Evelyn noticed the old leather tool bag underneath the drinking fountain as she tilted her water bottle to fill it. She glanced at her watch as water barely came out. "C'mo-o-on."
The squeaks of sneakers echoed through the green tile hallway as other students filed through the doorway next to her. She gave up with her water bottle only half-full and went in. She saw one of the girls from her Bible study go in ahead of her. Evelyn pretended not to notice her and sat near the front.
As she took her seat a man in dirty tan overalls and a white beard was pointing at something in a book open to the professor on his podium. Then the white bearded man turned around to the chalk board. He erased and replaced a small exponent on an equation. The white beard bounced as he asked the prof if he was good now. The prof replied with a nod and a smile, and the man left, reaching into his front pocket to pull out a little wrench.
After class, Evelyn had a question for the professor and it happened to be about the same equation on the board.
After he explained it, the Prof said, "Hey Evelyn. Are you alright? You are one of my brightest students but you've lost the light I saw in your eyes at the beginning of the semester."
"It's uh..." Evelyn considered how much to say, "It's kind of the typical college crisis of faith. Like all this science seems to prove false the God I grew up with." She looked up and he was curious to hear more. So she hesitantly continued, "Like right now everything seems to it can be explained away by a few laws of nature from physics and chemistry. And yet we Christians have talked ourselves into all these knots with Free Will vs. Predestination. Are we saved by works or by grace. And the extremely tangled concept we've made of the trinity. You'd think, for something so important it would be simple and perfect, like an equation. And all this here," She gestured to the room around her, just seems... so vapid and meaningless."
An intrigued smile grew on the professor's face. "I've ended up at atheism myself, Evelyn. But I've had to become comfortable with a few impossible questions in physics too. I mean, there are things in this world that can't quite be explained away by physics yet. Like, we cannot find the Dark Matter that seems to be adding gravity to our universe. Perhaps it could be something spiritual? And as far as is it Free Will or Predestination? Well, we've found light can be a particle and a wave, you know? Maybe both can be true." He shrugged. He looked up and waved at another leaving student. Then he said to her. "I don't know much about the Trintiy. But you do remind me of one Christian I know who is a true physicist. I'm sure you could talk to him."
"Oh," she replied. Light sparked in her eyes again for a moment. "Who's that?"
"Have you seen the white haired maintenance guy around here?" He saw her eyes get big, and nod. "We call him Santa, with his beard and all, and like... um..." He looked at the book on the lectern and lifted its cover. He pointed to the author, "A play on Santiago." He raised his eyebrows and smiled as if he wanted to say more about the cover. But he put the book cover back down as he continued, "He actually got pushed out of academia because he was teaching his ideas of how he was imagining the Christian God as being part of the explanation of unexplained physics issues. Hard to get funding for that, you know? And all the public institution's problems with religion. So..." He shrugged with a slight smile. "as your teacher, I'm not supposed to recommend him, but... he's around."
---
The next day Evelyn walked through the same halls towards her lab. Her light was dim again today. Her muslim roommate had again railed her with questions about the feasibility of the Trinity. Evelyn didn't want to leave her faith. But the Trinity just seemed so complicated. Shouldn't such important things about reality be simple? Jesus is God, or he isn't. Why didn't Jesus tell us plainly for something that seems so important.
She paused to fill up her water bottle and this time the fountain shot so hard it hit the wall. She managed to get some water in her bottle and turned. She stopped and almost ran into someone as she turned-- it was the white bearded man carrying his tool bag to fix the fountain.
He did a quick maneuver and just barely avoided hitting her. Something caught his eye and he stared down at her hand a little too long, as he gestured to the water fountain and mumbled something about, "Those who have, will be given more."
She continued down the hallway, her heart beating. I should say something, she thought. She glanced back one more time before she entered her lab. He happened to look up at her at just the same moment. But the last thing she saw was him looking over to the head of the department who was stepping from his doorway to show Santa his laptop, as if to ask him something.
---
She set down her things on her desk and saw the book "Out of The Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis." she had been carrying in the same hand as her water bottle. That must have been what he was looking at!
Two hours later when she left class she walked to the water fountain. It came out perfectly. The nozzle had been replaced with a larger customized metal piece so that stream could be wider and come out lower, while keeping the same pressure. Her bottle filled in a flash. But as she glanced up, she saw a new yellow post it pinned to the bulletin board above the fountain. It said,
"All the planets are imperfect and their orbits are oblong. Page, 115."
She didn't know what it meant until that night. She had gone to Bible study and the things they talked about were so fluffy logic or poorly researched. She could see how they were stuck in their conservative Baptist church's very specific version of theology. And had done her research and she knew how other denominations would poke holes through their theology. And even with everything she knew, the passage just seemed to provoke more questions in her. When she read the gospels, the concepts just weren't that simple. was so complicated. Shouldn't God be simple? "God, please help."
She told herself she deserved a half an hour break from studies to read her book. She found her heart beating as she read a certain paragraph. She read it again. Her eyes got large. She glanced down. It was page 115. On it C.S. Lewis mentions, almost off-handedly, how the planets were all different distances from each other, and their orbits were not perfect circles, like one might expect something created to be. It was not a mathematical model out there, each body was as unique and full of life as each complex human.
The next day she went straight to the physics building, though there were no classes that day. She traversed each of the hallways on the four narrow floors, searching in every door that was open. She had just about given up until on the top floor she looked to the very end. There before a large panoramic window there were three chairs. And in the middle one that looked straight out the window, she saw an old white head. This had to be him.
This time she boldly marched up to him and said, are you Santa?
He looked up at her and a big peaceful smile spread across his face. "And you must be Evelyn. Professor Isaac told me about a talented young woman who was asking questions of her faith."
She nodded. "He said they were beyond his depth."
She smiled back at him. His eyes were warm and kind. His whole attention was on her.
She said, "Are you on break? Or do you have any times I could maybe come talk to you?"
"Oh, little sister. They don't pay me." He gestured for her to sit down. "This is what I live for. My children have their own kids now, and my wife has passed on. I would love to help you with your questions."
"First, I got your message." She dropped her bag, sat down and leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "It does help a little bit to realize everything that is real is complex and asymmetric once you look deeper.
Santa pointed to his torso. "Look underneath this almost symmetric skin and you got a heart on the left, intestines that start on one side and end on the other, and yet..." he enjoyed the dramatic pause, "we're balanced perfectly laterally. So why might God not be that way."
She was loving this already. "I thought maybe God would be clean and perfect like physics equations are clean."
"Even they are not perfect. Newtonian physics described how an apple fell until we grew up and could see big enough for Einstein's relativity, or small enough for the crazy weird stuff with atomic physics. So what does that tell you about the Trinity. Pop quiz to see how you're growing."
"I'm going deeper with God then my current model allows for, which is demanding new understandings from me?"
He smiled and replied, "One might say that. And I'd add, like CS Lewis was trying to tell us, that everything is imperfect enough to be unique, and deserve personal attention."
"I mean, how does this lead to us 'deserving personal attention'?"
"You're right. I have not explained that. Why don't you think God appeared to us in a way that we could definitively say he's real?
She shrugged.
"Well, first, that's trick question because how else did any of this get here without a creator. I mean even the big bang had to be started by something. And second, the only reason I know God thinks we deserve personal attention is because the other way he showed himself to us is in the form of a human."
"What do you mean? How does this show he thinks we deserve personal attention."
"The fact that God came in the form of a human shows me his main aim with us is intimacy. He came as one of us. How could we feel as close to him as if he shares in all the same experiences as everyone in our species?"
She nodded as she thought. "Hmm. Okay, I think I could maybe buy that." She leaned back but looked back up at him with a quiet smile. Well, then how about the Trinity. Why is it so convoluted. Is he God or man? How come he says he's God's son, but also the son of man, both of which have several different meanings over time. He says as the word he was eternal with God, and elsewhere says he was the one begotten son." She threw up her hands. "It just seems so complicated and full of contradictions. It's about the most important thing in the universe, but it's not clear at all. It seems like the worst designed organization yet it's the best Christians have. All the other religions have avoided the conundrum by saying he was a human, or the first creation or pick your favorite other answer."
He nodded and looked around for some example. His eyes finally landed on her arm. "Am I wrong to say your right arm, right there, is about as real as anything around us?"
She considered it and then shook her head.
"Is it made of living matter?"
She said, "Yes."
Then he said, "Or is it made of inorganic matter, like down at the chemical level?"
She looked down, scrunched her forehead and she thought about it Santa replied. Also kind of inorganic matter at the level of amino acids and sodium and even cells are just made up of carbon and such. So it's both. Not as simple of an answer as you thought, right?"
She breathed in as she thought, and finally acquiesced a "No."
Let's try something that seems more obvious. The simple Christians could NEVER concieve of this brain game. You'd say it's pretty indisputable it's your right arm, right? One might think we could at least agree on that right?"
She hesitantly nodded.
He replied, "But let's look at a larger time scale. Before you were conceived, were those particles your arm at all? And all the blood in it right now could have been in your left arm two minutes ago. The skin and all the bones replenish every seven years or whatever." He leaned forward.
"What I'm trying to get at, is that the most real things in the universe are usually the most hard to pin a definition to. The hardest to fit into a distinct equation or definition. So why wouldn't God be the MOST difficult to explain or pin down. And his story and time frame is longer than anything else that exists. Just think of his story, I mean just the love story between God the Father, Jesus, and the Spirit. I mean, I have millions of moments that shaped my relationship with my wife. God had a billion more moments like that we don't know about. I imagine in some of them God served Jesus, in some Jesus served God. In some Jesus took a role most like the earth would say would be a son. Other times he is more like a son to mankind. The source of everything could very likely be the most complex, most difficult thing to describe. And I'd wager, that's probably the way it should be."
So the Trinity is supposed to be hard to understand?
Well, let's just look at physics. We have hundreds of complex equations to understand reality. Shouldn't the creator of our reality take more equations than that? And shouldn't we find it a joy to pursue discovering them? And if we did want to debate if Jesus is God or not, you'd first have to define what is God? If we mean the one who created the universe, we could say, well, maybe God made Jesus his foreman on His galactic job site. That doesn't mean he's God. And if we ask, is Jesus the same being as God, you could rightly ask if the billions of bacteria necessary for my body to thrive are the same as my body. I'm not sure if that's a black and white answer. If you say it's the same being if they have the same DNA, I doubt God has DNA. But even if he did, if I got a Kidney transplant from someone with a different DNA, I could still say it's part of my body. Pretty much part of the same being. I'm just trying to say that our simple words are far too small a box to even properly define the relationships between the 'father' the 'son' and the 'spirit' of the Trinity. Our language is built on symbols we see in this world. There are billions of planets and dozens of other dimensions in which our words may only describe a nanometer sized slice of reality. I'd say our complex descriptions of the Trinity are probably not developed enough."
"Here's a philosophy I've been dreaming up since my professor days. Might be why I quit."
"Professor said you were pushed out." She said.
He continued, "Another complex definition. Each person involved probably has a slightly different explanation based on their history with me and the institution."
Okay so here's the theory: I've been working on, and it flavors many of my answers to these questions. What if studying everything in this world is for the sake of knowing the more about God. What if learning about the cosmic beginning of the universe, the rise and fall of galaxies and the acts and characteristics of beings in any and all species, everything from the reliability of good dogs, to the devotion of ants to the commitment of penguins to their mates, what if they all are a reenactment, of sorts, on a stage, of the events in the history between God and Jesus."
She nodded, though a little skeptical. "Maybe, I guess. Good luck proving that one. But are my worries about my faith and my friends and what I'm going to get on my quiz tomorrow and everything I care about in my little life really just a theater production and I'm just the actor that has no idea I'm just a pawn?"
"I think the fact that you care about them is God showing you a tiny sliver of His heart for you. Plus..." a glimmer shone in his eye as a smile slowly grew on his face. "You know how our reality's particles are 99.9 percent space in between all our atoms. Did you know that all the millions of black holes were from stars which collapsed all their galaxy's mass into one tiny dense spot, it's finally compressed to so small that..." He waited for her to reach the conclusion.
"Yeah it's infinitely dense and stuff."
He let out his breath, "I'd wager it's about 99.99 percent more dense and what we see as meaningful here is just a breeze as compared to how solid and real and weighty we will be when we ascend to heaven, whether that's in a black hole or another way. I presume that compared to right here, in heaven, is when things will really matter."
She sat back and looked forward. "Well, I appreciate how you don't just have Bible answers."
"I like to dream about how God is so much bigger than what we think of him, and unlocking his mysteries can be done with a lot more than just a book."
"Universes." He smiled at her. "How long will you be here."
"About three more years."
Raw Spoon
September 26, 2024
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