IT WAS NOTHING, REALLY!

December 11, 2006

When I was a young teenager, I came across a book by Science Fiction author
Theodore Sturgeon, "Sturgeon is alive and well," a collection of some pretty far-
out sci-fi stories - not the space travel kind, but fairly down-to-earth ones, such as
the story about an inventor who discovers the power of nothing while sitting on
the toilet, entitled, "It was nothing, really." The inventor in the story develops a
powerful force field out of the very substance of nothing, which sounds very
much like what the new physics tells us: We used to think all the energy was in
the particles of the atom; now it seems that the energy is, in fact, in the space
between the particles!
I used to think that air was pretty much like nothing: I took it for granted, since I
couldn't really touch it or see it or feel it, and I'm sure many of us are not really
aware of the miracle that's happening with every breath we take. Yet, when a
space craft re-enters the atmosphere, the astronauts encounter the fact that air
isn't nothing at all, but fairly solid, compared to the nothingness they just came
from, in outer space. It starts to dawn on one then, why, when God created the
sky, He called it firmament (Genesis 1:6,7), indicating that the stuff He made it of
was firm and relatively solid, compared to all the nothing, that empty space
between the planets, the 'particles' of the universe...
Some bright guys, like Mark McCutcheon (I mentioned him before), are finding
out that maybe the forces we knew in physics aren't really separate forces at all...
maybe there's more to all that nothing, all that empty space between the particles
of the atoms and the universe, than we know.... Maybe it hasn't even dawned on
us yet how little, how nothing we know...
One of the best Christians songs ever written, from a time way before Christian
music ever became as huge as it is now, is "Oxygen" by Richard Page, in which
he describes the Lord as being our oxygen. How fitting and appropriate, because
with every breath we take, God proves His love for us, or, as Richard Rohr puts it
in "Everything Belongs" (a book I can whole-heartedly recommend to any truth
seeker, which has not only triggered the inspiration for this blog, but also quite a
few of my forth-coming songs): "We're already totally in the presence of God.
What's absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God is maintaining us in
existence with every breath we take. As we take another it means that God is
choosing us now and now and now..."
He also says that God is hiding in the physical world, which is something David
Berg, founder of The Family International, also taught, and I was able to confirm
by personal experience many times. I personally suspect that the place God
chooses to hide specially - perhaps His favorite 'hiding place,' is nothingness,
that empty space between the particles, where all the energy lies, just as He
chooses the little, humble and 'invisible' people, the 'nothings' and 'nobodies' in
this world to do the great works that nobody else wants to do.
I don't know who said it first, David Berg or Eric Idle, or yet another inspired
thinker: "God made the world out of nothing and He hung it on nothing. Hangs
pretty good, doesn't it?" So, nothing seems to be a pretty trustworthy substance,
because God seems to be in it. After all, if everything is made from nothing, and
nothing is our origin, than maybe there's more to nothing than we've been able to
fathom thus far...