The Life-Light
Photo Credit: Ryan Klinck
By Andrea Lingle
The Word was first,
The Word present to God,
God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
In readiness for God from day one.
Everything was created through him;
Nothing—not one thing!—
Came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
And the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn’t put it out.
John 1:1–5 The Message
In 1964 Robert W. Wilson and Arno A. Penzias were fiddling with a new antenna, all shiny and bright out of the box. And they couldn’t get it to work. No matter what they tried, it kept picking up static. It seemed, no matter where they pointed their instrument, they kept hearing a smooth, constant fuzz. Frustrated, they calibrated and cleaned and adjusted, trying to clear up the disturbance. They even tried cleaning off stray bird poop—just in case.
The disturbance was Cosmic Background Radiation, or, as best I can tell, the reverberation of the initial expansion of the universe—or Big Bang. Finding this disturbance won them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978.
Isn’t that wonderful.
Their disturbance was really a discovery.
And here is the most amazing part. Because the cosmic background radiation is uniform, it indicated to other people, with different educational backgrounds and life-styles, that this means that the tiniest sliver of a moment after the universe began to expand, the fundamental physical forces in our universe were unified (what happened right at the moment of expansion seems to be a mystery). Things like space and time and gravity were one thing.
When the universe broke open into light and heat and gravity it experienced a disunification. Perhaps one might say a death. An exuberant, bombastic, extremely long death. The universe was no longer unified. No longer simple. No longer with itself.
And from this has come life. Your life, my life, flowers, bees, and butterflies. From this has come music and oceans and a baby’s hiccups. Laughter, tears, joy, and loss. Life. The ultimate disturbance.
And what was it that called this light and motion into being? Would you be satisfied with Mystery?
How about Grace?
How about Love?