-- Socrates
Meditation: by George Gershwin a song entitled “I Got Plenty of Nothing” sung by Harry Belafonte
I got plenty of nothing.
Nothing's plenty for me.
I got no car - got no mule
Got no misery
The folks with plenty of plenty
Got a lock on the door.
Afraid somebody's a gonna rob 'em
While there out making more - what for?
I got no lock on the door - that's no way to be.
They can steal the rug from the floor - that's OK with me
'Cause the things that I prize - like the stars in the skies - are all free.
I got plenty of nothing.
Nothing's plenty for me.
I got my gal - got my song
Got heaven the whole day long.
Got my gal, got my lord, got my song.
I got plenty of nothing.
Nothing's plenty for me.
I got the sun, got the moon
Got the deep blue sea.
The folks with plenty of plenty
Got to pray all the day.
Seems with plenty you sure got to worry
How to keep the devil away, away.
I ain’t fretting about hell
‘Til the time arrives.
Never worry long as I’m well
Never want to strive to be good, to be bad,
What the hell, I am glad I’m alive
I got plenty of nothing
Nothing's plenty for me
I got my gal, got my song
Got heaven the whole day long
Got my gal, got my lord, got my song,
Got my song, got my song.
Reading: by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss from A Universe from Nothing – Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing (p. 4)
The discovery that the universe is not static, but rather expanding, has profound philosophical and religious significance, because it suggested that our universe had a beginning. A beginning implies creation, and creation stirs emotions. While it took several decades following the discovery in 1929 of our expanding universe for the notion of a Big Bang to achieve independent empirical confirmation, Pope Pius XII heralded it in 1951 as evidence for Genesis. As he put it: “It would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of primordial Fiat Lux [Let there be Light], when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies. Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the Hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place. We say: “Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!”
The full story is actually a little more interesting.
Reading: by astrophysicist Alan Lightman from Mr g: A Novel about Creation (p. 3)
As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe.
Not much was happening at the time. As a matter of fact, time didn’t exist. Nor space. When you looked out into the Void, you were really looking at nothing more than your own thought. And if you tried to picture wind or stars or water, you could not give form or texture to your notions.
Those things did not exist. Smooth, rough, waxy, sharp, prickly, brittle – even qualities such as these lacked meaning. Practically everything slept in an infinite torpor of potentiality. I knew that I could make whatever I wanted. But that was the problem. Unlimited possibilities bring unlimited indecision. When I thought about this particular creation or that, uncertain about how each thing would turn out, I grew anxious and went back to sleep. But at a particular moment, I managed… if not exactly to sweep aside my doubts, at least to take a chance.
Almost immediately, it seemed my aunt Penelope asked me why I would want to do such a thing. Wasn’t I comfortable with the emptiness just as it was? Yes, yes, I said, of course, but… You could mess things up, said my aunt. Leave Him alone, said Uncle Deva. Uncle toddled over and stood beside me in his dear way. Please don’t tell me what to do, retorted my aunt. Then she turned and stared hard at me. Her hair, uncombed and knotted as usual, drooped down to her bulky shoulders. Well? She said, and waited. I never liked it when Aunt Penelope glowered at me. I think I’m going to do it, I finally said. It was the first decision I’d made in eons of unmeasured existence, and it felt good to have decided something. Or rather, to have decided that something had to be done, that a change was in the offing. I had chosen to replace nothingness with something. Something is not nothing. Something could be anything. My imagination reeled. From now on, there would be a future, a present, and a past. A past of nothingness, and the future of something.
Reading: by feminist theologian Carter Heyward (from Our Passion for Justice)
We touch this strength, our power, who we are in the world, when we are most fully in touch with one another and with the world. There is no doubt in my mind that in so doing we are participants in ongoing incarnation, bringing God to life in the world. For god is nothing other than the eternally creative source of our relational power, our common strength, a god whose movement is to empower, bringing us into our own together, a god whose name in history is love.
Something from Nothing
A Sermon Delivered on January 6, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
In this week’s New Yorker magazine I stumbled upon the story of a man named Apollo Robbins. Apollo Robbins is a professional picket-pocket. Not a criminal, but an entertainer. Robbins is amazingly adept at removing objects from people’s pockets, rings from fingers, watches from wrists, and even glasses right off your nose. He was in the news a few years ago when during one of his performances he successfully emptied the pockets of several Secret Service Agents who were escorting president Jimmy Carter.
He calls himself a “gentleman thief,” in that he steals things from people’s pockets, without their realizing they’ve been robbed, and then, to the amusement of those looking on, displays the objects taken, before returning them to their rightful owner. Forbes Magazine calls him an “artful manipulator of awareness.”
He is so skilled at his craft that he also serves as a speaker and consultant. He has been hired as consultant by law enforcement to explain the tricks of the pick-pocket trade, so police officers can better catch real thieves. He has been sought out by officials at the Department of Defense, because they were interested in his skills of misdirection. Recently Robbins was also featured on a National Geographic TV show called “Brain Games,” that offers scientific insight into to how easily our brains can be fooled.
Robbins was born in the town of Plainview, Texas, in 1974. His parents say his birth was a miracle. There were complications during the pregnancy. The doctors warned that his mother would likely die in childbirth, and that he would be crippled and brain damaged.
But his mother didn’t die. And though Robbins was born with twisted limbs and motor-skill deficits, after years of rehabilitation, leg-braces, and physical therapy, he was finally able to walk and hold a pen. In the years that followed he developed an uncanny physical dexterity. When he was fifteen, he watched a magician at the local country fair. He was fascinated, and soon began to study magic himself.
Apollo Robbins is many things. But above all, he is an amazingly gifted magician.
It is amazing to watch Robbins, and to witness how in the pockets of his unwitting victims objects suddenly appear and disappear. One moment there is something in their pockets, in the next, there is nothing. Coins, wallets, cell-phones and watches suddenly vanish. And just as suddenly re-appear, in unexpected places.
* * *
The greatest magic act, for sure, is the creation of the universe. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… God said, “Let there be light,” And there was light!”
Abracadabra – Let there be light!
Creation “ex nihilo” is the way theologians long imagined this act of divine beginning, creation “out of nothing.” In the beginning there was nothing but God. And God was the First Cause. Creation was a divine act. A miracle, a magic, only possible by the power of God.
In his book A Universe From Nothing, Lawrence Krauss takes issue with those who believe the universe must have been created by God. As Krauss sees it, today science can prove otherwise. Science has found answers “from staggeringly beautiful experimental observations, as well as from the theories that underlie much of modern physics… [they] all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem.”
Just as the pope would like to take the discovery of the Big Bang as scientific proof of God’s existence, Krauss would like to use science to prove the opposite. This argument between certain scientists and religionists has been going on for some time.
Scientists say, the universe is about fifteen billion years old.
“In the beginning, everything that is now the universe, including all of its space, was concentrated in a singularity, maybe the size of a pinhead, that was unimaginably hot and unimaginably dense. It all let loose during an event called the Big Bang, a misleading term in that there wasn’t really an explosion. What happened was that the compacted space expanded very rapidly, carrying everything else along with it.
…The expansion continued for another 15 billion years, yielding the present observable universe, [one septillion – a one and 24 zeros] miles in diameter.” (Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, p. 4)
While scientifically sound, I confess, I don’t find this explanation much easier to imagine than God deciding to create something out of nothing.
* * *
It is a fascinating and confounding idea: something from nothing. It is at once a brain-twister and a holy grail. Something from nothing, is like pulling a rabbit from a hat, or like turning water to wine, or like turning straw to gold.
Something from nothing is a fascinating idea. But it is misleading. The Big Bang is not the story of something from nothing. It is not a story of creation, but rather a story of transformation. It is the transformation of something unimaginably small and dense to something unimaginably large and expansive.
Likewise the story told in the book of Genesis doesn’t describe the creation of something from nothing. There was God, after all. And there was also the earth. “The earth was without shape and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep, but the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water.” God began by separating the light from the darkness, transforming what had been, into something new and unprecedented.
Creation seems like the emergence of something out of nothing. But in fact, it is simply the transformation of one combination of elements into another, the transformation of one kind of order into another.
In a commentary on the Buddhist Heart Sutra, which touches on the meaning of emptiness and nothingness, Thich Nhat Hanh asks: “Can you name one thing that was once a nothing? A cloud? Do you think that a cloud can be born out of nothing? Before becoming a cloud, it was water, maybe flowing as a river. It was not nothing…”
Thich Nhat Hanh makes the case that there are no real beginnings in the universe, only continuations. Before we were born, we already existed within our mother’s womb. And before conception we existed partially in each of our parents. We existed in their flesh and blood and breath, sustained by the food they ate, and nourished by sunlight and rain.
Thus he writes,
“As I look more deeply, I can see that in a former life I was a cloud. This is not poetry; it is science. Why do I say that in a former life I was a cloud? Because I am still a cloud. Without the cloud I cannot be here. I am the cloud, the river, and the air at this very moment, so I know that in the past I have been a cloud, a river, and the air. And I was a rock. I was the minerals in the water. This is not a question of belief in reincarnation. This is the history of life on earth. We have been gas, sunshine, water, fungi, and plants. We have been single-celled beings.” (The Heart of Understanding, p. 21)
* * *
The philosopher David Albert uses a striking image to describe the emergence of something out of nothing in quantum physics.
“The fact that particles can pop in and out of existence [in quantum physics]… is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence … as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings – if you look at them aright – amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.” (The New York Times Book Review, 3/12/12, “On the Origin of Everything)
* * *
Apollo Robbins is a magician. He creates the illusion of something out of nothing. The secret of his success lies in his uncommon ability - through his touch, his movement, and his words - to distract us. For a split second we are looking at his face, as he asks a question, or we follow the movement of his right hand as it reaches into a pocket. And at that split-second we oblivious to what he is doing with his left hand, just beyond our field of vision, while we are focusing on something else.
Watching him engage with one of his victims, gently nudging them here or there, touching a shoulder, shaking a hand, turning his body to stand next to them, is like watching a dancer.
Describing his technique, he says, it is not so much a matter of physical movement, but rather of manipulating the “choreography of people’s attention.” “Attention is like water,” he says. “It flows. It’s liquid. You can create channels to divert it.”
At any given moment a person can only pay attention to a certain number of events happening at the same time. Robbins talks about “carving up the attentional pie,” or “surfing attention.”
So for instance, Robbins explains, if he leans his face close to someone, all their attention is on his face, and their pockets, especially the pockets lower on their body are outside their frame of awareness. Or if he wants to move their attention away from their jacket pocket, he might say “You had a wallet in your back pocket – is it still there?” So while they are wondering about their back pocket, their brain short-circuits for a second, and Robbins can slip something out of their front jacket pocket.
* * *
As we live our lives, at any given moment, we can only pay attention to a limited a number of things. Our home, our health, our work. Our family and friends, our commitments, our community. Our dreams, our desires, our ambitions. Our hopes and our fears. Our strengths and our limitation.
We live amidst unimagined and unprecedented possibilities. Sometimes it can seem life is playing tricks on us, providing us with experiences we didn’t see coming. Suddenly confronting us with the unexpected. Other times robbing us of some of the things we treasured, things we didn’t realize were precious until they were gone.
* * *
I have always been touched by Gershwin’s song “I’ve got plenty of nothing.” On one level it is simply a romantic tune within a modern opera. On another level it makes a profound philosophical and theological point. It is the song of a poor man, who is actually rich. A man who owns very little, and yet has everything he needs. What appears to be nothing, is in fact something. The sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky, are plenty.
* * *
Everything we need is right here. It is up to us to pay attention to all there is. It is up to us to put it to good use.
We don’t need magic. We don’t need miracles. We simply need to open our eyes and ears. We need to shift our attention. We need to wise up to the distractions that would mislead us. We need to pay attention to what really matters.
Creation is not an event that happened once 15 billion years ago, like a light switch flicked on by a heavenly hand. Creation is a process of transformation without beginning and without end. Creation is a process of unstoppable change, in which each of us is inextricably involved. We can’t stop the process of being and becoming, any more than we can stop the sun from moving across the sky, or stop time from ticking by.
This is the way Carter Heyward imagines God: an eternally creative force that exists within us and between us. God is our common strength, a relational power we bring into being in the very living of our lives. We create God whenever we seek to serve a greater good. We create God in our every act of love.
As we begin a new year,
May we continue the work of our lives.
Building upon the stories of yesterday,
May we create a better tomorrow.
Amen.
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