Welcome back to the Palace in Time!
I realized this evening that if this was a REAL podcast, I’d have some jazzy intro music to welcome you all into my headspace, but since I am not that cool or that organized at this stage of my Professional Podcasting Career, I remembered back when our kids were little and we’d read Where the Wild Things Are together. When we arrived at the part where the wild rumpus would begin, the pages of dancing monsters had their own theme song (which happened to be my ringtone for the same stretch of time). Since you are voluntarily opting into this wild rumpus, I give you my new intro! Welcome back to the Palace in Time!
[ listen to the audio clip above for that delightful treat ]
“When I begin to feel overwhelmed by the state of the world, I find that it helps to right-size things a bit,” my friend Karen told our small group of faithful folks meeting online this week. She then played a short video presentation of Louie Giglio talking about God and our position in the universe. He does what he can to help his audience try to grasp the vastness of the universe.
Here we are, he said, an arrow pointing at a speck of light on the edge of a shining spiral in the middle of a black backdrop dotted by distant stars. One among billions of stars, in just this one galaxy alone.
I stared at the image of our galaxy, so stunning in its mathematical precision. It resembles the Fibonacci spiral, though it isn’t a true golden spiral.
If you aren’t familiar with my pal, Fibonacci, he was a 12th century Italian mathematician, star of the Middle Ages when it came to number crunching. He’s credited with a string of numbers we know as the Fibonacci sequence, a sequence of numbers that goes on forever. Each subsequent number in the sequence is the sum of the two numbers that precede it. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34… you get the idea. As the sequence expands, it forms the golden spiral:
Pretty, right?
Louie Giglio positioned us—our solar system anyway—in an outer-ish edge of our galaxy, in some outer-ish edge of the known universe, populated with somewhere around 8 billion other stars.
And then he zoomed in to our teensy little planet, filled with seven billion teensy little people alive right now, feeling like we’re each individually the center of the universe, but of course we’re not.
In the vast landscape of what we know about our universe, it’s hard not to feel small. We are small.
But smallness does not mean insignificance.
I believe this, because the watermark1 of the One who holds all things together appears everywhere in creation, from the stellar to the cellular.
The golden spiral is embedded in the fossils formed in the crust of a long forgotten ocean.
It is washed onto beaches across every continent.
It spins in both directions in the center of a sunflower.
It unfolds through the scales of pinecones.
It’s even found on every face.
Down to our very DNA.
Every piece of matter matters. It is stamped by the creator, I made this, and this, and this, fruitfully and fantastically multiplying all of creation from its very beginning to its current unfolding with the intricate, elegant music of mathematics, laws of physics, pool of not really that many elements, spinning and expanding and whirling in delight so that we get all this.
We get to be a part of all this, for this brief wink in the span of time. And it is very good. Perhaps with a little right sizing, I can mimic that same beauty and joy, join in the dance of creation, and do a little good work on this speck of dust I inhabit here in this unfathomably interconnected universe. Significantly insignificant.
I imagine in those brief milliseconds when the universe was first formed it unfolded from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 5 and on and on, unfurling in this ever widening spiral. I don’t know if that is at all physically or mathematically accurate, but wouldn’t it be just beautiful if it were so?
Because we know in those brief milliseconds when you were first formed in your mother’s womb, you began as a single cell, then split from one into two, then four, then eight, then 16, splitting and dividing and multiplying from something singular and simple into you, who hold in your face and hands and fingers and DNA imprints of the Fibonacci sequence, a reflection of the entire universe.
Significantly insignificant.
“Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson
“In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1
“For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.” Colossians 1:16
“You created every part of me; you put me together in my mother’s womb. I will praise you because I have been remarkably and wondrously made.” Psalm 139:13-14
I Just Finished Reading…
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, and his main character happens to be a retired math teacher. I don’t know for a fact but I’m pretty darn sure that Matt Haig has had some kind of a mystical experience, because La Presencia sure seems like a force for good that pulls back the veil on all of the seemingly mundane experiences in our lives to reveal the Really Real underneath, and he’s definitely gotta be geeking out on Fibonacci like me. At least a little bit. I loved The Midnight Library by Matt Haig equally and look forward to reading more of Haig’s work.
Oh, hi there, Holy Spirit, how fun it is to be swept up in your movement!
Something must be in the air this week because about an hour after I finished writing this, I received James K.A. Smith’s latest Substack, and I just want to say that I’m so with you, J.
He writes:
“I don’t know what it is about my wiring, my personality, or my history, but this elasticity of experience between singularity and universality has long fascinated me. You watch a thousand people skitter by on a New York City sidewalk and they are a mass of humanity, a blob of generality, tiny dots in a pointillist painting that is the human race across time. But if you could zoom in on any one of them and then somehow plumb the depths of their consciousness you would be visiting an unknown galaxy never seen before.”
I frickin’ loved that, partly because just this morning I said to some friends, we’re literally in this unimaginably vast galaxy and simultaneously surrounded by eight billion other galaxies walking around us every single day. (And let’s not even forget the rest of the planet’s inhabitants!)
I hope you’ll keep reading what he had to write, because it is beautiful. I want to say “and so much lovelier than my own mutterings,” but comparison is the thief of joy, so instead, I am relishing in the thrill of having picked up the same aroma of the Spirit James K.A. Smith sniffed floating on the breeze this week. It is good to be part of the collective Consciousness, “every soul a cosmos; every other infinite.”
I was telling my son, Elvis, about the Fibonacci spiral, how it’s like God stamped “I made this, I made this, I made this” on everything, and he said, “It’s like God’s watermark,” and my soul cried out “YES” and my heart did a little jig and my mind savored the word and my eyes brimmed over because this one, it’s so good when I get to see him, so credit given where credit is due.
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