Reverence for Weird Things

I always wanted to be a Christian. My friend Carolyn went to church where if you were well behaved you got marshmallows and the love of Jesus, and if you were badly behaved you only got the love of Jesus. I wanted to go, but I was pretty sure that we weren't church people in my family. Church families always started meals by telling Jesus about all the things they were grateful for. My family started meals by arguing about whose turn it was to do the dishes.

Also, my family celebrated Santa-Clause-Christmas instead of Jesus-Christmas, and I’m pretty sure if you believed in God you celebrated Jesus-Christmas.

And we believed in Evolution.  You had to believe either in God or Evolution.  That’s how it worked.  There were two big guys with white beards named Darwin and God.  If you chose the Darwin one, you believed about monkeys and the universe being really old, and if you chose the God one you believed about a garden called Eden and you said grace and went to church.

Eventually, I worked up the guts to ask my mom if there was a God. I found her in the kitchen (my mom, not God) and I asked her The Big Question. She stopped what she was doing and stared into space really hard, like she was focussing on the question with her whole mind. She wasn’t—it turned out she was trying to convert the butter her recipe called for from grams to ounces. I asked her a second time, and she said she was baking and not to bother her because did I want pie or not? Then she said to go ask my dad because he loves pointless questions with no answer.

So I asked my dad, and he said that he didn't believe in God in the way Carolyn did, but that he wanted to show me something. He wrote on a piece of paper "e to the power of pi times I equals zero". He said it was math.

It wasn’t math. The zero and the equals were, but “e” is language arts. So is “I”, which dad said stood for “imaginary numbers” which is clearly a mistake because if there’s one place you are not supposed to use your imagination, it’s math class. The squiggle, he said was a drawing of a pie, but it looked nothing like a pie, which is remarkable because how hard is it to draw pie? It’s a circle.

I told dad to make an effort.

Dad told me that some day, I would grow up, and I would take advanced mathematics, and I would learn to understand this equation. And I did grow up, and I did take advanced mathematics, and I still have no idea what that equation means. But I do know this.

I know that physics looked like God to my father. That it made him a part of something so huge and so elegant that it is a miracle it even exists. It’s a miracle that we get to understand even the tiny sliver that we understand. And it’s a miracle that we get to use math and science to take that understanding and join together to travel through space and build bridges and save lives. It’s a miracle how science allows us to be a part of a journey of understanding that reaches deep into history and far into the future.

We think of science and religion as in opposition to each other. Whenever people talk like that, I think of my dad and the expression on his face as he drew that incomprehensible set of squiggles on the page, and handed it to me with all the reverence of a man handling scripture.

That incomprehensible drawing that to him was the shadow of God, cast across the page so that parts of it could be seen by humans.

(This is a great reading to lead into a response time… ask people what makes their faces light up with that kind of reverence, and you’ll get amazing stories. This reading comes with full permission to use, edit, distribute etc and was written by Liz James)