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So already, I've been blogging about fields for many years--fields with kings in them during the month of spiritual return before the Jewish new year, wheat fields in Vincent Van Gogh's paintings, color fields in Helen Frankenthaler's paintings, the particular field in Berlin, NY at the top of which our cabin sits. Today, though, I write about a different field: the unified field. Those of you who've read Richard Rohr's Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life* know the unified field is an important concept in that book.
Having read Teaching a Stone to Talk so many years ago, I didn't recall Annie Dillard's description of the unified field in her essay "Total Eclipse." Rohr quotes Dillard to begin Chapter 4 of his book*:
In the deeps are the violence and terror of which
psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you
drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot
locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the
rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the
unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our
life together here. This is given. It is not learned. (53).*
Dillard talks about a field that "our sciences cannot find" that is much connected to our human capacities for good, evil, and "inexplicable caring."** When two college friends--friends from the first and second halves of life--and I read Rohr's book together over a period of several months just this spring, we realized that our understanding of the unified field was sketchy at best. So I volunteered to do some research about it.
As I think we vaguely
knew, the term comes from physics,*** and particularly Einstein’s desire to
prove that all the forces of nature are of a piece, all part of a coherent, interactive, interdependent whole. As one article explained,
For centuries, researchers had attempted to
describe all the fundamental forces of nature and how they interact in a single
theory. This unified field theory stumped the likes of Albert Einstein, who
worked on the theory for many years.
In physics, a field is an area under the influence of some force, such as
gravity or electromagnetism. A field theory refers generally to why physical
phenomena happen, and how these phenomena interact with nature.****
After reading some physics I couldn't much grasp (though I was intrigued by the
fact that weaker things weren’t necessarily wiped out by stronger ones, both
having their place this unified scheme), I went back to reading Rohr, who defines the term as “that single world of
elementary forces, principles, and particles that . . . [Einstein] assumed held together the
entire universe of space-time” (75).
Which doesn't mean that Rohr recommends everyone embrace Catholicism as their personal crucible and pathway. As soon as he's done relating his own story, Rohr's quick to assert that the unified field is universal, existent for and potentially accessible to all people. Seekers who are members of religious communities that both challenge and support them may be particularly apt to succeed at experiencing the unified field: “any religious
community, if it is doing its job," he explains, makes it so you are “forced to face
important issues at a much deeper level to survive as . . . [whatever you are
religiously], or even as a human," and thus provides the spiritual wrestling opportunities prerequisite for experiencing the unified field.
In addition, Rohr explains that accepting our knowledge of death increases our chances of taking spiritual advantage of potential crucible moments--and thus of experiencing the unified field:
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Painting by Scott Ketcham
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Only that which is limited and even dies grows in value and appreciation; it is
the spiritual version of supply and demand. If we lived forever, they say, we
would never take life seriously or learn to love what is. I think that is
probably true. Being held long and hard inside limits and tensions, incarnate
moments—crucibles for sure—allows us to search for and often find ‘the
reconciling third’ or the unified field beneath it all. ‘The most personal
becomes the most universal,’ Chardin loved to say. (78-9)
For each of us, the path to "value and appreciation" is personal and individual--but also like everyone else's in important ways. This pandemic year, so many of us have similarly been "held long and hard inside limits and tensions" as the deaths of loved ones and the threat of death and illness have surrounded us.
Four days before my father died of COVID-19, on the day he was released from the hospital to continue recuperating, I posted a blog post poem about "Walking November." During my walks in and around the salt marsh on November's gray and gold shortening days, I had divined--"divined" seems like just the right word here--that there was something more than just walking going on for me. The marsh, like the road in the traditional Irish blessing, seemed to be rising up to meet me. Thus, walking while fearing, worrying, grieving, and loving was providing me with a strong, indelible experience of the unified field that I'd been reading about.
Frankly, I don't think I would have trusted this experience had I not been participating in an adult education class through my synagogue that significantly enlarged my understanding of prayer and its many forms, purposes, and outcomes.
That said, my experience--of both the unified field and my trust in it--still surprised me. I was raised in family in which the imminent bad was always considered more trustworthy than any pervasive, freely given good. So just to begin to develop any capacity to believe that there could be such a thing as an underlying beneficence took a long time. Furthermore, not surprisingly, nothing in my early religious training prepared me to entertain the possibility of the following:
More than anything else, the Spirit keeps us connected and safely inside an
already existing flow, if we but allow it. We never ‘create’ or earn the
Spirit; we discover this inner abiding as we learn to draw upon our deepest
inner life. This utterly unified field is always the given. (90)
Hebrew School taught me a lot of language, stories, and religious
rituals; home taught me Jewish culture and customs. The
combined message was a sense of Jewish belonging through shared practice as opposed to through encounter with "the Spirit." That set me up for an early adult experience like the one of most “postmodern
people” that Rohr describes in his “Home and Homesickness” chapter:
For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for
the ancients. We have to do all of the ‘enchanting’ ourselves. This leaves us
alone, confused, and doubtful. There is no meaning already in place for our
discovery and enjoyment. We have to create all meaning by ourselves in such an
inert and empty world, and most of us do not seem to succeed very well. This is
the burden of living in our heady and lonely time, when we think it is all up
to us. (93)
Only as an adult did my own pursuit of spiritual knowledge and meaning, Jewish and other, lead me to
wrestle with idea of God as spirit, or Spirit, not just as the being whom we
prayed to and about, not just as the powerful, communicative being/presence in
the Bible.***** And still, I do most of my wrestling on my own.
For this reason, I was especially grateful when Rohr spoke directly of Jews
when he talked about how much, for us believer-wrestlers, “this very quiet
inner unfolding of things . . . seems to create the most doubt and
anxiety” (110):
Basic religious belief is a vote for some coherence, purpose, benevolence, and
direction in the universe, . . .. This belief is perhaps the same act of faith
as that of Albert Einstein, who said before he discovered his unified field that
he assumed just two things: that whatever reality is, it would show itself to
be both ‘simple and beautiful.’ I agree! Faith in any religion is always
somehow saying that God is one and God is good, and if so, then all of
reality must be that simple and beautiful too. The Jewish people made it
their creed, wrote it on their hearts, and inscribed it on their doorways.
(Deuteronomy 6:4-5), so they could not and would not forget it. (111)
I’ve been praying those words, which hang next to my front door, for years as a well-trained Jew, generally without
understanding the significance of “One” as the assertion of a coherent, underlying, compassionate unity or oneness--not just as a description of the number of gods in Judaism.
Still, my relatively recent shift in understanding doesn’t mean
that I’m fully on board with the idea that everything is “simple and beautiful
too.” As if he’d anticipated my doubts, Rohr says in his next paragraph, “To hold the full mystery of life is
always to endure its other half, which is the equal mystery of death and doubt.
To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still
mysterious and unknowable" (112).
So here I am still living in and among the crucibles, sensing the unified field from time to time. But I think I'm on the right
road. And if I’m right about being on the right road, I might, as Rumi says, be doing good for more than just
for me:
If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you’re causing terrible damage.
If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,
you’re helping people you don’t know
and have never seen.******
I hope so!
* Rohr, R. (2013). Falling upward: a spirituality for the two halves of life. Jossey-Bass.
** Photograph accompanying the following blog: Peggy.
(2015, November 8). Unified Field Theory and Oneness [web log].
www.new.ecumenicus.org.
*** Photograph accompanying the following blog:
Jeffrey, Colin. “A Long Way from Everything: The Search for a Grand Unified
Theory.” New Atlas, 13 May 2019,
newatlas.com/einstein-quantum-field-theory-relativity-gravity/42389/.
**** Howell, E. (2017, April 27). Unified field Theory: Tying it all together. https://www.livescience.com/58861-unified-field-theory.html.
***** One my cousins has been a source of resources and encouragement during
this search for relationship with God in and beyond me. Books and adult ed
courses have helped, too. Belonging to a synagogue for the last few years after
a long hiatus of not belonging to a Jewish community has also helped.
****** Rumi, J. (1994). Untitled Poem. In The Enlightened Heart (pp. 56). poem, HarperCollins Publishers.
******* In July 2021, Feedburner and Blogger will be parting ways, so readers of my blog who receive email notification when I post will no longer be so notified. To those who still wish to read this blog, I suggest you bookmark soalready.blogspot.com and check for new posts on the 25th of each month. So sorry for this unwelcome change and the inconvenience it creates.
