The physicists’ answer to the riddle of why the universe does not fly apart are WIMPs – weakly interacting massive particles – and the search for WIMPs is intensifying.  The identification and explanation of WIMPS will open up extraordinary new avenues of knowledge.  Each step forward in the search for dark matter presents further problems with the Standard Model of the universe; it presents even deeper problems for conventional Christian explanations of the universe; fundamentalism is driven into a tighter corner and mainstream Christians are left to ponder where they might find God in the cosmos.

Preaching on the concept of predestination last autumn, I referred to Hermann Minkowkski, Albert Einstein’s mathematics professor.

Minkowski saw space and time as being not separate, but being one thing. He talked of them as being space-time, according to which says science writer Marcus Chown, “the Universe can be thought of as a vast map. All events—from the creation of the Universe in the Big Bang to your birth at a particular time and place on earth—are laid out on it, each with its unique space-time location . . . But the map picture poses a problem. If everything is laid out—preordained almost—there is no room for concepts of past, present and future”. Minkowski’s most famous pupil, that Swiss post office clerk who became know for the brilliance of his scientific thought and uniqueness of his hairstyle, wrote, “For us physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion”.

After the sermon, a scientist who sang in the choir talked of how religion and science ran on parallel lines, lines that should not converge; neither should tread on the ground of the other.

If the lines should not converge, neither should they diverge.  If the religious account of reality is at odds with the actual reality that people experience, then all but the hard-liners and eccentrics will eventually dismiss religion as no more than primitive superstition.  If Christian cosmology cannot come to terms with a universe of dark matter, and a string of other difficult concepts, then Christianity itself will eventually become as elusive as the WIMPs.

The principle of sub-atomic physics seemed simple; the sums with which the principle was explained were the sort where people do maths without numbers.  Einstein featured prominently, which was reassuring.

The ‘God Particle’ in the title of the lecture did not signify theological content; it was a reference to the Higgs boson, a particle underlying the others that has not yet identified.  Dr O’Raifeartaigh suggested that according to one apocryphal tradition, the term ‘God particle’ is a polite contraction of an exclamation by one physicist who asked, where is that Goddamn particle?”

At the heart of particle physics is an understanding of the universe fundamentally at variance with traditional church teaching; church teaching that persists despite the steady accumulation of evidence that makes the old dogmas intellectually untenable.

As recently as 2006, the Nigerian priest who is chaplain to the international community in the Church of Ireland Diocese of Dublin and Glendalough stood in a south Dublin church and declared, “God made the world in six days! Do not believe the scientists!”.  It was a declaration that caused the Emeritus Professor of Geology from Trinity College, Dublin, sat in the third row of the choir, to raise his eyebrows.  It was a declaration also that brought requests that the man be never invited to preach again.  Yet the Archbishop of Dublin allows such teaching to continue in his diocese, presumably an indication of tolerance towards creationism.

If Protestant fundamentalists on one side are far removed from the realities being revealed by the working of the Large Hadron Collider; they have plenty of counterparts in the Catholic community.  The only intellectually credible God is one who is outside of time and space and the only place for Heaven , if it is to exist, is similarly outside of the spacetime dimension we currently inhabit.  If we have lives beyond this one, then they are lives in which we have stepped into another dimension.  Yet all around the country at this time of the year, there are cemetery masses, prayers for the departed who are apparently in purgatory, wherever it may be.

Dr O’Raifeartaigh’s lecture did not allow for biblical literalism, nor for a medieval three-decker universe; it described the world as it is, not the world as the church would have it to be.  There are lyrics by the pop singer Paloma Faith that ask, “Do you want the truth or something beautiful?”  Maybe we like our beautiful schemes of things; we like singing ‘All things bright and beautiful’ declaring ‘The Lord God made them all’; we like our timeline where God stands at the end watching as everyone appears up through the ground.   Centuries of art have rested on our way of looking at things, perhaps we would be afraid of the truth.

At one time, I felt a certain proprietorial sense towards the Derryman.  In March 1989, I walked 110 miles in five days to travel from Gartan in Co Donegal to Movilla in Co Down, where a local tradition alleged he had studied under Finian.  Being honest, there was not much sense of a saintly presence along the way, more a sense of sore feet and aching knees.

Spending time as Rector of Larne from 1996 to 1999, I was always struck by the stained glass depiction of Columba by Wilhelmina Geddes.  He appeared as a tough, sinewy, muscular figure, one for whom the crossing from Ulster to the Scotland in a currach would have been a credible possibility.

With our children attending Saint Columba’s College in Dublin since 2001, occasional brushes with him have continued since.

Columba always seemed human.  His row with Finian had led to bloodshed and in disgrace he had left Ireland to go into exile on a remote Scottish island.  It was his ability to rebuild his life that seemed impressive; his capacity to make something out of nothing.

Only when attending a Saint Columba’s day service this year, did I discover that the whole history of Columba had been rewritten centuries ago.  The strong man of Geddes’ imagination had been turned into a plaster saint as long ago as 1532, in which year Manus O’Donnell’s life of Columba described the departure from Ireland thus:

Then steered they the boat through Loch Foyle to the place where the lake entereth into the great sea, that is called the Tonna Cenarma today. And it was not the folk only of his land that were heavy and sorrowful after Columcille, but the birds and the senseless creatures were sorrowful after him. And in token of this thing, the seagulls and the birds of Loch Foyle were pursuing on both sides of the boat, screaming and screeching for grief that Columcille was leaving Erin. And he understood that they were uttering speech of sorrow as he would understand it from human folk; and so great was his gentleness and his love for his land and the place of his birth that no greater was his sorrow in parting from her human folk than his sorrow in parting from the seagulls and the birds of Loch Foyle. So that he made this quatrain:

“The seagulls of Loch Foyle,
They are before me and in my wake;
In my coracle with me they come not ;
Alas, it is sad, our parting.”

Understanding animals? Gentleness?  This is Columba, not Dr Dolittle.  The medieval writers replace the man with a caricature and the church continues that tradition.

The appeal of Columba’s story lies in the possibility of redemption; in the possibility of faith changing a life; in the possibility of coming back from even the worst mistakes; reduce him to legends and traditions and talking to the birds and he is no more than a picture in a stained glass window, and not one by Wilhemina Geddes.

Monday, 3rd May

Another moment this evening that will go down in the memory for years to come.  On Thursday morning last, twenty-five members of the church travelled an hour to Kigali airport, to greet three of us: in their Sunday best, bearing bunches or orchids, and joining in impromptu singing.

Tonight, the adults amongst their number organised a farewell meal for us; there were speeches and laughter and a sense of being wanted.

Perhaps that is the strength of the African church, that sense that everyone matters.  The welcomes at the beginning of a service may take fifteen or twenty minutes and no occasion can pass without someone standing to say a few (or more!) words, but there is an inclusiveness, no-one is unimportant.

Standing to say ‘thank you’, there was an overwhelming sense of being amongst friends; we might need an interpreter to understand each other, but we could speak to each other with warmth and with deep affection.  The formal handshakes that would have marked the conclusion of an occasion in Ireland were replaced with hugs for many of those present.

If any church is near to what Jesus intended, it is this little community of people, with their daily attempts to serve the poor, and the joyful worship of those who gather not only on Sundays, but at 6 am each Tuesday and Saturday to sing and pray before going to their daily work.

What is it that they possess that makes their church different? It is a sense of community that makes their faith real and living.  Community is more than speaking to people in the neighbourhood, it is about expressing concern in tangible and material ways for people you might not even like, but that you love because that is what your faith is about. Community can be unattractive because it places obligations upon us, but without community we fail to  be the church.

Lesslie Newbigin once wrote:

It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought-and is seeking-to make explicit who He is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.

The people of Gahogo, without the privilege of formal theological education, come closer to Jesus’ intention than generations of prelates and academics.

Visiting the 1916 frontline, a cemetery was described as ‘communal’. It seemed an odd term; cemeteries by their nature are communal.  Explained in clearer language, it meant a long trench had been dug and the bodies of the fallen had been laid in without any separation.  The point was emphasised by the gravestones standing in a solid line, without space between them.  The remains of those named lay somewhere beneath the patch of soil, but the precise location could not be specified.

Even such a wide interpretation of identity and location was not sufficient for some of the remains that had once been part of a human being;  that had once been part of a  person who had lived with their own hopes and dreams; that had once thought and talked and moved.

The unknown remains were dealt with in succinct terms  At the top of the stone was inscribed, ‘A Soldier of the Great War’; further down, just three words, ‘Known Unto God’.

Listening to the descriptions of how German machine gun fire had cut down wave upon wave of soldiers; listening to how 100,000 soldiers had gone ‘over the top’ on 1st July 1916, of whom 60,000 became casualties, 20,000 of those dying; it was not convincing to suggest that God was somehow present in the process.

Words from Sebastian Faulks were remembered  Not words from Birdsong, the novel that graphically captures the reality of trench warfare, but lines from his World War II novel, Charlotte Gray. Levade, a Jewish character living in Nazi-occupied France, reflects on his own end:

“No child born knows the world he is entering, and at the moment of his birth he is a stranger to his parents. When he dies, many years later, there may be regrets among those left behind that they never knew him better, but he is forgotten almost as soon as he dies because there is no time for others to puzzle out his life. After a few years he will be referred to once or twice by a grandchild, then by no one at all. Unknown at the moment of birth, unknown after death. This weight of solitude! A being unknown.

And yet, if I believe in God, I am known. On the tombs of the English soldiers, the ones too fragmented to have a name, I remember that they wrote ‘Known unto God’. By this they meant that here was a man, who did once have arms and legs and a father and a mother, but they could not find all the parts of him – least of all his name.

God will know me, even as I cannot know myself. If He created me, then He has lived with me. He knows the nature of my temptations and the manner of my failing. So I am not alone. I have for my companion the creator of the world.

At the hour of my death I would wish to be ‘known unto God’.”

If God is God at all, then he must know those who once possessed the random body parts that lay beneath this soil; and if God does not know them, then is he God at all?

“What is karma?” I asked.

“What goes around comes around”, one replied.

A belief in fairness in the cosmos; a belief that making the right choices would bring the right consequences; a belief in the power of freewill.

Reading Franz Kafka’s The Trial, there is an assertion that a choice had been possible; an oblique choice, but if K. had acted differently, then things might have turned out differently,

I was just caught unawares, that’s what happened.  If I had got up as soon as I was awake without letting myself get confused because Anna wasn’t there, if I’d got up and paid no regard to anyone who might have been in my way and come straight to you, if I’d done something like having my breakfast in the kitchen as an exception, asked you to bring my clothes from my room, in short, if I had behaved sensibly then nothing more would have happened, everything that was waiting to happen would have been stifled.  People are so often unprepared”.

Perhaps that is the problem; perhaps, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, if poor Vladimir and Estragon and been better prepared, they would not have been trapped in an interminable inertia

Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?
(Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.) He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said?

Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern escape the inertia of their literary forebears, but they still end up dead.  They are just part of a play where the lines have been written in advance; where the moment when the script could have been rejected passed before they were aware of it.

Our  names  shouted  in  a certain  dawn  …  a  message  …  a summons… there must have been  a moment,  at the beginning, where we could have said-no. But somehow we missed it.

In lines omitted from The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien expresses a sense of the circularity of experience; a belief that Hell itself was just the absurdity of life lived again and again and again:

Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable

Anyone sane rejects the fatalism of such fictional lines; we choose our own lives, write our own lines; live our own dramas.  We do not believe ourselves trapped, yet, for Anglicans, church doctrine commits us to the belief that there is nothing we can do to change the ending of the play; church doctrine states that the closing scene is predestined.  Article XVII of the Anglican Thirty Nine Articles of Religion states:

As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.

“A most dangerous downfall”; K, Vladimir and Estragon, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Joe would concur.  But if it’s true; then the class are wrong and life is unjust and bleak.

Looking in the archive, the very last blogspot post was a piece of spiritual reflection.

“Contemplative prayer at church this evening reflected on the words, “I have carved your name on the palm of my hand”, reassuring lines that speak of our nearness to God and God’s nearness to us.

The words have been the inspiration for children’s talks I have done on at least half a dozen occasions. The idea of writing on your hand so that you don’t forget something is immediate and concrete for children (as well as being in defiance of the teacher who would tell you not to write on your hand!).

Barbara, who led our contemplation, invited us to ponder the words, to make them our own. The suggestion of carving evoked pictures in my mind of richly grained wood being shaped by a mallet and chisel.

The picture took shape of a mallet coming down again and again on the chisel. The chisel had been struck so many times that the wood at the top of the handle was splayed out over the ferrule around the end. As I watched the mallet striking the chisel, the grained wood became a human hand and the chisel became a square black crude nail driven repeatedly into the hand. The names that had been carved were driven deep into blood.

It was an alarming image, the safe and reassuring picture being replaced by one of violent cruelty. This was not a picture that I could have used in a children’s talk, but it was a picture of the profound level of God’s love for us in Jesus, the names being driven into his hand being people for whom he died.

I left the church quietly to ponder a disturbing reflection, feeling uneasy that a gentle and domesticated picture of our relationship with God could shift in my mind to something altogether more challenging, and as I walked the words of one of Stuart Townend’s most beautiful of modern hymns drifted into my mind.

How deep the Father’s love for us,
how vast beyond all measure,
that he should give his only Son
to make a wretch his treasure!
How great the pain of searing loss:
the Father turns his face away
as wounds which mar the chosen one
bring many sons to glory!

Behold the man upon a cross,
my sin upon his shoulders;
ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
call out among the scoffers.
It was my sin that held him there
until it was accomplished,
his dying breath has brought me life—
I know that it is finished.

I will not boast in anything,
no gifts, no power, no wisdom;
but I will boast in Jesus Christ,
his death and resurrection.
Why should I gain from his reward?
I cannot give an answer;
but this I know with all my heart,
his wounds have paid my ransom”.

I’ve gone much more grey in the three years since, but Townend’s words are as fresh as ever.

Isn’t that what it was about?  Aren’t there different sorts of time?

A neighbour in the North, in the 1990s, sat drinking a mug of tea on his 80th birthday, “Do you know, Ian? if I had known I was going to live to 80, I would probably have lived my life in a very different way”.  It would have been intrusive to have asked what he might have done differently; it seemed unclear whether the statement was a statement of regret or just a detached philosophical comment.  Having served through the Second World War, his life would have been lived through those years with an intensity unknown in peacetime; was he saying that had he known he would live more than fifty years beyond the end of the war, then his life would have been more relaxed, more easy going?  How many people are there who live lives of ease who reach a particular point and say, “I wished I had done more with those years”.

The same chronological sequence, the same period of years through which two different people live may seem very different lengths time.   Chronologically, there is no doubt that the time period has been identical, but qualitatively the periods may seem hugely different.  There can be those “Twelfth of Never” moments, occupying perhaps only a short time, perhaps only days, that fill the whole landscape when the years are viewed in retrospect.  A single moment can change the nature of a year, of a decade even.

There are times inside of time and times outside of time.  The times inside of time are always brief.

There is a moment in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings when it emerges that Elrond, the elven king, is six thousand years and, if at heart you are still a fifteen year old, you think, ‘Imagine living six thousand years!”  But even elves only achieve immortality by sailing West to the Grey Havens; and what is six thousand years in the big scheme of things?  Chronological times are brief, finite.  Even if you understood Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and were able to travel at the speed of light, so slowing down the passing of time, you would still come to an end eventually.

It’s the times outside of time that last.  Reflecting on the word ‘everlasting’ in this evening’s contemplation at church, there was the realisation that the word points to the times beyond time; that human language can only hint at moments beyond.   Donny was right; it is those moments that count.

Eyres is an avid unbeliever, yet his Saturday reflections frequently touch upon matters that were at the centre of the teaching of the First Century.  The value of neighbourliness in a hard winter is stressed in today’s column:

In London too, our good, hospitable neighbours have seemed more important than ever. Part of the big city’s attraction for many has always been its anonymity. But nobody wants to die in anonymity, discovered weeks later in a flat full of cans of baked beans. Hard winters bring out the importance of real physical proximity, rather than the more long-distance or virtual relationships that many of us have increasingly come to rely on. Maybe those old fires, or the stoves that people sit around in Spain, which bring people physically together, are more convivial than central heating. Facebook contacts become less attractive when you’re shivering or sliding on ice.

It would not be hard to imagine Jesus, had he lived in climes more than 50 degrees North, rather than in Mediterranean heat, telling parables where the true neighbour is someone who walks three miles through snow and ice to bring food to elderly friends unable to venture out.

Eyres’ column comes at the end of a week when a free paper came from the people who run the evangelical programme, Alpha.  The top half of the front page is dominated by a smiling photograph of Britain’s last Prime Minister.  “An Interview with Tony Blair”, declares the headline.  Mr Blair is quoted as saying, “Alpha . . . is probably the most interesting and incredible thing going on in our Christian world”.

Perhaps their timing was particularly bad, but the idea that Mr Blair, who declared at the inquiry into the Iraq war that he would still take his country into a conflict that has cost thousands of innocent lives, should be presented as commending a course that is intended to present a Gospel of peace and love seems slightly incongruous.

Could it be that Jesus of Nazareth would feel more comfortable with the caring and integrity of the unbelieving Harry Eyres, than with an evangelicalism that embraces the master of spin?

The music transfigured those who played and those who listened.  Men with faces lined from years working on the roads, men from scattered townlands far from Dublin who had left behind first loves to travel to England in search of a living, became inscrutable, silently deep characters whose expressions told of stories and histories passed through the generations.

Dermot Bolger’s “Tuning Up” captures the moment when musicians are transformed:

In kitchens and pub corners and concert halls
Musicians gather. They open instrument cases,
Tune up, exchange greetings, gossip and jibes
Until, gradually, the noise of everyday life ceases.

At some unspoken moment they become someone other
Than who they were when walking through the doors.

The seconds in which the transformation takes place are ones in which a silent agreement between the performers and the listeners is reached; when both concur that they are about to move from everyday life to something different.

In Dermot Bolger’s description there is a moment to which every performer must aspire: the suspension of reality, the putting aside of all the stuff people carry with them.  The music does not work if it becomes no more than aural wallpaper; the actor’s lines fall flat if the audience are not present with him there in the room; the poet becomes no more than a person standing on a stage reading words if those words are not heard with meaning.

Bolger’s moment is found in places far removed from pubs and theatres.  The powerful role sporting events play depends on spectators assigning to their favourites roles far more significant than just participants in a game: the joy and the despondency the ecstasy and the violence are irrational to onlookers in the outside world, but silences and songs and anthems transform players from athletes to warriors, personal champions locked in mortal combat.

In times past and now all but lost, the church could capture such a sense of the moment being different, of those present being other.  Now we seem to have no more power to transform a moment than has a bag of chips with salt and vinegar on the Oxford Road on a Saturday night.