Through Glasses Darkly
Dr. Mary Lamb
One of the things I do with my new students each year is ask them to close their eyes for a few minutes and remember a time when they learned something significant – something that mattered to them, something that stayed with them. I ask them to make it real in their memory – to parse out the sensory details of the experience. What do they see, hear, smell? What can they feel under their hands, under their feet? Who is speaking, and not speaking? What is being said, and not being said? What can they not quite remember? And how do they feel?
We do this exercise usually as preparation (what teachers call, I think, an “anticipatory set”) for a conversation about guidelines for behavior in class – as a way to frame that conversation in terms of how we will help to bring about an environment where significant learning can happen. While their eyes are closed and mine are open, the exercise often brings me back to significant learning experiences of my own – in particular, a related pair of experiences, one when I was ten years old, and the other when I was nineteen. In the first memory, I am camping with a friend, also named Mary, and her family at Governor Dodge State Park in Wisconsin. In the middle of the night – I don’t know the hour, but later ask, and it’s 3AM – my friend and I and her sister and another friend are gently wakened by her bearded father and led out, through the zippered door of our tent, beyond the forested campsite, to an open meadow on a hillside where the stars fill the sky utterly. Everywhere I look are more stars than I could ever count – the cosmos spread out before me in vast array. I sit right down on the grass, the damp ground underneath me pulling me into it. I learn to spot the dippers that night, and Cassiopeia, and learn what it’s like to see our own Milky Way galaxy from inside of it, separated from it by the gravity of Earth, yet also part of it, in it. I am thrilled and at the same time profoundly humbled. That feeling of humility is present in me still, as is the feeling of comfort that humility brought to me, and the sense of surprise at that comfort. I felt how tiny I was in the enormous scope of things that night, yes – but why should the tininess of my own being bring me such a sense of peace? In the face of all that I could never manage or control, why this serenity?
As the years after that night unspooled and I reflected back on that experience, I came to think of it as the night I found God – not the God of my childhood, the white bearded father god preached about at my Baptist nursery school, not thunderbolt Zeus, not the Santa god who watched me sleeping, but the God of my own experience. God became for me that sense of all that we could seek to know and name and measure and at the same time never wholly grasp. Somehow I came to understand that it was the tension itself, between knowing and the unknowable, like that tension between the centripetal pull of gravity and the centrifugal push of the exploding universe, that made the brief span of my life, cradled in family and caring community, possible. This tension, which I came to think of as cosmic glue, came to occupy the space of God in my mind as a young person, and that moment became a marker for my passage out of childhood.
When I was nineteen and in college, I took Astronomy. I wasn’t a great success at it. I had a wonderful professor, who often stood on his desk to describe the night sky arrayed on the ceiling of his lecture hall, and tried to help us gauge scale by means of objects in the room. I wish for every student a professor like Jim Kaler, and for every professor students more engaged in their science classes than I was. Still, I remember with clarity the day Professor Kaler explained that, if Alpha Centauri is roughly 4.4 light-years away, then we are only ever seeing it as it was 4.4 light years ago – that we cannot see it as it is now. He helped me to understand that, when we look into the night sky, we are seeing history – the light record of what was – four, or four hundred, or four thousand, or four million, or four billion years ago. Always, then, there is this unspannable gap between what is known and what is impossible to know.
On August 21, 2017, CE, I met a group of humans in a place on Terra called the Unitarian Church of Evanston. We came together to watch Luna cross into the space between Terra and Sol. We were not in the path of totality; we only got to experience 85% occlusion, only got to see the crescent sun. Even so, it struck me – as we cast our circle and ate our lunar cheese and solar crackers and drummed our drums and took our seats for the viewing – that we had cast our lots so that we could experience together the sweet tension between what we know and what is unknowable. Though closer to us in space than Alpha Centauri, the dark side of the moon is still an apt symbol for occult knowledge, as is the portion of the sun it occludes. In order to better know and understand this moment, we donned our NASA-approved glasses, which necessitated our losing sight of everything else around us. “Better sit down,” I heard members of our company say to each other – “Don’t walk around in those glasses.” Though some did, of course – or chanced a look with no glasses at all, flying, like Icarus, too close to the sun. These fellow humans and I were not bound by the same notion of God, or even in many cases a need for the idea of God. Still, I think we experienced together something holy, a thing to be treasured.
This is, I think, why we come together at church: to share the known – what we have seen and learned and experienced – and to bear together the unknowable. This tension is God to me, and our coming together is faith and love. I wish for us and all humanity a sense of awe, and humility, and peace that passes understanding.