“In Sunday school, I learned to think of God as a very old white-bearded man on a throne, who stood above creation and occasionally stirred it with a stick. When I am dreaming quantum dreams, what I see is an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net…it is not enough for me to proclaim that God is responsible for all this unity. Instead, I want to proclaim that God is the unity—the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that make it all go…As Joseph Campbell once asked, what if the universe is not just a product of God but also the manifestation of God—a “eucharistic planet” in which we have been invited to live.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web, pp 54-5)
Barbara Brown Taylor in the essays in this book works to weave together science and religion. In the essay entitled, “The Physics of Communion,” she marvels along with Einstein at how subatomic particles seem to react as one entity even when separated and altered at great distances. She speculates that the now diverse aspects of creation—rocks, plants, mammals, stars, humans—retain some sense of the unity that they used to experience before the “big bang.” We remember our original oneness and yearn for it.
I remember the amazement that the discussion of fractals caused—pleasing, harmonious forms echoed not only in nature, but also in music, art, engineering, and mathematics. It seemed we were “wired” to find certain proportions beautiful, and that those same proportions proved to be structurally sound as well. Michelangelo’s naked man inscribed in a circle similar in relationship to a whorled shell, an airplane’s wing, the spans of a strong but flexible bridge. Our delight in fixed proportions would make sense if what we are responding to is the echo of our own unity with these diverse things. They resonate for us and they work for us because, in a sense, they are us.
When we think of oneness separating out into multiplicity, we also have a place for the diversity of religious experience. God is one, yet we perceive him differently depending on whether we have fetched up in the Middle East, a Pacific island, or the Indian subcontinent. So many faith traditions posit our current existence as a painful, illusory, but ultimately temporary separation from the Great Unity that is God.
In the Star Wars movies, perceptive characters like Yoda or Obi Won Konobi sense whenever there is “a disturbance in the force.” They feel the evil, greed, and megalomania of the antagonists as a literal break in the harmony of the universe. One doesn’t have to be a Jedi master to sense similar breaks. We have our own experiences of unity and separateness on a daily basis. On the beach, in the woods, during worship, listening to or making music, we feel connected and at peace. In contrast, in ugly environments or in “ugly” moments, such as during an argument, a period of depression or mourning, or a mean act, we feel painfully isolated. If we are wise, we realize that these times of separation are transient, and we wait patiently for our awareness of unity to return.
Often in the Christian liturgy, we hear that God is the “ground in which we live and move and have our being.” This “ground” is the big picture, containing all time, space, biological processes, mentation. God holds it all. For a time, we have crystallized, separated out of the Solution, yet ultimately, we will be reabsorbed, returned to the Great Oneness.
Barbara Brown Taylor quotes Neils Bohr, who said: “we must be clear, when it comes to atoms, language can only be used as in poetry.” Taylor then applies the same comment to God: “When it comes to God, language can be used only as in poetry.” We always labor to express divinity—God is love, God is unity, God is perfection, God is eternity, God is synchronicity. No matter what formula we try, all words break down. They are fragments of the whole.
I wish we could relax into our human experience. We get very anxious about our limitations. We have limited time, limited choices, limited abilities. Yet if we considered that all this anxiety stems from our experience of having temporarily distilled out of our true ground, we might be at peace. This stress is just part of the condition, similar to sweat emerging from skin on a hot day. God is in our struggle, and even in our struggle, we remain in God.
