Matter and Spirit

My little girl asked how you really know God is there. Not "is there a God?" but rather, "how do you know God is there?," a completely different question.  "But I can't see Him or hear Him!" she observed in concrete, developmentally appropriate, seven year old fashion. I struggled for an answer (akin to my feeling when my five year old asked, "but how does the baby get INTO the mommy's tummy?") Horrifying.

So instead of copping out and referring her to the Pastor or even her Sunday School teacher,  like a good mom, I did some reading.

“In the beginning God, (Elohim), created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Breath of God moved upon the face of the waters ... “

Chris Clarke discusses these lines, the start of the Bible and perhaps the most famous lines in it. "Even in English translation they convey something of the awe and mystery that fills the account. The first sentence announces starkly the theme of the coming chapter, nothing less than the totality of all that is. Then the next sentence invites us to imagine, or to fail to imagine, the starting point - a vast formless waste, where there is nothing solid, no bounds, no light, no dark even, just empty, shifting, infinite waters; stirred by an unknowable wind, the breath of God. This vision is the realm both of matter and of Spirit.   In this text there are four words charged with meaning: "Heavens", "Earth", "Breath (or Spirit)" and "Waters". The creation story will  unfold through the interplay of these four archetypal qualities, giving a far richer picture than our "matter and spirit".

Matter is evident in the first phrase of the Bible, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". In the original Hebrew, shamayim  with the "root" "ShM"  is also found in words meaning "hear", "name", "sound" and so on, sharing an underlying idea of a permeating vibration, or a connecting meaning. When you look at the word  translated as earth aretz   has a root indicating "a formed and fixed energy". This distinction clearly has connections with the "spirit/matter" polarity that we are familiar with; (apparently) the Hebrew polarity has many more intricate overtones. Some have drawn a metaphor from modern physics in using the terms "wave" and "particle" as one interpretation of this polarity.

A second theme then makes its appearance in the next verse, in "the spirit of God moved over the face of the waters". Here a new polarity emerges between the words translated as "spirit" and "waters". The first, ruach , like words from other languages more familiar to us, combines the ideas of breath, wind and spirit - the "breath of life" - but also an idea of "expansive power". The second, maim, has connotations identified with flow and generativity, for which he chooses "womb" as one interpretation. Thus at the start of our intellectual history we find not one simple polarity of spirit and matter, but two interlacing polarities: that of wave/particle and that of breath/womb." 

Although we tend to focus on the creation of the physical universe in this passage, it's interesting to note that God also created an invisible spiritual realm at this time. Referred to as "the heavenlies" or "the heavenly places" in the New Testament, it has different characteristics and obeys different laws than the physical world. 

 Man is a creature who was made to live simultaneously in both realms:

Genesis 2:7 "...then the LORD God formed [the physical body of] man
of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath
[spirit] of life; and man became a living being [nephesh = soul]."

But it isn't only in the realm of theology that we see this duality. According to physics, "it seems as though all the most elementary parts of the physical world have two aspects, one of a particle form, distinct, localised (aretz), and the other of a wave form, spreading and connecting (shamayim). The circumstances determine which it is that manifests." (Clarke) Contemporary physics goes into even more mind numbing detail of quantum fields and curved space-time, which addresses maim (waters: flow and generativity).

But now back to my seven year old's question: "how do you know God is there?," As intelligent as she is, a discussion of quantum physics is still a little over her head (and mine- my degrees are in social work for crying out loud).

So I simply answered, "with your heart".

It seemed to suffice.