A Blog is a Gumball

Chicago, late 1940s early '50s, St. Margaret Mary's, the wooden desks. I can still see the dark scratches on the surface, the narrow groove for pencils, the hole about the size of a silver dollar in the upper right hand corner. That was the ink well, but in eight years I never saw a drop of ink.

Several times a year we played musical desks and everybody ended up in a new one. The first thing you did, without looking, was stuff your workbooks into the space beneath the surface. Then you looked for a smooth spot somewhere on top. Good luck. Eventually you checked out the underside, and there they were. The lumps. Gumballs. Most were hard, with a sort of dusty covering. You could pry them off, but you learned real fast that you didn't want to. It was the yuch factor. The better course was to add to their number.

Which I did. Who knows, I may have planted a couple next to one of my dad's.

Blogs are gumballs without the yuch. You chew something over, roll it into a ball, post it on the internet, and see what sticks. That's the fun, seeing what sticks:

My understanding of "Let There Be Light" suggests that the light has as much of a spiritual quality as a physical.

Let's say a police office enters a crime scene in total darkness. . . .

Your premise that "if you poke it and it wiggles, it's alive" leaves me staring at my bowl of Jello.

I'd like to think that when the next animal pulls up and Adam says,"I name him giraffe" that God kind of does a spit-take or laughs milk through his nose and says, "Where the hell did that name come from!"

Spirit, natural as any miracle,
Great matter's second stage,
Provoked, shaped with clay,
Coaxed, warmed, fired to Self.

At some point it reduces to an article of faith, and isn't it deliciously ironic that even science must ultimately rely on faith?

It all adds up to an education--mine. On my terms, no less. I ask the questions and pick the brains. In return I get opinions, photos, poems, and a few accounts of journeys. I get leads. Have I been to Slate's Blogging the Bible web page? The one for FaithBooking? For the Jet Propulsion Laboratory? Have I read John Polkinghorne, Tom Wolfe, Loren Eiseley, Thomas Merton, Mario Beauregard, Teilhard de Chardin (if not, here's a DVD summarizing The Phenomemon of Man)?

I also get new perspectives, like that of an artist who looked--in both directions--at the sequence of Matter, Life, and Spirit in her creative process. And I get to hear from people I haven't heard from in a long while, several of them for over forty years.

I like to think in gumballs. They're essences. They're what you put in a nutshell. They're templates. Stick 'em somewhere and see what accrues, what fits. "Old Story" and "New Story" are gumballs, one a mirror image (almost) of the other. Spirit in the first position vs. Spirit in the last position. Are there actually cosmologies out there that fit the Old template? Chapter One of the Book of Genesis comes close, but there's too much Matter up front. Are there any that fit the New? Many come to mind, but none is a perfect fit.

But that's where the action is, the education--where something doesn't fit the template. Poor fits offer the promise of something new, something fresh, something to keep an eye on.

In the weeks ahead I'll be looking at three cosmologies that fit the "New" template. On a whim, I chose ones that had the word "everything" in their titles: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, Harold Morowitz's The Emergence of Everything, and Ken Wilber's A Brief History of Everything. Getting each down to a gumball will be hard. I'll have to stick to it--and so will you.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 JOHN N. KOTRE

Impossibly Beautiful

And they were something to behold, with a strange and distant beauty that called to Adam from afar. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 16)

Consider this the first "guest blog" at the Story-of-Everything Place. It is certainly the first visual one. Commenter John Bayerl sent in a set of photos that were judged last year, by astronomers, to be the best from 16 years of Hubble telescope operation. "This has to be part of The Story of Everything," said John. In an article in the Daily Mail, reporter Michael Hanlon said the photos "illustrate that our universe is not only deeply strange, but almost impossibly beautiful." I have to agree.

The winning photo, above, is of the Sombrero Galaxy, 28 million light years from earth and 50,000 light years across. The next four places were awarded to pictures of nebulae, those clouds of gas and dust that are both the graveyards and the nurseries of stars. All are within 8,000 light years of earth.

Second place went to the Ant Nebula. It derives its name from the way it looks to telescopes on the ground.

In third place was the Eskimo Nebula. The furry hood around the face is a ring of comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying star.

Number four was the Cat's Eye Nebula, one of the most complex nebulae known. It lies 3,000 light years away.

The Hourglass Nebula, 8000 light years away, came in fifth. It's narrow in the middle because the winds that shape it are weaker at the center.

Are the colors real? See how the Hubble web site explains what's behind the pictures. While you're there, go to their Gallery to get an idea of all that's in their collection. Photos six through ten in the judging can be seen here. As Jodie Foster said at the end of the movie Contact, "I had no idea!"

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