Electrons to Galaxies

and the love that connects it all

Ken and I are in our first Bible study class. Twice a month, 50 of us meet in a large group to watch some videos, then we move to a smaller group for The Good Stuff. I mean, the videos are really good, too, don’t get me wrong, it’s just the smaller group is where the abstract is brought down to the practical and personal. It’s where the nameless people in the pew three behind me at Mass become Pricilla, with her gruff manner of speaking that hides very tender ideas, or Beverly, who accuses herself of being impatient, has flatlined three times, and told God “don’t do that again. Take me home, or leave me be”.

Before the very first meeting, we were given homework to discuss in the inaugural small group session. One of the items asked that age old question- what do you think heaven is like? This is a sneaky question, posed as it was in the introductory lesson. Since we don’t know what heaven is like, any answer we supply really reveals more about ourselves than about God. By listening to the answers, I knew who was going to be the class theologian (“As Paul clearly states in Corinthians, no heart can conceive of heaven, though the Catechism in paragraph 1026 tells us that we will all be united perfectly with Christ”), who was going to be the class slacker (“I…uhhhh….didn’t really do this one yet, but I think heaven will be….um….perfect love”), who was going to be the class orthodoxy questioner (“Heaven will have dogs. All my dogs that have ever lived. And if there’s no dogs, I don’t want to go”) and so on. But beyond the unintentionally revealing answers, I was struck by the fierce strength of love.

It’s probably not a shocker when I tell you that Ken and I are the youngest in the class, and that’s saying something. Ken’s logged in half a century, and I’m not far behind him, but we’re easily 15-20 years younger than the rest of class. And for our fellow group members, those extra decades have been filled with the passing of scores of loved ones. Nearly every other person in the small group have bid their parents goodbye, and a sizable number of spouses as well. And all of them, from the Theologian to the Slacker to the Dog Lover all mentioned how much they couldn’t wait to reunite with them in Heaven.

We hear that all the time, “reuniting with loved ones in Heaven”. It starts taking on clichèd, saccharine flatness- a tidy something you toss out in response to a death, but don’t give much thought to. Or when you do give it thought, you recoil at the discovery that maybe you don’t really believe it because it doesn’t seem real. It’s such a foreign thought as to render it meaningless, certainly not something that can be absorbed into experiential knowledge.

It feels like contemplating the size of electrons or what it means when we say that a particular galaxy is 32 billion light years away. We can recite the head knowledge of each, but electrons or galaxy GN-z11 aren’t real to me. I can’t even begin to conceptualize how small an electron is, and considering that one light year amounts to six trillion miles (that’s 6,000,000,000,000, just to see it typed out), there’s no way my brain can wrap itself around 32 billion of them (want to make yourself sick? Mess around with the Scale of the Universe website for a while). So when I say sometimes heaven seems hard to believe in because I can’t conceptualize it, that’s what I mean. It’s too much for my head to hold, too much for any human head to hold. But, unlike electrons or GN-z11, I want to order my life with Heaven as its central point. How do I do that, when the reality of it is too foreign to interact with in any meaningful way?

Back to that first small group session. I listened as each member of the group spoke about how much they couldn’t wait to see their loved ones again, and they would talk about how much they loved their parents (and it was always a parent. Spouses weren’t spoken of in this manner, read into that what you will), how much they miss their mom or dad, and how they longed to be reunited with them one day. There was something about the enduring nature of that bond, the fierceness of that love, that struck me. Maybe it was the light in their eyes as they spoke. Maybe it was the unselfconscious sincerity of their affection. For one (the Theologian), I was struck by how his posture changed from the rigid, formal stance he struck during regular discourse, to a relaxed pose, unguarded and open, as if the love he had for his long deceased dad softened him like rain.

These weren’t people speaking about a severed bond, they weren’t experiencing a one-way emotional event. They were expressing their continued participation in a reciprocal human relationship. The love and affection they were experiencing wasn’t flowing from them and into a void- it was clearly connecting with the object of that love, and receiving love in return, completing a circuit that connected the earthly to….whatever Heaven is.

I’m trying the best I can to explain this, how something as mundane (from the Old French word “mondain”, meaning “of this world, earthly”) as people speaking about their departed parents bridged that gap of inconceivability for me. But it was like realizing that there was an energy, a bond, a road, a pull, a force, a thing that was connecting my earthly group members to the deceased people they were speaking about. It doesn’t help me grasp eternity, or the mechanics of heaven, but the strength and endurance of their love was enough of a light to dispel the darkness of disbelief.

It occurs to me right now, just as I’m wrapping up this essay, that maybe what I got a glimpse of, that bond connecting the living to the dead, is the Body of Christ. Another concept that’s too huge for me to understand, but at that moment none of it seemed scary in its scope. At that moment, all of it, the Body of Christ, the immortality of the human soul, the existence of Heaven was moved from head knowledge to heart knowledge through Love.

Hallowtide approaches, and as I thank God for His saints and pray for the Holy Souls in Purgatory, I’ll keep that first small group session in mind, that moment when Heaven and eternity fit into a single classroom, the numinous was made accessible, and the Love that connects everything everything everything from electrons to galaxies, to the living and the dead, to you and me, was laid out plain.

Photo by Rachel Moore on Unsplash