Imma Shine

It's the end of my long day (leave the house at 7:45 a.m. and don't get home until 9 p.m.) and I just finished driving, I'm the only one home, and I'm drinking a beer (Pigs Ass Porter, since you asked), so just take this whole thing with a grain of salt.  You've been warned.  And while I'm specifying caveats, please substitute "what I think of as God" for "God" throughout.

So several years ago, I read the first half of one of Brian Greene's books, The Elegant Universe.  (Love beautifully written books about science, but I never seem to get more than halfway through.)  He was explaining, beautifully, the theory of relativity, and it was late at night, and all the sudden I got it.  I had this flash of being able to hold the whole thing in my head-- all this lovely, brilliant pure energy racing around the universe at the speed of light, and then slowing down as it takes on mass and becomes-- well, everything.  Matter.  (That may not have been at all what Mr. Greene was trying to explain, but work with me here.)  Then I woke up the next morning and it was gone.  I can still remember the basic outline, obviously, but that moment where the whole thing existed as a moment of comprehension in my head is gone forever. 

But I can spin that idea out endlessly.  I've thought about it a lot over the intervening years, and moved it into a realm which Mr. Greene would probably be embarrassed to have anything to do with (sorry, Brian).  For example, is this what the Incarnation is a metaphor for?  God, pure energy/light, choosing to take on material form?  Or this:   if you can ascribe volition to pure energy, you could think of that moment, the moment of taking on mass, as a choice, and that choice might be made out of love.  Which gives a whole new meaning to the New Age idea that the fundamental glue of the universe is love.  Pure energy choosing to take on material form, slowing down its headlong flight across the universe, so that the world(s) can exist.  So we can exist. 

And then the corollary, or subset, or next thought, anyway:  and that's all we are, too.  Pure energy, slowed down from light speed, to take on mass and exist.  (cue Twilight Zone music). I should possibly be typing this while unimpaired, but I'd never have the nerve to post this if I wasn't punchy.  Remember, I told you-- half a beer and I am silly as Junie B. Jones.

So tonight while i was endlessly driving back from UTown, it occurred to me in another one of those flashes that what we are is brilliant.  What I am is brilliant.  Not more brilliant than anyone else, but we are each brilliant. Brilliant is our status quo, not something we achieve during certain special moments.  And there's something about recognizing our own brilliance that connects us with God.  If you want to use the language of my youth, we're somehow denigrating God if we deny the way God made us, if we deny that the way God made us is to be brilliant.  If you want it phrased agnostically:  We grow up in a world that layers guilt and obligation and worry and anxiety on top of what is our essential self.

OK, now I'm getting uncomfortable.  But that was my flash of insight on the endless drive today.  oh, good grief, I'm uncomfortable with my own brilliance, right?  so what else is new.  and I can never be anything but silly when typing out this kind of thing because who the hell am I to think I know anything about this?  but it's what I was thinking about, so voila, the post.  and dh and MadMax got home so I'm not even editing it. much.