[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Higher Math

All my life I've had a problem with high-level abstraction. The 
minute we leave the pavement, it seems, my mind starts stuttering and 
goes into a sort of frozen panic. Which means that standard math 
teaching tends to leave me twirling in a combination of anxiety and 
ADD, and frustrated to boot. Why all these silly proof-things? I did 
manage to get through university statistics and calculus, but only 
just barely.

We do have a mathematician in the family, and I have it on good 
assurance from her that mathematics at the high level really is full 
of elegance and beauty; the problem isn't the tune but my 
tone-deafness to it. She is a truthful person and I believe her.

I also know, from taking the occasional pulse, that physics continues 
to hunt for a Grand Unifying Theory that will tie everything together 
from galaxies to nanoparticles. As usual, I get lost when they start 
talking about string theory, but when I saw an article in this week's 
_New Yorker_ (having slithered past the front cover), I did sit down 
to read it. The _New Yorker_ has a long history of making things 
intelligible, and I had hopes.

I didn't have any trouble with the math or physics, but I did get 
stopped in my tracks by one statement. The subject of the article, 
Garrett Lisi, was quoted thusly: "'The only thing that makes sense.' 
he said, 'is if the universe is beautiful and simple and elegant.'"

Oh?

Okay, I'm not up in the airplane, high above the clouds, with the 
mathematicians and physicists, and perhaps I don't see the world as 
clearly as they do. I'm down here on the (currently July-sticky) 
ground. But who said that the universe MUST be beautiful and simple 
and elegant?

What if it's actually muddled and messy and complicated?

Of course this has nothing to do with physics, which I will leave to 
the physicists and the real mathematicians, and may they revel in the 
beauty of their work (remembering always that beauty must also be 
true, and no, the two are not necessarily identical). I'm thinking 
more of the ways of the soul, not their professional province. The 
ways of the soul may not be straight and uncomplicated. In fact, they 
can be quite remarkably inelegant, involving panicky charges off into 
the undergrowth and all sorts of sincere but mistaken choices.

I'm thinking about this because I've just come through a particular 
process that's usually exceedingly complicated, even  Byzantine, and 
time-consuming and paperwork-heavy -- and almost at the very end of 
it, the person in charge realized that there was a quick, neat, and 
quite elegant solution to the problem that would take a couple of 
weeks instead of months, if I collected and handed in *these* pieces 
of paper instead of *those* pieces of paper. So I went off and did 
just that, phoned and got faxes sent, and the quick and elegant 
solution will be in place next week.

But the process... ah, the process....

We'd gotten quite far along the complicated path, the muddled and 
messy one, before we took the clean and elegant shortcut. I swear up 
down and sideways that this was the Holy Spirit in action. I *needed* 
to take the complicated path, for a major piece of healing and 
forgiveness. The process (which many see as an ordeal) had, in fact, 
liberated me and brought me deep blessings. I had relinquished the 
need for judgment and could act with disinterested love, and I 
experienced real love along the way. And now when the Tempter 
whispers at my shoulder, "Well, what about justice?" I can tell 
Whatever-It-Is to go fry ice.

I think I prefer a Creation in which the Creator allows things to be 
muddled and messy and complicated, because that's when the soul's 
work often gets done. Math and physics entirely aside, when we insist 
on our souls being beautiful and simple and elegant, we are usually 
in denial about something pretty important. That beauty is not true. 
But the beauty we step into after the difficult path *is* true, and 
perhaps the harder the path, the deeper the beauty and truth.

I'll leave the Theory of Everything up to the people who love that 
higher math, and more power to them. I'm sure God appreciates their 
deep delight in His equations, even if they think they found them for 
themselves instead of realizing that they'd stumbled over them. 
There's joy up there in the stratosphere, and I'm sure that makes God 
beam with pleasure.

But there's joy down here in the muss and the muddle too, over a 
single sinner saved. God takes huge joy in that.



*****************************************
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain