Rick Searle, on his blog Utopia and Dystopia recently posted on Giordono Bruno, burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church in 1600 for speculation about the possibility of there being a plurality of worlds.  I liked Rick’s post a lot, and wrote this response:

Your piece made me think about how I use science in my religious life.  But first, I have to object to the idea that “Religions are above all ethical and philosophical orientations towards life on a human scale.”  That’s certainly part of religion, but I think at base religions are a response to the numinous.  People have had, and still have, experiences that go beyond rational explanation, that go beyond science, even.  They need some way to think and talk about those experiences, and they find their way to religions, not because they’re rejecting science and its claims, but because they find that religion provides the language for what they need to say.  I, like you, decry the way that religions can become intolerant.  I would describe that intolerance as a kind of xenophobia – we become so immersed in the language of our faith that any other language seems threatening, other, strange.  But if we reject these other “languages,” our own starts to die.  English is full of French words, is in fact a strange combination of latinate and Germanic languages.  But that’s exactly why I think it’s so beautiful.  To my mind, religion only increases its beauty by allowing scientific words and phrases (by which I mean concepts) to change it.  When I think about science, I think about it religiously.  That doesn’t mean that I try to ignore its truths and make it conform to any dogma.  It means that I encounter science through the lens of my faith.  I seek to understand the natural world because doing so helps me to understand God.  Like a scientist who really believes in the scientific method, I know that my understanding of God is incomplete, that I am merely proposing hypotheses in an attempt to speak about a mystery that is far beyond my comprehension.  Some of the hypotheses I propose will be proved wrong.  Some will stand, at least during my lifetime.  But a disproven hypotheses doesn’t mean that I’ll abandon the language of religion, or the work of trying to understand the numinous.  For me, the idea of other planets, other worlds, even other dimensions, is a very welcome one.  It excites me to think that there are other words, other concepts, through which I can think about God.  But always with the knowledge that God is outside of my understanding.  I think that Bruno’s theological mistake was in trying to apply the concepts of “finite” and “infinite” to the nature of God.  “Since a single Jesus visiting an infinite number of earths one at a time would take an infinite amount of time, there must be an infinite number of Jesuses. Therefore, God must create an infinite number of Christs.”   God wouldn’t need to create an infinite number of Christs if God is Christ (Christ, in Christian theology, is uncreated and existed before creation, as God).  God is outside of time.  A triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) who is outside of time can be on infinite worlds all at once, or play with time in any way that divinity can imagine.  But here I am entering into Bruno’s mistake, claiming that my conception of infinity is applicable to God.  The only way to move beyond speculation is to find other worlds, and to look for Christ on them.

I was at a meeting today and we were asked to reflect on the end of Genesis, when Joseph asks that his descendents return his bones to the Holy Land: “When God comes to you, you shall carry up my bones from here.”  Here’s the poem I sketched out as my reflection:

I think I left some bones in Wisconsin.
A bonfire’s yellow sparks in still air –
a morning when I walked across a dewy meadow –
long weeds silting the water that our oars pulled through.
I pull these bones into the present and accept the past
as a memento mori, memory as the substance of mortality.

So much of this past adheres to the otherworldly symmetry
of holy places – Holy Hill, the Chapel of the Holy Spirit.
We named them and defined their sacredness by our uses,
even if the use was only to step into green light,
auburn shadows, not to pray but to spend a moment
standing in the atmosphere of polished wood.

I remember sun and dust across a whorled floor,
hard boards pressed against my back,
the day still beside the windows
and domesticity enchanted, the sacred here,
sleeping with my child in the next room.
I remember my wife in that moment.

Which bones are most worthy of processions through the wilderness?
Where is religion, really, in a traveling person?
Is it in memory’s corpse, in the timeless chapel,
the house in summer?  When God comes,
we carry bones.  Not through silken meadows.
Not over remembered hills.  But everywhere.

All at once.

Heartbreak is a real thing.  The shock of losing love causes the body to release adrenaline and other stress chemicals that can actually cause the heart to spasm.  The left ventricle becomes enlarged and arteries close.  It can look and feel like a heart attack.  Since 2005, the nation’s leading heart clinics have taken it seriously and dubbed it “broken heart syndrome.”  People have died of a broken heart.

Today is the first day of Lent.  Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and the joke is that all of those people who have given up chocolate for Lent will be immediately regretting their decisions.  But there is something highly appropriate about these two days falling so close together.  Heartbreak is the reverse image, the necessary contrast, to the state of being in love.  Lent is the time when, even though we live in a world that is alive with God’s grace, we feel broken and abandoned, even if the abandonment is all of our own choosing.  We are the ones who have dumped God, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel a great deal of regret.  Heartbreak belongs to both people at the end of a relationship.  Lent belongs to both us and God.

There is a Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb.  It is full of stranded objects, nick knacks and mementos that couples bought together, when they were in their best time, and that now belong to no one, since there isn’t any best time, or any couple, anymore.  A five inch tall wind-up bunny.  A glass horse.  Some of the objects were themselves the cause of the break-up, or emblematic of the reasons why the relationship ended.  A side mirror that a jilted lover broke from her lover’s car when she discovered it parked outside of his mistress’s house.    Some were gifts, that are now laden with memory, stranded in the museum because they cost their owner’s too much to keep.  A box made out of glued together matches that a sailor once made for his sweetheart.  A necklace.

People have donated all of these objects to the museum, and included little stories that hang on placards beside them.  A blue and white plastic model of a molecule has a placard that reads: “An animal constructed out of different objects (chemical puzzle) with eyes glued on and a piece of paper saying who gave me this present.”  A cell phone has a placard that reads: “He gave me his cell phone so I couldn’t call him any more.”  Shannon Service, who wrote about a visit to the museum for Brink Magazine, writes that “In their own way, the pieces mirror my own rage, my own awkwardness, and my own despair.  They remind me of my flailings in the face of love.  But instead of feeling shame, I find myself relieved…I let go of the notion that there is, somewhere, a proper, measured response to losing love.  A broken heart makes us human, and sometimes being human is a ridiculous, painful, desperate thing.”

We have all come here today because we feel a need to share our own brokenness, our own humanity.  Lent isn’t about the ending of romantic love, but about an even larger condition of broken heartedness.  The Psalmist writes, “As for me, I am a worm and no man.”  Surely he’s expressing a feeling that is familiar to all of us.  Haven’t we all awoken, at some point, at some dark moment, and said something like that to ourselves?  We feel low, lower than any other creature on earth.  Because of something we’ve done.  Because of something that’s been done to us.  But we don’t just concentrate on the event, the thing that happened that brought us down.  We extend our understanding, and begin to see brokenness, sorrow, as one of the primary states of the world.  As if it were an element.  We have failed the universe, or the universe has failed us.

There are many times in our lives, a great many, when we don’t think in this way.  When we feel secure, and happy, and whole.  When we know that we are beloved children of God, created in God’s image, and we feel that the love of God suffices.  But Lent isn’t about those times.  Lent is about acknowledging the full scope of our humanity, the sorrow that interlaces the joy.

The temptation is to never acknowledge that sorrow, to pretend that there’s only joy.  C. Nathan DeWall, who teaches at the University of Kentucky-Lexington, performed a simple experiment.  Knowing that heartbreak is real, is physical, he set out to test the results of simply numbing the pain.  He gave tylenol to test subjects and had them play a computer game in which they experienced rejection.  He said: “We made a straightforward prediction that if we numb people to the physical pain, it will numb the emotional pain as well.”  MRI scans showed that he was right.  But his results shouldn’t be surprising.  Anyone who’s ever eaten a carton of ice cream after a break-up, or gotten drunk, knows that it’s possible to physically numb heartbreak.  We also know that you can only eat so much ice cream, drink so much alcohol, take so many pills, before the problem switches from heartbreak to something else.

To acknowledge our heartbreak, whether it’s heartbreak that comes from a failed relationship or simply from being alive, takes courage.  It takes an act of faith, of trust.  Faith that our acknowledgment will be met with kindness and understanding.  Trust that we truly are loved, by God, by our friends, even by strangers who have experienced their own heartbreak, and know how we feel, and sympathize, because heartbreak has created empathy within them.  Surely God, who gave Himself for us, has experienced empathy, and knows our heartbreak.  The prophet Joel said “Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”  That grace, that mercy, that patience and steadfast love, are the gifts of heartbreak, the things we learn from our sorrow.

Paul said, “we are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see– we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”  That is the condition of heartbreak, to have an inner sate that is different from the outer state, to see the world rolling on, and feel that we have no part in it.  But if we could see behind the mask, we would know that heartbreak is true to everyone, just as true as joy is.  That there is an eternal and secret Museum of Broken Hearts, and that we all have pieces in it, and little placards, detailing our wounds.  To enter this season of Lent is to walk through the doors of the museum, carrying our own mementos, and looking for a shelf to put them on, a place to hang them on the wall.  And while we’re there, this season of Lent gives us a chance to look around, to see all of the other stray, abandoned objects, all of the weird details of each other’s heartache, and to know that we’re not alone, that the world often feels the way that we do, and that this feeling, full within ourselves, can build the beauty of empathy within us, can help us see, with clarity, the ashes that we each secretly bear, and can create new love in our hearts.  Our hearts will be repaired by new love.  Not singular love, not the love of a new lover, but love of everything, love of our shared humanity.  The same love that God is always offering to us, the love that brings us to share in each other’s joy and heartbreak, the love that makes us rise from the ashes, fully alive.