I have a very specific, very particular way of eating my Lucky Charms. First, you have to sort out the oats from the marshmallows. My spoon deftly slideshow and darts between the green clovers, yellow stars, red balloons and purple horseshoes to find every single sugary oat before I’m even allowed to touch the marshmallow confections. Then, and only then, when every oat is consumed and I have just a swirling bowl of charms do I allow myself the pleasure of the marshmallows. But they, too, must be properly sorted — roygbiv style. First the red, then the orange, then yellow and green and indigo and violet. Finally, I’m left with the milk, turned grey from the mixture of all those artificial colors melding together like a great primordial ooze. This is the proper and right way to eat Lucky Charms. And anyone who simply dives right in with no discretion between them is clearly a barbarian and does not deserve this morning magical deliciousness.
So perhaps you can imagine my shock to hear that it doesn’t really matter. The oats and the corn syrup, the yellow number five and the artificial flavors are all humming with the same thing. They’re all connected. They’re all thrumming with the rhythm of the universe.
“Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the [same] slow cosmic beat.” So says a recent article in The Atlantic. Just soak that in a minute. “Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person, is vibrating along to the [same] slow cosmic beat.” From the eggs you scramble to the milk you pour in your Lucky Charms every morning, it’s all connected by echoes of the big bang, the very first beginnings of the very first anything, a throbbing existence.
Scientists have discovered a “cosmic background” - a sort of thrumming beat that courses through every single thing in the universe.
They call them ripples — these gravitational waves that are “bending space and time.” Now this is way beyond my pay grade, and something I’ll never fully understand, but according to this article, these gravitational waves create minute distortions in space and time. Scientists have theorized about this for 100 years, and Einstein theorized the existence of this one thing he called space-time, but only eight years ago did we have the instruments needed to detect these distortions in space and time. And scientists have theorized that some of these distortions come all the way from The Big Bang itself. Think of it. Reverberations of the beginnings of time in your coffee cup, while you’re pumping gas, right now in the very pew upon which you sit. These are the result of the merging of countless galaxies. They’re colliding and exploding to form the ingredients in crickets and song birds, orange popsicles, and thunderstorms, decorative couch pillows, and 5 o’clock cocktails.
The article states, “If scientists could find and analyze this background, they’d have a direct look all the way back to the first slivers of time to the moment of creation.” Scientists, through studying these things called pulsars - which are “rapidly spinning cinders of once-massive stars” - have found that one change in a pulsar’s signal is linked to changes in others. These changes in signals are linked anomalies - connected to a distant hum of connected and “overlapping echoes of disturbances scattered across the universe.”
Through complicated machines and numbers and complex math my C- in high school calculus can’t even begin to fathom, scientists have found that “every gravitational wave…is humming through the constitution of the space you inhabit right now.” You - and everything around you - is literally vibrating with that same energy that began the universe. Some might even call that energy “God.” The article states, “Every proton and neutron in every atom from the tip of your shoes to the top of your head is shifting, shuttling, and vibrating in a collective purr within which the entire universe is implicated.”
In other words, in case I’ve lost you, we now have scientific proof that we - and everything around us - is “humming in tune to the entire universe.” We each contain a “signature” of everything that has ever been.
We have such strange illustrations of what the kingdom of heaven is like in our reading today. Terrible farmers, sketchy landowners, and bankrupting merchants don’t usually shout out “Kingdom of Heaven!” to me, but with all these mind blowing ideas about the connectedness of the cosmos swirling around in our heads, I guess it’s not as weird as I thought. I mean, they’re still pretty weird. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed - which, according to Pliny the Younger, was considered an invasive weed that would take over and destroy your crops. No farmer in their right mind would purposefully plant such a thing. It’d be like Jesus telling us to stop our war against the spotted lantern fly - just let them go, let them take over, for such is the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of heaven is like a little yeast added to wheat that consumes the sugars and infiltrates every grain and spreads through the whole loaf of bread. Yeast that isn’t even kosher for Passover. And what is some random guy doing trespassing in someone else’s field, and why doesn’t he just take the treasure, rather than re-hide it and buy the field. As if there’s some legit way to steal the kingdom of heaven. And what a terrible business plan for a merchant, who makes a living selling pearls, to take his entire life savings - everything he has - to buy the biggest one he can find? Sure. He’ll have a giant pearl, but nothing to eat, no roof over his head. And the kingdom of heaven is somehow like that? These are odd parables. Strange comparisons. Suggestions that the kingdom of heaven is nowhere we think and everywhere we look.
These parables invite us to see how everything is connected. God’s heartbeat is as ubiquitous as dandelions and mustard plants, yeast multiplying in the dough. The kingdom of heaven is everywhere - even in those places hidden in plain sight. The kingdom of heaven in the oats. The kingdom of heaven in the charms.
The kingdom of heaven in the bird with the broken wing.
The kingdom of heaven in the pothole.
The kingdom of heaven in the weeds and the wheat.
The kingdom of heaven in the black holes and the gravitational pulls and the misunderstandings and the confusion and the complicated math.
The kingdom of heaven in the silence of the woods and in the cacophony of the city streets.
The kingdom of heaven in the man with tattered clothes and the girl who sells her body.
The kingdom of heaven on the other side of the aisle, in the prison, in the 24 hour news cycle.
The kingdom of heaven in the poor and the sick and the imprisoned.
The kingdom of heaven in a man, hung on a cross, crying out to a God he cannot find.
And the kingdom of heaven is worth everything we have because it is everything we have. We throw our nets into the sea and catch fish of every kind because it’s all thrumming with the presence of God. And even the so-called “bad” will be thrown back into the fire - fiery balls of gas and heat that will photosynthesize into grapes and bananas and rainforests and bread. Fiery balls of gas and heat that will one day collapse in on themselves, form black holes that will collide and send reverberations throughout the universe and into our breakfast cereal.
Do you understand all this? Everything in the universe is connected by God’s heartbeat. It spreads and grows, connecting all things to their very beginnings - a treasure of what is new and what is old.
This changes everything and nothing. But what if we entered into our lives with the awareness that all is in all. That we all go right back to the Source. That nothing, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Would we change how we spend our lives? Would it change how much we tip the waitress or donate to the cause or spend time with the downtrodden? Would it change how we sit in traffic or reuse the plastic or conserve the resources we’ve been given? Would it change how we grab the box and the milk, how we take the bowl to the table, how we dip in our spoon, how we eat our breakfast cereal? Suddenly everything is sacred, every act is liturgy, every sight is a vestment. All things holy. All things thrumming with the presence of God. The kingdom of heaven is right here. Right now. If only we had eyes to see and ears to hear. Oh God, give us such eyes, grant us such ears.
Have you understood all this?
Heck no.
We have milk and eggs and Lucky Charms to pick up at the grocery on our way home.
Thanks be to God.
Amen
ReplyDeleteJenn, I love this! What a good writer you are!
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