Proper 16, Year B
This is an O‑ring. No surprises there. If you’re of a certain age, you may remember where you were when the collapse of an O-ring caused the space shuttle Challenger to break apart on a cold, bright, winter afternoon. 1986. In the investigation, a member of the panel showed that O-rings are vulnerable to cold. He dipped a new O‑ring into a glass of iced water and watched it lose its resilience. No complex equations or machines: only a simple demonstration for a simple truth.
Engineers who made the O-ring told NASA not to launch the shuttle, that it was 40 degrees colder that day in Florida than was safe. But company managers told NASA, “It’s okay to launch.”
That person who dropped the O-ring into ice was Richard Feynman, the brilliant, beloved professor of physics at Cal Tech. But he was anything but simple-minded. By the time he was 24, he had a PhD. in theoretical physics and worked at Los Alamos during the war. His research in quantum electrodynamics and helium superfluidity -whatever that means – earned him a Nobel prize. He was also director of doctorate students, but he and the faculty came up with the idea that he would give a series of lectures for freshmen and sophomores, to kindle a spark. But in the end, the auditorium was always packed with faculty colleagues and PhD candidates, and those famous lectures ended up in a book Lectures in Physics. Six of them were published separately as Six Easy Pieces that you can find on the shelf in a good bookstore.
The lectures were a radical departure from traditional physics, in which students usually swim around in the troubled waters of math equations, hoping to stay afloat. Feynman’s approach was off-the-wall, with images that students and regular people could understand. He adds a footnote to one chapter where he reflects on the relationship between science and the spirit, and I’d like to quote:
“I can see the stars on a desert night, and I feel them. But (as a physicist), do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this blue carousel, my eye can see light that’s been coming to me for a million years. (It is) a vast pattern of which I am part, my atoms from some forgotten star. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.”
In that sentence, there’s no rhythm or rhyme, but it’s a sort of poetry for the soul, and Feynman’s words lit a fire for people who were there, as sparks of movement beyond the literal. Even after my academic failure in Algebra II, I connect with this, and I feel excited, engaged, alive. It’s sort of thrilling to read Six Easy Pieces, even if I don’t understand the physics. It feels like a leap into the unknown. It opens me up, breaks me open.
And it’s sort of thrilling to come across a sentence something like, “In the beginning was the word”, opening the gospel of John, even if I don’t understand the metaphysics or biology or chemistry or the space/time continuum. It’s true that John can be explicit, as you may remember when he talks about Lazarus and Martha and Mary, but he seems more interested in suggesting who Jesus might be, raising questions: “In the beginning was the Word…” – what exactly is that about?
John’s metaphors can be simplistic but also baffling: the lamb, the vine, the gate. Where is the plain speech instead of riddles? But Jesus’s speech is full of questions and more questions, and refers to himself as the Son of Man: what’s that supposed to mean?
He says, “I am the bread of life which came down from heaven.” He has a following of left-brained people, literal‑minded, and when he talks to them about bread, they seem to be tone deaf, unable to hear the music, much less carry the melody. Think of Peter: “I will build three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah;” Think of Thomas: “Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands, I will not believe,” and they’re confused. It’s confusing. Jesus complains that they have ears but can’t hear. They have eyes but can’t see.
The French author Jean Cocteau once drew a lithograph of a simple black fish with a circle for an eye. The text translates, “The blind fish, who see nothing”, but the suggestion is that the clearest vision comes when the eyes are closed, that the richest sounds are heard in silence, that understanding comes from believing with the heart what the mind cannot decipher, and John believes that some people would run wake up to a larger truth.
“I am the bread of life which came down from heaven.” Faith is not an equation, like ‘X number of miracles equaling X amount of a messiah.’ It’s more like a fractal, the graphing of a complex number: no matter where you click on the image, it takes you further into the inexplicable mystery and beauty.
Alanda Greene writes that beauty activates the brain’s right hemisphere and brings balance to the left brain’s isolation. It’s the beauty in the language, in the imagination, embracing something difficult and rare and mysterious.
Faith is trusting that Jesus is more than we can know through the intellect. He is Word that can never be spoken, image that can never be envisioned, bread that does not feed the body, but sustains the soul.
“I am the bread of life which came down from heaven.” Nothing tangible will satisfy the hunger of the heart. The Bread of Life take on a life of its own.
Feynman writes in The Meaning of it All, “You have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you don’t have it exactly right.”
Close your eyes. The metaphor becomes the meal. “It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.”
