A Little "Cosmological Mystery"

If you're an avid Scientific American reader like me, you may have stumbled across the recent article (reprinted from Nature) about an experiment that actually had scientists bringing a bit of gas below absolute zero.  At first glance, one might think this absolute rubbish--or as the article itself says--"It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery."  The "cosmological mystery" this technique may or may not help solve is the question of "dark energy" and the exciting new idea (though nowhere near ready to be a real hypothesis yet) of the scientists in question is something like this, "Matter acts quite a bit differently than you would ever expect in negative-Kelvin temperatures, if matter somehow is under the same conditions, maybe it just acts differently than we expected and dark energy really just is normal energy under some incredibly unexpected conditions . . . ."
    I liked that idea, and not just because it satisfies the part of me that wants to slash the imagination of science down to size with Occam's Razor, though it does do that.  And not also because it puts a "face" on dark energy for me--makes it look like something more than a place-holding name for a phenomenon for which scientists have observed, but in reality haven't come remotely close to cracking.  Granted the connection between negative-Kelvin gas and dark energy is probably just a clever connection in spe but not in re, but I like clever connections, so why don't we run with this clever connection for a moment or two?
      When I read about Supersymmtery "failing" a few months ago, I was strangely pleased about it.  It was a nice vindication of the fact that at its best science seeks the truth, and sometimes that means finding out that the thing you've been searching for probably doesn't exist.  It's still possible that it's too soon to tell about Supersymmetry.  But the evidence is mounting that's she's a goner or Supersymmetry is going to look quite different than most expected.
    I have some affection for the unexpected, and perhaps the connection between both of these articles is the reality of science stumbling while breaking ground on new frontiers.  I don't mean that at all pejoratively--if you don't stumble while breaking new ground . . . well, I don't have a metaphor for it--you're either God or you're stumbling.  It's the most human enterprise, and stumbling (or "meandering" as one SciAm writer put it) toward truth is also the best human enterprise.
     In this case, the "stumbling" is made all the more interesting because the stumbling seems to end in resting against the firm foundation of some firmly established ideas.  In the case of the apparent failure of Supersymmetry, it comes on the heels of a most profound victory for the Standard Model.  Supersymmetry may have failed, but the Standard Model has, simply, worked.  It is not a grand unifying theory, but we're clearly getting quite a bit right here.  No dark matter yet, no singular theory of the fundamental forces, but we can account for the minute in a very detailed fashion.
       On the other hand, this new article on negative-Kelvin gas sparks some ideas--maybe (and it's such a maybe) dark energy really can be accounted for by the matter/energy in the universe that exists already.  Maybe there's no such thing as dark energy--or that it is the far side of the moon, the Janus-face of matter we're just not used to seeing--and there isn't anything else out there to be looking for.  Which doesn't mean there isn't anything left to discover, on the contrary, it means that we don't know what we do know quite so well as we thought.  If--and it's a huge hypothetical if--dark energy is just normal energy in an extreme state . . . it would mean that the answer to the question has been here the whole time, we just have yet to be able to even imagine the right questions.  It would be akin to another Einsteinian revolution: Newton (and co.) had a really great explanation for what we commonly observe in nature, but Einstein's crazy-complicated ideas that completely revolutionized our entire thinking about time, space, and light, was the right one.  What Newton did was remarkable, but what Einstein did was absolutely revolutionary on the cultural and psychological level--he rewrote the book on everything we thought we knew and could experience with the most common of senses.  For the scientific community, what we knew about the universe had already been problematized, and he found the solution in the place only genius thought to look.  But for everyone, he revolutionized the way we think about space and time and even "relativity".  For our purposes now, the reference is analogical: if dark energy is just energy, and not another "kind" of energy filled with exotic particles in far-flung corners of time and space, then we have no idea of what energy is capable.  We already know the energy contained in just an atom is remarkable--perhaps we have only glimpsed the beginning of the potential of matter/energy to do incredible things and simply to be incredible.
   In any case, I imagine we'll find out someday, and I imagine we'll do better than the current Wikipedia page on dark energy which makes me scowl a little because it sounds like science doing a "god-of-the-gaps" hypothesis as bad as the luminferous ether ever was.  Perhaps I'm supposed to be hearing, "We have no idea how to account for the disparity needed for the expanding universe model (when the universe is flat), and we're calling the potential solution for this problem "dark energy"?"  Being a Thomist and generally supportive of coherent metaphysical systems, I really don't like god-of-the-gaps hypotheses . . . but more on that in another article.

The Spirit of Martyrdom

        Is this a slender proof of the impotence of death, do you think? Or is it a slight indication 

        of the Savior's victory over it, when boys and young girls who are in Christ look beyond            

        this present life and train themselves to die? Every one is by nature afraid of death and 

        of bodily dissolution; the marvel of marvels is that he who is enfolded in the faith of the cross                 

        despises this natural fear and for the sake of the cross is no longer cowardly in face of it.

              ---Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ch. 5 "The Resurrection"

This post is written as something of a reflection on the killing of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida this past November.  After learning that the shooter was pleading self-defense, claiming that the teenagers were armed and that his life was in danger, although there is at the moment no evidence that this is the case, I began the principle parts of this reflection.  A few other elements of the killing also got my attention.  (1) The killer Michael Dunn was 46, well-employed, apparently a collector of guns, while the victim was a 17 year old.  (2) Michael Dunn was also white and the victim (and possibly his friends?) were black.  (3) Dunn fired 8 rounds total--there is no evidence of return fire from the alleged-armed victims.  (4)  Dunn was under the influence of some amount of alcohol, though whether enough to impair his reasoning is unclear. (5)  The shooting happened at night, in the dark.

I claim no particular insight or knowledge "about what really happened that night", but as an outsider, it is easy to imagine what could have happened, and what I suspect did happen, though I freely admit that my personal suspicions are not very valuable and do not really matter in this particular case.  But for the sake of my reflection, let us for the moment assume that my imaginative suspicions about "what really happened" is correct.  

I imagine the following:  I imagine that Dunn was slightly intoxicated--enough to make him suggestible, perhaps a bit sleepy, perhaps careless, perhaps more prone to anger because of whatever amount of alcohol he consumed.  I imagine that he was in a strange place (in Jacksonville, not his home town), and going to a liquor store and came across a car full of black teenagers listening to loud (rap) music and that he became unduly apprehensive and perhaps even paranoid because of all these factors.  I imagine he thought he had a right and a duty to defend himself and use lethal force if necessary (because who carries a handgun who doesn't believe that's true?).  I imagine he had a nasty altercation that involved lots of yelling and anger and curses from both parties, and that in his anger and partly racially motivated fear, and in the dark in a strange place . . . I imagine that Dunn heard Jordan Davis and his friends threatening him, and took them literally, and that Dunn imagined that Davis had a gun and was going to try to kill him.  So Dunn does what is necessary of course, shoots and kills Davis, and pops off eight rounds total just to make sure he had vanquished his foe, whose status as a deadly enemy was almost entirely fabricated by emotion and imagination.  That is what I imagine.

But regardless as to what I imagine, what I see is fear: fear of death.  Fear of losing one's life to someone else.  Fear of being robbed of what one deserves, fear of dying in a worthless altercation (better make sure--I'll get him before he gets me!  I won't let them take me that way!)  I also see a judgment made--better to kill than to be killed.  Better to protect one's own.  Better to exercise one's power where one can and fight for one's rights.  Better to be a killer than a coward or a fool.  I see the world's perspective on life and death.

What I suspect in Dunn, I've heard right out in other people in other ways: a self-protectiveness and devotion to self-love (incurvatus in se, perhaps) that chills me.  What chills me more is when I hear it in Christians, for it is the warning bell of a love of God and neighbor that has grown cold.  I hear it in the obnoxious birth-certificate "controversy" with Obama.  People absurdly hate him both for his liberal policies and accuse him of being a Muslim at the same time--don't they know that if he were a Muslim fundamentalist, he would not be a liberal in any sense?  But they are so ignorant that all they can do is fuse ignorant fear with ignorant fear--they have the now socially incorrect fear of black people and the socially ambiguous fear of fundamentalist Islam--and the masses to which this fear appeals know next to nothing about these things and no one who is either black or Muslim.  Thus, they join them both together into one great fear.

I hear it in the fearful bigoted speech of people who are "afraid" of black people or more often now, "afraid" of people from the Middle East.  I imagine if I lived in a different part of the United States, I would also hear about "immigrants", but thankfully I don't hear about that.  But the fact of the matter is, if I am afraid of someone else and have not conquered that fear with love and courage, I am going to treat someone or a class of people very badly.  History bears that out, though I am not presently going to prove my case by history.

What most of these small, fearful bigoted people (and heavens, perhaps I am one of them at times?!) have in common is that they want security in life: they want to secure what is theirs, secure what they have.  They want to secure their rights, their protection, their prosperity, their well-being before "those people" take it away.  What a miser or a miserably selfish person seeks to pursue for herself alone, a bigot pursues for "us" and "ours".  A selfish person only loves himself enough to act, a bigot has got far enough in love of neighbor to love their nearest kin alone.  A selfish person will sacrifice for no one but herself, but a bigot will sacrifice for his kind and not for what is not perceived to be his kind.  Thus, a very imperfect love has the capacity for terrible vice and sometimes terrible evil.  

My family particularly is prone to "tribalism"--they love their own and extend to their own every grace, courtesy, kindness, generosity--but little of this can be seen outside the family unit.  In fact, given the charity shown to insiders, it is really shocking to see how "outsiders" are treated.  It is rarely natural for us to extend this self-giving, other-preferring  love to the full extent to which Christ meant for it to be extended.  And by chance we learn to love all our neighbors, all the kindreds of the earth very well for Christ's sake, noticing and taking note and regard for his likeness in them all . . . Jesus has still asked from us a step further: we also must love our enemies.  It is this love that Christ exemplifies most fully in the Gospel--he loves those who betray him and those who put him to death.  Having loved his own, he loves them to the end, even if still they walk away from him or stab him in the back for 30 pieces of silver, or personally see to it that he dies in shame on a tree in agony as a criminal.

   

But back to bigotry.  It is this preference for the things that belong to "us" and "ours", and especially the security that we feel we are owed or entitled to by life or by the government or by the moral law or by whatever justification we seek and find that helps us justify some of our least Christ-like behaviors.  Because security under the perception of threat from a group that is "other" will make people do all sorts of crazy things that they ought not do.  It is the combination of "threat" and "other" ("not-me") that lets either a lone person or a nation think about preemptive strikes and "getting him before he gets me".  And the conviction that I (or we) deserve my own life and security is what makes self-defense necessary.  The one who deserves his life and his rights naturally feels that he must cling to it, and that it is only right to defend it.  If one is so thoughtlessly devoted to oneself and one's own good and one's own deserts and consumed with oneself, how is one to put one's own self aside to love one's neighbor, or more importantly, one's enemy? 

The Christian has been made free from self-defense.  We are not required to defend ourselves.  My life was once given to me in Creation by a gift.  Robbed from me by an enemy, and restored to me by a Friend.  But in restoring my life to me, my Friend did it in such a way that I need never cling to it again.  Jesus gives us Life Eternal that cannot be taken from us by anything or anyone, and thus we are freed to hold on to our own lives very lightly.  I don't have to cling to my life and protect my rights, because my true life is hidden with Christ on high and will one day be revealed in splendor.  What we see now isn't everything that is to be seen.

Tertullian once said that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.  It is my prayer that the spirit of the martyrs would fill the Church, so that it would be very obvious that we don't need to cling to our lives and our security like the world and our flesh tell us we must.  Athanasius was once able to use the lives of the martyrs as proof that Christ's Resurrection had truly taken place, and that the power of death had truly been beaten.  The saints, the people in the Church, were martyred so often and showed such disdain for dying (which normal people are afraid of) the only logical explanation, says Athanasius, is that something has truly changed.  That with Christ there is something truly different, and that difference is freedom from fear of death and being set free to truly live.  Athanasius (contra mundum!) writes,

        Even so, if anyone still doubts the conquest of death, after so many proofs and so many martyrdoms in      

        Christ and such daily scorn of death by His truest servants, he certainly does well to marvel at so great 

        a thing, but he must not be obstinate in unbelief and disregard of plain facts. No, he must be like the 

        man who wants to prove the property of the asbestos, and like him who enters the conqueror's 

        dominions to see the tyrant bound. He must embrace the faith of Christ, this disbeliever in the conquest

        of death, and come to His teaching. Then he will see how impotent death is and how completely 

        conquered. Indeed, there have been many former unbelievers and deriders who, after they became 

        believers, so scorned death as even themselves to become martyrs for Christ's sake.

        

        (29) If, then, it is by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ that death is trampled underfoot, it is 

        clear that it is Christ Himself and none other Who is the Archvictor over death and has robbed it of its 

        power. Death used to be strong and terrible, but now, since the sojourn of the Savior and the death and 

        resurrection of His body, it is despised; and obviously it is by the very Christ Who mounted on the 

        cross that it has been destroyed and vanquished finally. When the sun rises after the night and the whole 

        world is lit up by it, nobody doubts that it is the sun which has thus shed its light everywhere and driven 

        away the dark. Equally clear is it, since this utter scorning and trampling down of death has ensued

        upon the Savior's manifestation in the body and His death on the cross, that it is He Himself

        Who brought death to nought and daily raises monuments to His victory in His own disciples . . . .

        If you see with your own eyes men and women and children, even, thus welcoming death for the sake 
        of Christ's religion, how can you be so utterly silly and incredulous and maimed in your mind as not to 

        realize that Christ, to Whom these all bear witness, Himself gives the victory to each, making death

        completely powerless for those who hold His faith and bear the sign of the cross? No one in his senses 

        doubts that a snake is dead when he sees it trampled underfoot, especially when he knows how savage      
        it used to be; nor, if he sees boys making fun of a lion, does he doubt that the brute is either dead or 

        completely bereft of strength. These things can be seen with our own eyes, and it is the same with the 

        conquest of death. Doubt no longer, then, when you see death mocked and scorned by those who 

        believe in Christ, that by Christ death was destroyed, and the corruption that goes with it resolved and 

        brought to end.

I pray, not for the martyrdom of blood (though this happens today so much in our Church, albeit not so much in the United States), but for the "white martyrdom", the bloodless martyrdom, that the monastics went out in the desert to seek.  That the people of God would be joined to Christ in a death like his, so that they also may join in his Resurrection and shine the light of God's glory and freedom and power over the world and over death.  May our freedom and our life in Christ be so powerful that death and the world and the flesh are seen to be scorned and mocked by our people.  May the light of the glory of God shine in our faces as we are changed into the likeness of Christ's own face and image.

"The Mystery of Iniquity" a Reflection on the Events on December 14th, 2012

After reading a little bit about the Connecticut shooting today and trying to find a way to pray about it, I ran across this article in The Onion: "Fuck Everything, Nation Reports". As long as profanity isn't something that gets you terribly upset, I think it is worth the read. One of the most interesting parts of the article to me is the following excerpt:

"“Seriously, what the hell is this? What’s even going on anymore? Why do things like this keep happening?”
Continued McEllis, before covering her face with her hands, “Why?”
Despairing sources confirmed that the gunman, armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle—a fucking combat rifle, Jesus—walked into a classroom full of goddamned children where his mother was a teacher and, good God, if this is what the world is becoming, then how about we just pack it in and fucking give up, because this is no way to live.
I mean, honestly, all 315 million Americans confirmed."

I can't really blame anyone for feeling this way. When I was driving to work today, I heard about the shooting in Connecticut about the same time as I heard about another shooting in Florida (which, as one might expect, ended up being interracial again) . . . but I didn't hear any of the details of the former case. It wasn't until I talked with my mom after dinner this evening that she told me 20 children had died. 20 children. And this after the gunman killed his own mother at her house, and then went off to her workplace to kill her coworkers and students.

I don't know why any of this happened. Frankly, even if we ever are to learn exactly why Adam Lanza did any of those things, it won't really matter. God knows, I am sure, but I don't think knowledge will really mitigate any of the horror of what happened. Either he was insane, or he was demon-possessed, or he was evil of his own choosing. Does it really matter which one? When the facts of the matter are that the world really is this broken by evil and malice and madness, and things like this keep happening in relatively prosperous America as they have always happened in other times and places . . . does it matter why so and so did thus and such? I don't think so. And I doubt it is a real comfort to the families of the victims for them to know why. They don't care why right now--they just want their children back.

This is why Paul described the prevalent forces of evil in the world as the "mystery of iniquity" and this is why God included the book of Job in the Canon of Scripture. We rarely know why, the "reasons why" are themselves irrational and full of hate, malice, envy, rage that make no sense. The "why" does not help us. Wisdom has its limits. Sometimes you just need miracle.

Discovering the roots of evil is no real comfort to us. Even if we, as readers of Job and readers of the story of Scripture and readers of the story of the history of the world that unfolds before us, even if we readers know as God knows that there is a supernatural Enemy behind all of these things that eggs on evil in the world, that pursues us with malice, that is ever and always out to destroy us . . . well, that's not a comfort, is it? It might help us a little with perspective, but if anything, that knowledge that tempt us to despair--as Theoden King said in The Two Towers, "So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?"

The answer for Theoden was "get rescued out of it". He and all his men would have died if it weren't for Gandalf and the aide that he brought with it. And the real lesson of the book of Job is that people absolutely need divine intervention. Although it did not appear so to Job, God had actually put a limit on the activities of the accuser. In this case, he would not let the enemy destroy Job's life--and apparently God would not let the enemy touch Job's wife either. Finally, in the end, God personally appears to Job, speaks to him, and overturns all the evil that Job had suffered with blessing: "And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job . . . and after this Job lived 140 years, and Job died, an old man, full of days."

I guess it would have taken at least 50 years to get over the tragic loss of his first family. Perhaps 140 years of blessing would have healed the devastation of Job's heart. 140 years of the Lord's love and favor and comfort lavished upon him.

I imagine the griefs I have suffered in my own life have been very small. I have never lost anyone close to me through death, much less a tragic death. I have loved a lot of different people and it seems like I am forever having to let go of someone or grieving the grief of a friend or loved one lost to this or that thing, though physical death has yet to be the cause. Love hurts and loving people who are bent on destroying themselves hurts, but I imagine death hurts more. I have however, got to watch and listen a little bit to people who have suffered. I have listened to some of my African brothers talk about the horrible losses endured in war-torn homelands. I have listened to the stories of women in prison who have lost everything and possess nothing except little shreds of hope in God. I have probably seen God more clearly present in jail and among the addicted than anywhere except the community gathered by and united in the Eucharistic meal and worship. God is with those who suffer and those who have nothing except hope in him.

The Onion said, "fuck everything" because, it isn't "as if the same fucking bullshit isn't going to keep happening again and again and fucking again before people finally decide it's time to change the way we live, so what's the point? What the hell is the goddamned point?" The authors concluded the article by saying that they had nothing to say. The latter is certainly appropriate: Job's comforters could have improved some by remaining silent, as difficult as that is to do. But I say, though not to those whose own loss it was, but to all the rest of us who look on their grief and try a little bit to grieve with them. Instead of "fuck everything", how about, "Love one another, as Christ has loved you." We can't stop all the madness right now. We don't have the power. But God does, and he has promised that he will bring an end to this madness. He will bring an end to this madness and then there will be such joy undiminished by sorrow for endless ages upon endless ages that we won't remember such horrible things as this.

I always used to cringe a little at the end of Job because I thought it was a fairy-tale ending stuck on the end of a tragic story. It only made sense to me as a picture of what the Gospel story is all about. It only made sense if Job was a little story that foreshadowed the real story about Jesus defeating death, ushering in the Resurrected life, and promising his children that he would be coming back for them, and coming back to do away with evil once and for all. And then telling those same children to tell this message to all the world, and to prove that this message is true by how they loved. We do need to change the way we live . . . but not because we have power in ourselves to overturn all the evil in the world--but rather that our witness is powerful to the One who does have the power to overturn all the evil in the world. (If we had the power to tackle evil by ourselves, we would have beaten it by now.) Our Gospel is pretty useless without Jesus coming back to set things right once and for all. He is often about the business of setting right smaller things, but one day he will come and set to right all things.

And what do we say to the people who are intimately suffering such horrible things as the shooting in Connecticut right now? Probably, you say nothing. Probably, you remain silent and love them in your presence and not by your speech. Probably you do everything in your power to love them by your service and by your presence and by your devotion to them and you let God speak to them. Probably you just suffer alongside them and maybe a day will come down the road where they will want to hear something, where they will want hope and encouragement, and want to hear a story about Somebody who loved them enough to taste and suffer death so that it might be sanctified for us, and one day banished altogether, and who is coming back as a Conquering King to set things right forever.  But that day, the day to speak, is not always today.

Star Trek: "A Piece of the Action"

I love Star Trek for all sorts of reasons.  One day I'll write a post about what is probably my most favorite episode of the entire Trek franchise, and why it's my favorite, but "A Piece of the Action" makes the cut as certainly being one of the most fun episodes ever.  Who doesn't want to see Kirk and Spock running about an extraterrestrial version of 1920s gangsta Chicago with tommy guns and fedoras?  And really rockin' the fedoras, too?  Who doesn't want to contemplate the deliciously absurd notion that descendants of a human colony might appropriate a 1990s history of 1920s Chicago mob life as a sort of biblical code of conduct? 

It doesn't really get much better than this.  Normally, I love Star Trek because it does such a good job communicating things like adventure and wonder and delight in what is beautiful and noble and good.  Most of the time, it also depicts characters who are adults with fairly advanced personal integrity, lots of self-respect, and a lot of love both for what they do and for other people.  It is a depiction of humanity's "golden-age" so to speak in which people are wise, intelligent, noble, and generous--the sort of people with whom you'd want to have adventures.  But other times, Star Trek is just fun.  And "A Piece of the Action" is one of those times.