to God through Subatomic Particles

My interest in religion carried me nicely through a conventional Protestant childhood, but throughout my church-going adolescence, the question of whether God really existed was often on my mind. When I left home for college, I also left off church-going and it was several years before I started going again.

With a newly acquired husband, I wound up joining an Episcopal church. I was very active at St. Andrews, singing in the choir, working in the office, organizing the library, helping with Lenten dinners, volunteering for a diocesan project, and doing a little writing. And I enjoyed being there.

It was during this time, however, that I arrived at the biggest concept that would underlie my belief in God. “Why do we think there is a Creator and what he created? Why the dichotomy?” Even though the Hebrews had nicely given us One God, there were still two things: God and the universe.  “Why isn’t it all one?” I asked, thus launching myself in the direction of pantheism.

While at St. Andrews, I signed up for some one-week courses at the Hartford Seminary. Two of the courses were with Bishop John Shelby Spong whose books I had found appealing. Another was with Diarmuid O’Murchu, a Roman Catholic priest and social psychologist whose day job is working with the poor in London, but who also writes and lectures. Both these men were wonderfully open in their approach to theological questions and I was very happy to listen to them.

I was also interested in the work of Alan Watts (1915-1973), a physicist and Episcopal priest who later immersed himself in Asian religions. He became a popular speaker on philosophy with an emphasis on Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. It was his work The Book about the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are (aka The Book) that made me feel less alone in my thinking.

Eventually I left St. Andrews and moved on to the Unity Church. Few people know what Unity is. It has only about 500 churches in the U.S. and about 160 others around the world. Its base is a beautiful college-campus-like 1,400 acres near Kansas City, Missouri. Ministers are put through a three year program of study there before being ordained. Others take training to become licensed Unity teachers.

Unity’s appeal for me is the fact that they believe in oneness. We people are one with each other, with the Universe, and with God. In this line of thought, God is all there is.

My physics reading introduced me to the double slit experiment in which light is observed going through one or both slits on a barrier to form a pattern on a second barrier placed behind the first. The resultant pattern on the second barrier is that of either a particle or a wave and this result made it impossible for scientists to say definitively whether light is a particle or whether it is a wave.

But the experiment gets even more outlandish. It turns out that if you connect a device to keep track of what the particles are doing, the light seems to know it’s being watched and it changes its behavior. This is called the “observer effect” and it underlies my perception of the nature of reality. As physicist Sir James Jeans put it, “The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine.”

Meanwhile, at Unity I was once again singing in a choir; but my best experience there were the Wednesday morning classes on metaphysics. For eight years I attended this class while reading Eric Butterworth, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and many others. The best thing about this class of 8 or 10 people was that no idea was too outrageous for consideration. Even the reality of death could be challenged, leading one of our members to remark during a discussion, “You people are talking as if there is such a thing as death.”

I was surprised to run into Bishop John Shelby Spong at my Unity church. He gave a sermon in which he described a theory of what happens to you after you die. His idea is that your soul changes from being an incarnated one to being an abstract one. Some people believe that the soul retains the personality seen in the earthly body, and others believe that it does not.

Unity was also open to incorporating quantum physics into the idea of God or the Universe. One of our members, a  physicist, taught us about quantum entanglement emphasizing that strange things happen at the level of particle physics. Quantum entanglement started with the observation that once two particles have been joined, you can change a trait in one of them and the other immediately changes as well. This happens even when they’ve been separated and have an enormous distance between them.

Some people believe that an anthropomorphic God is necessary to help us mind our morals – to reward us if we’re good and punish us if we’re not. I tossed out the idea of good and evil somewhere along my way, thinking it to be a human construct created to help us live peacefully among ourselves. It’s a useful and necessary concept, but if there were no people, would there be good and evil? I believe there would just be nature, something we’ve always accepted as morally neutral. I have a framed favorite quote from the Persian poet Rumi. It reads “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I will meet you there.”

None of us can actually know what God is. We all travel our own spiritual path and it is not for anyone to say that one is better than another. My path has led to this:

God and the Universe are the same thing, a kind of consciousness or intelligence way beyond our ability to understand or articulate. Infinite, eternal, beneficent, God is all there is.

My approach to religion has been very cerebral and most people would probably prefer something more personal and comforting. But all this philosophizing has engendered a faith that keeps me grounded. Along the way I’ve picked up attitudes of respect and kindness for self and others, appreciation of our physical world, recognition of the transient quality of all things, and a sense that the universe as a whole is beneficent whether we can see it or not.