual energy (the only source of it), creating the cosmic song that is vibrating with “mystery”, seeming like “magic”, creating a “matrix” or even a “membrane” of reality for us to dance upon? Perhaps we Christians need to update definition of a Creator. We have made Him too small and old-fashioned, too bearded and three (or four) dimensional! We did not realize that we had placed upon Him the limits of our own mind trying to understand the universe. No wonder scientists who generate crazy, wild expanded views of reality argue against our limited views of a Creator. Rather than defending our view, why not expand our notion of His vastness as we broaden our enjoyment of the Mystery? The universe is jazz with a purpose! It’s not just God’s position at the center of cosmological explanation that makes Him God to me. It’s that I find Him at the center of my own ridiculous struggles! He is not just the music of the spheres—he is the music in my local sphere. And if He chooses to run the universe on His rhythms, it behooves me to dance along.