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.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
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!)
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!)
Monday, April 28, 2014
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!
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!
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