After 13.8 billion years, the universe has only grown more complicated, interesting, and unified. It is the engine that can only run faster, the garden that blooms into the neighbors’ yards, the overflowing basket of fish and bread; it is the slowly widening door.
On Wednesday night in Silver Spring, Md., as part of his “Everything is Spiritual” tour, spiritual teacher, speaker, and author Rob Bell asked: Is the universe fundamentally headed toward carnage and destruction, or wholeness, life, and beauty?
His answer: Are you alive? If so, then it’s headed toward wholeness. And most exciting of all, you and I get to be a part of it.
Start with this: one “ineffable singularity,” the point that holds all matter and energy. From this bursts particles, then atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, animals, and now us. The universe has a habit of doing this, each layer comprised of at least the properties of the previous. Energies form between particles, and an atom is made. The energies of atoms sync, and a molecule is created.
Now imagine this: what miracles are being made right now, between us? What more complex and unified layer is forming? What mysterious, fragile, intricate relationships might we create? What grand new epiphenomenon, what Kingdom of God, what universal magic do we partake in when we learn to listen to each other, make space within ourselves for each other?
Using a triangular isosceles whiteboard, Bell tells the story of universal progress, with the world beginning at the tip of the triangle, and the future flooding forward. Melding the scientific and spiritual, he probes us to ponder the paradox of a world that is deepening in both complexity and unity.
The universe is made up of 96 percent dark matter and energy, swirling with complexity — black holes, empty spaces, bad dreams, failed marriages, unknown territory, broken bowls and bruised shins and loneliness. And yet — look! — everything is still churning along. And in a way that can only be explained in the gut, these alarming dark things are perhaps the only things that have the tendency of bringing people together into community.
As Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche writes, “In community life we discover our own deepest wound and learn to accept it. So our rebirth can begin. It is from this very wound that we are born.”
If we accept Jesus’ suggestion, that this is the Kingdom of God, and if we take Bell’s point seriously, that we are all in this together, that our dark matter doesn’t stop us from plummeting toward unity — then think how blessed we are.
Now imagine this: you are an “omnicentric reality,” a center of the universe, a grounded point from which whole cities will pour forth. You, with your shame and despair heavy in your arms, are the key to the universe’s next epiphenomenon.
Imagine that from you there will be birthed a new kind of community.
Imagine it, and then go live like it is true.
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