The Presence of God

Second and Third Weeks in Ordinary Time

In ancient times the gods were thought to intervene in human affairs on a regular basis.  The Greeks even had a word for it: theophany, which is defined as “manifestation of the deity.”  In Christian culture theophany refers to an appearance of God, or a sign of His presence that is tangible to the senses.  There are many examples of theophanies in the Old Testament when God appeared, but not always in human form.  He spoke directly to prophets or through messengers referred to as angels, and sometimes in dreams.   Christians believe that God Himself became present to humanity in the person of Jesus.  During His lifetime and ministry, Jesus actions were often accompanied by visible, audible and tangible signs of God’s presence.  We read about these theophanies during Advent and the weeks following Easter.  Mary encountered the Angel Gabriel, Angels visited Joseph in his dreams, and the wise men, directing them to alter their return route.  When Jesus presented Himself to John the Baptist, God spoke aloud, announcing Jesus to be His beloved Son.  This coming Sunday we’ll read about Jesus preaching that “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” (Mark 1:15).  

When Pope John Paul II introduced the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, he chose five events of Jesus life which are all examples of God manifesting Himself in visible, audible and tangible ways in and through Jesus, including the Transfiguration, the wedding feast at Cana and when He instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper.    The Catholic Church teaches that the seven Sacraments are all visible signs of the invisible reality of God’s Presence. 

There’s another form of theophany I’d like to explore in this meditation, and I want to make clear at the outset that these thoughts are my own, and not necessarily the teaching of the Church.  Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the way God manifests Himself in and through human beings.   We are taught that our bodies are “temples of the Holy Spirit.”  We also believe that each and every human being possesses an inherent and inviolate dignity because we have been created in the image of God and because Jesus Himself became man, elevating humanity to the status of children of God.

Combining these beliefs with recent discoveries in the area of physics makes me wonder about the nature of our reality.  For centuries we’ve come to rely on the laws of math and physics to describe reality in ways that are predictable and repeatable.  However, new observations about quantum entanglement, gravitational fields and the phenomenon referred to by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance” reveals the possibility that all matter is stranger and less predictable than we have long thought.  These ideas infuriated Einstein and he spent the last 30 years of his life trying to disprove them, but over the past 50 years it has become increasingly apparent that quantum mechanics, as strange as it all seems, is more likely to be a better description of reality than either Newton or Einstein’s simpler, more logical models. 

Quite a few years ago I had one of those strange dreams in which something important seemed perfectly clear and understandable, but in the light of day I could not adequately describe it.  I dreamt that gravity was the key to understanding the meaning of life and the universe.   But when I tried to put my interpretation of the dream into words, it didn’t measure up to how clear it all seemed in the dream.   Of course, the subconscious mind communicates in images and symbols, rather than words, so I’ve been struggling to describe why gravity is so important.   For many years I thought of gravity as the attraction of objects to one another; the greater the mass of the object, the greater it’s gravitational pull, hence lower gravity on the moon, and zero gravity in outer space.  

It occurred to me that we are attracted to one another as a kind of reflection of the gravitational forces inherent to having bodies and souls.  However, Einstein redefined gravity as a field that is distorted by the mass of objects.  He used lots of images to describe his theories and the best one for describing a gravitational field is the idea of a very heavy bowling ball sitting in the center of a trampoline (the gravitational field).  The mass of the ball distorts the trampoline so that if an object passes nearby, it will literally fall toward the ball.  Using this model, Einstein came up with his theories about the nature of space.  Physicists used to think space was full of some strange substance they called ether, which served to transport light in waves, the way sound travels through air.   Einstein correctly deduced that light possessed mass (quanta) and was not merely energy traveling in waves through this mysterious ether, but had properties of both waves and particle.  

As progress was made in physics and the properties of subatomic particles became known, things began getting strange and unpredictable.   Photons, or packets of energy, that cause electrons change orbit around a neutron, have now been split and are considered “entangled,” resulting in behavior demonstrating that entangled photons travel faster than the speed of light, which Einstein and his contemporaries considered to be the limit of speed and a constant throughout the universe.    

So what, you may ask, does this have to do with our nature as human beings, or God’s presence in our lives?   It occurs to me that our very bodies are comprised of atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, and photons, which make up our mass.   String theory even suggests that these subatomic particles are themselves a form of energy.  This makes sense according to Einstein who famously discovered that matter and energy are interchangeable (E=mc2).   According to the commonly accepted “big bang” theory of the origin of the universe,  all matter was compressed into an infinitely dense singularity which then exploded, ejecting all the mass of the universe, setting time and space into motion.

 The matter that makes up the atoms of our body was present in that big bang.  The incredible complexity of our bodies defies the notion of entropy, and our ability to think, to love and to use reason in arriving at an awareness of all this, is a testament to intelligent design.   In all this, what seems to hold the stars, planets and our very bodies in place, despite the earth  spinning 1000 miles an hour, and traveling  around the sun thousands of times faster than that, even as our galaxy hurtles through space at breakneck speed, is ...(wait for it)… gravity, or more specifically, gravitational fields.   It is as if God Himself holds us together, keeping the electrons in our atoms from spinning off,  keeping our cells together,  and our bodies from floating off into space.   Perhaps the very matter that makes up our bodies has been derived from the Pure Energy of God Himself and the gravitational fields that make our existence possible are (metaphorically) the hands of God holding us in existence, causing us to be drawn to each other in love which is the essence of His nature.

Created in the image of God, we are imbued with love because God loves us, and by our nature we long for the infinity of His love, striving to imitate His love when we are at our best.   Perhaps we long for God and for love because down to the very fiber of our being, we are His creation, His beloved progeny, His energy, converted to mass and held in existence and in motion by the power of His infinite love.   And in His grand design we love one another because we sense the presence of God in each and every person.

Psalm 138 captures these ideas in the beautiful prose revealed to the Psalmist more than 2000 years ago:

“Where can I go, then, to take refuge from thy Spirit, to hide from Thy view?  Thine are my inmost thoughts.  Didst thou not form me in my mother’s womb?  I praise thee for my wondrous fashioning, for all the wonders of Thy creation.  This mortal frame has no mysteries for Thee, who didst contrive it in secret, devise its pattern, there in the dark recesses of the earth.”   (Translation by Ronald Knox)