Image of the galaxy M101 from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer Photo: NASA

Let me begin with two fundamental tenets of my belief system: First, I utterly and without question believe the Universe we inhabit was made by a singular, living, creative, brilliant, loving God (Whom I happen to call “Father” but you may prefer to call “Mother” or any other of the many possible appellations for our Source and Center), a Creator who got it in His mind a very long time ago, as we measure such things, to set up all this vastness for His own purposes, perhaps many purposes, but at least one of them was to eventuate, after massive expenditures of energy and time, His material daughters and sons: you and me. I cannot say that He did this “the better to know and love us” since I have no idea what His initial motivation may have been, but I do know that once we had been made as He imagined us – “in His image” – He most assuredly came to love and care for each of us, one-by-one, as deeply as any parent ever has. I know this because I have lived it, witnessed it, and observed it in my own personal experience for a lifetime, but I also know that it is, alas, impossible to prove.

And my second belief follows from the first: we earthlings are surely not alone. How can anyone even begin to believe that the earth is the only place with intelligent life in all the Grand Universe? I have always felt in my bones that there must be millions of inhabited planets strewn across the substance of space, each one boasting millions of diverse material creatures who, like we, are doing their best to get the most they can out of the lives they lead. I’m not sure how I first subscribed to this notion, but perhaps I simply came to believe the velvet of the midnight sky teems with life because it is the inescapably logical extension of a larger idea: that our nurturing God, while loving and generous, is never, ever wasteful (after all, He recycles everything) and would not have expended such a wealth of matter and energy for countless eons across billions of light-years just to give us fumbling humans – His loveable but meager earthlings so very recently arrived and rarely deserving – a starry, starry night.

Of course, I am aware that your own conclusions – the grains of truth in your own collecting thimble – may be the polar opposite of mine, but I persist because, if a truth can yearn for the light, these are joyful possibilities that hunger to be shared, and I relish the sharing.

Now, the thing is (and for the sake of discussion, regardless of your own beliefs) if God is God, then the physical logic – the science – of the material universe He created must, perforce, flow from Him just as surely as the joy to be found in a moving hymn or the inspiration from a stunning sunset. In other words, the operating, actual rules of physics must also, by definition, be the actual rules of God, Himself. And if this is true, then those like me who profess belief in Him do our fellow seekers – and Truth – a profound disservice when we dismiss proven science because it upends some long-held religious dogma or doctrine, however venerated that teaching may be. Likewise, I would ask the scientist – empiricists of all stripes, really – to be equally open-minded enough to at least allow for the possibility of a living spiritual dimension even if it has not (so far at least) been proved. There have always been uncountable trillions of microbes permeating us and the space around us, not to put too fine a point on it, but we only discovered them in the last century. “Though science courses from the Source//Who spawned, as well, the spirit//The Source cannot be proven//So, they socialize over coffee//And miss the point.”

Rudi Giuliani famously remarked not so long ago, “Truth isn’t truth,” and in the topsy-turvy world we currently inhabit a huge swath of folks apparently accept this view (perhaps because it provides anyone an excuse for intellectual laziness), but of course he is wrong. Truth, by definition and whether he likes it or not, is singular. There can ever and only be ONE Truth. That which IS, is. Hydrogen is lighter than helium because it IS, and always will be and no matter how brilliantly you may argue otherwise, this truth will not change. This is science, the realm of matter, but it is not all that matters to me. And when you have been inspired as I was by my transformative preschool visits with Christ (see previous essay “Uncle Jesus”) to spend your entire life looking for new ways to introduce Him to others that they, too, might come to love Him as you do, you take as many paths as you are able, and when you are looking for Truth without fear or favor wherever you can find it, sometimes you stumble upon things you had no idea you were even looking for; sometimes the pieces of a material puzzle you didn’t even know you were solving can simply fall into place like a gentle embrace as the new realization enfolds you. When Truth is singular, sometimes in your personal seeking you might turn over a spiritual rock only to find a physical reality underneath, and that is exactly what happened to me.

This essay surely represents my most audacious reach into the limits of possibility, but I persist, because I think these ideas are thrilling and fundamental. They lay out a constant, loving connection – a tangible connection – ever streaming from our Father at the center of all things to each one of us. But, as it directly contravenes accepted cosmological belief, it requires a slight adjustment from the current conjectural understanding of the Universe and how it works. You see, current science says that nothing is ever added to the universe; that the Big Bang was all there is, but I say my loving Father nurtures His family! The universe He made must breathe, must grow as He continues, ever and always, to send out his sum and substance from the center of His creation to the edge of the edge.

“But,” I can hear someone say, “don’t you think somebody would have noticed by now if the sum total of matter was constantly being increased, however that may happen?” Well, yes, I would answer. In fact, they already have, they just haven’t yet realized what they are seeing, and this is true in two distinct ways. First, the dark matter. What if the reason we can’t see it through our telescopes is simply because it hasn’t moved into view yet? Our nearest star is over 4 light-years away, and if it exploded today in the spring of 2023 we wouldn’t have a clue until the summer of 2027, and that’s our closest neighbor. Conversely, 99.999% of creation by my estimation is thousands, millions, even billions of light-years away, so if there has been growth to the corpus of creation in those places, best case, we might at long last notice something in a thousand years of Webb observations, and, well, that’s a millennium from now. Perhaps, I posit, that missing matter isn’t really missing at all. It is just not yet observable from Earth.

Secondly, the Higgs Field. Though it is visualized by a scientific community in thrall to a static Universe as a “field” or blanket spread out across the face of all space, I am firmly convinced that it is something much more dynamic and interesting. It is the Flow of God, itself. But, let me begin with my dark matter conjecture.

The loving Father God in Whom I believe would never create a static universe any more than a loving parent would procreate a child only to leave it to starve without any support whatever. If God is the God I love Who is ever within and beside me, He didn’t just fling you and me and a gazillion stars out into the sky like a giant Frisbee and leave us to fend for ourselves! Rather, He made a living, breathing, dynamic universe, a fertile environment where His material children might be eventuated, a place perfectly designed for us to thrive and grow and, in the fullness of time, come to love Him in return for His generosity and astonishing skills. Ours is a creation made to reflect His very nature – His Beauty, Goodness and Truth – into which He might ever pour His love-in-action: tangible support in substance and energy to sustain His vast family. And the more I have thought about it, the more clarity I have gained.

You might say that I have come to these realizations by the back door, since one would expect scientific insight to come from scientific study rather than spiritual seeking, but if God’s truth and science’s truth are one and the same, then it shouldn’t matter which door one uses to get inside. And, wonder of wonders, once you accept the possibility of a “flow of God” emanating from the center and moving outward across all space to the outer edges of creation, the solution to the ‘missing matter’ conundrum seems obvious.

Pause with me, for a moment, and ask yourself about all those stories we have read for decades about ever-more-distant galaxies we are finding billions of light years away thanks to increasingly powerful telescopes. Have you never wondered if it was not possible that the actual reality of those fifteen-billion-year-old sights we see through such a distance darkly as they were all those ages ago could not have completely changed into something quite different by now? We are told these observations as if they have never changed a whit in aeons of aeons, yet, as we have surely learned from life on earth, NOTHING made of matter stays the same. Even mountains of granite are eventually turned to sand. It is the nature of nature to erode, to change, to morph, yet we are expected to believe that these distant galaxies have not changed in fifteen billion years?

Conversely, however, if as current science suggests, no substance – matter – is ever added to the Universe – if all that IS or ever shall be, every speck of dust in the entirety of all creation, was released by that teensy-tiny corpuscle of density that became the universe in one split second, one big bang – then there is perhaps some sense in assuming that not much has changed over billions of  years. In such a scheme, things would inevitably settle into some sort of equilibrium of mutual gravity and stay that way, even if they drifted apart over time. But consider, please, that if a central source has been adding energy/matter to the Universe for all time, as I propose (and bearing in mind that our measly few decades of observation is not even enough to get a whiff of what universal processes, movements, additions, or subtractions might really be happening over billions of years) then guess what? Not only would the amount of change in the distant starry regions be completely beyond our ability to know, blinded as we are by time and distance, but the ongoing addition of that unseen mass, day in and day out, would surely have, by now, increased the overall substance of Creation enough to account for the missing matter that has so stumped observers for a generation. The gravity pull creating the conundrum, I propose, is simply that generated by matter yet too young for us to see.

Telescopes are nothing less than time machines and the farther they look, the more ancient is the truth they reveal, but God’s love is “an ever-present help in time of need” and I believe He never stops delivering His gifts of light, life and love to His creation, and consequently that our universe never stops growing, eventuating, evolving according to His vision. Even so, my adventures in astrophysical conjecture might never have begun had they not been inspired by the worldwide scientific search for “The God Particle,” or, more properly denominated, the Higgs Boson, the recent discovery/confirmation of which required the construction of the largest machine in the world, the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], placed within an underground tunnel 17 miles in circumference beneath the French/Swiss Border that took 10 years to build “in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries.” [Wikipedia]

That’s a passel of resources – billions and billions of dollars and more than a few thousand scientific lifetimes– just to observe particles that only last for a nanosecond before dissipating into nothingness, for Higgs Bosons are literal flash-in-the-pan impossibly small particles that, in and of themselves, are not all that important, but the fact that these flashes happen, as was recently proven in the LHC, does matter (no pun intended) – even matters enough to actually go to such extraordinary lengths to find them – because they confirm the existence of something infinitely greater: the “Higgs Field,” which as currently understood is the absolute condition-precedent for any matter, at all, to occur.

Now, I promise not to get too far into the weeds, but the Higgs Field is described as a sort of vast circular skirt covering the whole of the known universe. The Simple English Wikipedia definition says:

“The Higgs field is a field of energy that is thought to exist in every region of the universe. The field is accompanied by a fundamental particle known as the Higgs boson, which is used by the field to continuously interact with other particles, such as the electron. Particles that interact with the field are “given” mass and, in a similar fashion to an object passing through molasses, will become slower as they pass through it. The result of a particle “gaining” mass from the field is the prevention of its ability to travel at the speed of light.

“Mass itself is not generated by the Higgs field; the act of creating matter or energy from nothing would violate the “laws of conservation” [please note]. Mass is, however, gained by particles via their Higgs field interactions with the Higgs Boson. Higgs bosons contain the relative mass in the form of energy and once the field has endowed a formerly massless particle, the particle in question will slow down as it has now become “heavy”.

“If the Higgs field did not exist, particles would not have the mass required to attract one another and would float around freely at light speed. Also, gravity would not exist because mass would not be there to attract other mass [emphasis mine].”

In other words, if there were no Higgs Field, then there wouldn’t be anything at all. Neither you, nor me, nor the stars in the sky.

Now, one more point. In the definition above, it mentions the “Laws of Conservation” which say, simplistically speaking, that “matter is neither created nor destroyed.” Ever. Likewise there is a Law of Energy Conservation, but neither of these “laws” take the possibility of change counted in light-years rather than moments into account. Epicurus, in 350 BC, said “the sum total of things was always as it is now, and such it will ever remain.” And, the pivotal experiment to confirm the constancy of mass was conducted in 1785 by Antoine Lavoisier who placed a lit candle in a sealed glass jar and observed that when the candle had burned down and melted, the contents of the jar weighed precisely the same as it had before burning – including gasses as well as melted wax and ashen wick. Thus, mass never increases or decreases. That seems a powerfully meager experiment to base a universal constant upon, but it has gone unquestioned, apparently, for over two centuries because the increase in total Universal mass I’m suggesting happens over centuries and millennia, not hours or minutes.

Likewise, like matter, “new” energy is also a non-sequitur in this cosmological construct relied upon by our scientists for centuries, but I here, as well, I rise to question this ‘truth,’ and to encourage science to develop an experiment that would either confirm or defeat their idea that our Father adds neither mass nor energy to the firmament of His creation, because I don’t believe either of these assumptions is true, and in the fullness of time, both will be reversed. Though it may do so exceedingly, imperceptibly slowly to our eyes, creation breathes and grows as it is fed, ever and always, from the generous font of Energies at its center. And I propose that it is the Higgs Flow – the Father’s own pouring out of everything required by His creation – that is the sustaining basis of all matter. Even we.

But that is not, I believe, all there is to it. Once you get your head around the idea that there is a flow ever and always making its way through all of creation – even right through the center of each one of us 24/7 like countless neutrinos – sent by our loving Creator, you begin to realize something else. Theoretical physicists may tell us that without the Higgs Field there would be no material reality at all; that the Higgs Field blanket of “molasses” is the foundational warp without which every star, every planet, everything down to the last atom of hydrogen would simply cease to be, but as I see it, their theory, while correct as far as it goes, has stopped two stations short of the destination. They have discovered the warp but missed the weft, perceived the ocean of creation, the Higgs Field, but have yet to capture its current. And, even more importantly, they have completely overlooked the cargo it carries to the outer edges of creation because they only see it as a static field. Once you realize it is a flow, suddenly it explains so much more: the energies and discernments given to us by our loving, generous Father Who continues to perfect His growing, learning, loving Universe of material children in every moment of every day.

Now, allow me to shift the focus from science to spirit for a moment and consider something that might, at first, seem entirely unrelated: the oft-repeated idea of “living water,” or the “water of life,” which is surely one of the most cryptic concepts in the Bible. According to the site Openbible.info, there are twenty-nine scripture verses about “living water” and exactly one-hundred about the “water of life.”¹ Isaiah², Jeremiah³, and Zechariah⁴ all mention “living waters” in some form or another, the book of Revelation is overflowing with citations⁵, and perhaps the most famous Biblical reference of all is found in the story of Jesus and the “woman at the well,” when He, having no dipper of His own, asks her for a drink and then uses the opportunity to invite her to partake of the living water of God “and never be thirsty again.”⁶ But, all that said and for all the mentions in our sacred writings, none of these writers actually define it. What, exactly, are all these people talking about?

Just to make it perfectly clear, what I’m proposing is that both the “matterizing” Higgs Field/Flow and that mysterious Biblical “living water” are, wonder of wonders, the same phenomenon, merely seen through the lenses of different disciplines and different times, requiring different words to have meaning. After all, even if you were a Son of God who completely understood the science behind these concepts while living as an itinerant prophet in First Century Palestine, how would you even being to explain it to your flock without any common vocabulary of physics? Given His situation, the “living water” description is about as accurate as Jesus could be. How else could He have described it, if His goal was to assure His followers that the love of the Father is always engaged, and the more we are able to align with it – the more we can drink in of His largesse – the more we will be able to utilize the gifts He so generously and constantly delivers from the Center of the Center?

As I have come to clarify my understanding of these gifts over time, they have fallen into seven discernable benefits constantly delivered by the Flow. The first three are gifts of energy and are absolutely necessary for the lives we lead: The energies of Love, Light, Life. The next three are gifts of discernment and I include them because there is simply no evolutionary reason for their existence either as concepts or ideas. In that sense they are profound mysteries, and as they are also God-like, wonder-filled and somehow inexplicably real, I consider them additional gifts from the Heart of our generous Father, gifts also delivered via His Flow. We could live perfectly successfully without them – biologically speaking – but not nearly so well, and these are our astonishing ability to discern the ineffable essence of Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Think about it. No other animal cares a hoot about any of these, but because, I presume, our doting Father wished His children to share the wonder of His vast, utterly magnificent universe – the stunning results of His astonishing artistry, to be uplifted by His Goodness, and governed by His Truth – He has given us the means to do so. I can think of no other possibility. Can you?

Lastly, the seventh blessing of the Flow? That would be the gift of Hope, I suggest, because when you are filled with the Light and Life and Love energies of the Father and washed through with appreciation for Beauty, Goodness and Truth, Hope is unavoidable. But without them, it would utterly disappear. Hope is the loving grace note, the spiritual smile of our Father adroitly placed to complete His grand embrace of every creature in all the vastness of space.

And here’s an astonishing fact: everyone accepts that each of these gifts of the spirit – Light, Life, Love, Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Hope – is real, even the most cynical of philosophers, but none can give them any discernable origin. Where did they begin if not in the heart of God?

Let us take them one by one:

The first gift riding the divine waves, of course, is Light, itself – the only one of the seven already recognized by science as a reality – and when I use the word “Light,” I mean it in all of its usual connotations: physical, mental, emotional and, most mysteriously of all, spiritual light. This includes, of course, all the “energies” of space that would require the Higgs Field/living water to exist in any case (the strong and weak atomic forces; gravity; and the great spectrum of electro-magnetic manifestations that include our visible light but also many other forms like x-rays, heat, etc.), but my definition of Light also includes the Light of Divine peace “that passes understanding,” the alluring, consoling, protecting, adjusting, rewarding Light of the Holy Spirit with hosts of angels at Her command.

The second gift is the energy we call Love. Now, you may not think of love as a form of energy, but, if so, you have forgotten your youth. Surely one is never more fulsome than when first flung into the throes of love. And as for the Love of God, well, that must surely predate all except God, Himself – even before the “Alpha” – since it is the only conceivable reason to my mind for building the Universe in the first place. Creation is nothing less than God’s own Love in action, and the miracle of His Love is the ability it gives Him to hold each and every one of us constantly in His heart, one-by-one and One-on-one. “Were there not Love//Would be no fear//For there would be nothing to lose,//Would be no hope//For there would be nothing to gain,//Would be no life//For there would be no reason.”

And, to my mind, the third of the energy gifts delivered on the wings of His Flow is that riddle called Life. Of course, if there were no bosons, and thus, no matter, then neither would there be any living thing. But even if all the atoms and molecules required for life could somehow be assembled, I submit – in spite of recent claims to the contrary by overly optimistic biologists – without the touch of God brought on the wings of his Flow, the assemblage would simply sit, inert.

The Love of God requires us, the Light of God illumines us, and the breath of God gives us Life.

But, even as beautifully, lovingly created as we are, without the next three gifts – those of discernment – almost all of creation’s blessings would tragically pass us by, utterly unnoticed. Truly the keys to life well lived, the discernments of Beauty, Goodness and Truth are capacities that I presume to have come from God since I can conceive of no other possible source. Consider: it contributes nothing to our evolutionary success to be awed by the Beauty of a dragonfly or transported by the colors of a sunrise, and yet we are. Goodness? Find me any other species in all the great array of nature’s diversity that has ever even approached the ideas of “right” and “wrong” – the “knowledge of good and evil” – and yet we are consumed by such judgments from birth until our very last breath. And Truth? Well, we could discuss the “truth of Truth” forever, but no one can deny the healthy instinct that resides within each of us for telling truth from falsehood: the Spirit of Truth.

No, our appreciation of Beauty, delight in Goodness and awareness of Truth are discernments that must have come from somewhere, but they didn’t arise organically. Nature cannot account for them, only Heavenly nurture. No other beings throughout the entire evolutionary history of earth have even come close to conceiving of such things, much less attaining the levels of perception necessary to inspire the building of great museums to beauty, temples to goodness or tribunals for truth, and yet, by God’s own Grace, we, His grandchildren, have done these things.

And, finally, the seventh gift of the flow of the Father is a special one because it is not carried across the universe on waves of living water like the other six, but springs naturally, unbidden, from the human heart in response to God’s generosity: the gift of Hope. For – at least it seems to me – even the most destitute, downtrodden, or abased of us, once attuned to the Father’s Love, Light, Life, Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, cannot fail but find Hope there, as well. Who could remain discouraged when showered in a constant stream with such rich and wondrous treasures? Hope is the bridge that carries us safely over life’s deadly chasms, the light at the end of every tunnel, and our never-failing spiritual salve, always at the ready to embrace us with its assuaging power, to lift us up and carry us forward past the inevitable disappointments of a material life. And, I believe, the living waters of the Father are the fount of all hope.

And, so, there you have it: my take on the Flow of God, on Living Water, on the extraordinary generosity of our Source and Center Who has ordained these things from the beginning, Who set in motion our great Universe that in the fullness of time it might become populated by many diverse will-creatures made by Him to learn of Him that all might ultimately come to know and love Him. For it is already very clear that He knows and loves us, a reality that we will explore in the third and final essay in this series, “The Love of God: Uncut Diamonds.”

Thank you for coming along and please remember me in your prayers!

GTW

Originally published March 7, 2014; Seventh revision: April 8, 2023

© 2023 by George Thomas Wilson, all rights reserved

¹  http://www.openbible.info/topics/water_of_life

² Isaiah 58: “¹⁰ if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. ¹¹ And the Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your desire with good things,and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.”

³ Jeremiah 2: “¹² Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, ¹³ for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that cn hold no water.”

⁴ Zechariah 13: “¹ On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness.”

⁵ Revelation 22:1 (epigraph); 21:6: “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.”; 7: 17: “For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

⁶ Gospel of John 4: 1-15: “Now when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John ² (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), ³ he left Judea and departed again to Galilee. ⁴ He had to pass through Samaria. ⁵ So he came to a city of Samaria, called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. ⁶ Jacob’s well was there, and so Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. ⁷ There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ ⁸ For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. ⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. ¹⁰ Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ ¹¹ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?’ ¹³ Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ ¹⁵ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.’”

⁷ https://inpraiseofangels.com/2020/01/17/the-family-of-god-uncle-jesus-sixth-posting/, the First Thread

⁸ Matthew 5:48, King James Version

⁹ Matthew 3:13: “¹³ Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. ¹⁴ John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ ¹⁵ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented. ¹⁶ And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; ¹⁷ and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’” Revised Standard Version