July 7, 2024

On the “God Particle” and the Blessings of Angst

A few years ago scientists made a big discovery at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.  They smashed a couple of protons into each other at near light speeds, and up popped the evidence of a hitherto unconfirmed subatomic particle.  It’s a boson, which is just a fancy name for photons, and some other elusive particles that flash into and out of existence when particles collide.  This boson is very much the particle that was predicted to exist by Peter Higgs back in 1964.  So this particle, now called the Higgs boson, confirmed the existence of the related “Higgs field” that acts a kind of cosmological sticky soup permeating all of space and slowing down other particles, causing them to acquire mass.  This process is called the “Higgs mechanism.”  The “Higgs mechanism” is simply the generation of masses for the W⁺, W⁻ and Z weak gauge bosons through the breaking of electroweak symmetry.  Now the big question.  Do I really understand everything I just said?  Not entirely.

But here’s where it gets interesting for us.  Somewhere along the line (to the consternation of physicists), media types started referring to the Higgs boson as “the God particle,” perhaps assuming that since the Higgs field would be responsible for the generation of mass, and therefore everything we see in the universe, it would be somehow the key to creation itself, or more likely, media types thought calling it the “God particle” would sell more newspapers, magazines, and air-time.  The truth is it’s not really God, it’s simply a theory about how the physics of the universe operates (which, I suppose, could mean about the same thing, depending on your conception of God).  But it’s not even anything new; physicists have been doing math and physics based on calculations for the Higgs field ever since Higgs came up with the idea.  They had already taken that theoretical line of research almost as far as they go with present knowledge.  So, physicists didn’t really get so excited about the realization that this new boson is pretty much the same particle that Higgs envisioned.  What really got their engines revving is the possibility that it would turn out to be somewhat different than the classical Higgs boson.  Because that would mean they’d have to go back to the drawing board and take up a whole new line of research and investigation.  That’s what really turns them on.  Therein lies my message today: a complicated, confusing, unknown, and angst-producing world is the best kind of world to live in.  Isn’t it lucky that’s the one we’ve got?

I was driven to this notion when I started to read the lectionary for today and saw that those who compile the lectionary readings had decided in their wisdom to leave out some verses from the passage in 2 Samuel you heard this morning.  In your bulletin, it says the reading is 2 Samuel 5:1-10.  I have to confess, I fudged a bit.  The actual lectionary reading, and the one I had Barbara read for you this morning, leaves out verses six through eight.  Well, you know me; I couldn’t resist looking to see what they decided to skip over.  Here it is:

“The king and his men marched to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, ‘You will not come in here, even the blind and the lame will turn you back’ – thinking, ‘David cannot come in here.’  Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion, which is now the city of David.  David had said on that day, ‘Whoever would strike down the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, those whom David hates.’ Therefore it is said, ‘The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.’”

David wants his men to attack the blind and the lame in Jerusalem because he hates them.  Yeah, I can understand why the lectionary people would want to skip over those verses.  As you can imagine, this really got me going.  So I started to dig.  What’s going on here?  Well, it turns out these three verses are considered by most biblical scholars to be so corrupted as to be practically non-translatable.  In other words, with the passing down of the story, first orally, from generation to generation, and then in written form, transcribed and recopied innumerable times, the words got jumbled and truncated to the point that transcribers were struggling to make sense of them and so revised them even further.  So translators are left trying to make sense of what has been passed down to us in Hebrew which, according to the best I’m able to do, translates the words of David most literally as, “Whoever would strike down the Jebusite and struggle with [something – which may mean a water shaft] and the lame and the blind, hated by David’s soul.”  All of this leads to the question, what might the original sentences have been?  There’s no way to know.  But there’s an intriguing possibility.  If one reads some later accounts in the Bible, in Joshua and Judges we find these words: “the Jebusites live with the people of Judah in Jerusalem to this day.”  So, David did not wipe out or drive out all the Jebusites when he conquered Jerusalem.  So it would be reasonable to assume that some kind of amnesty was accorded to the Jebusites that would have been set down in a retelling of the story, such as an account like this in 2 Samuel.  Add to this notion something else I discovered in doing my own translation.  If you move one little dot from above the left side of a letter to above the right side of the letter, it changes that letter from a sin to a shin, and so changes what the word might be.  The translation might go from, “the lame and the blind, hated by David’s soul . . .” to “the lame and the blind, sublime to David’s soul . . .”  Now, I’m no Hebrew authority, so don’t put a lot of stock in my half-baked notions here.  But if I’ve lost you in all this linguistic ruminating, that’s OK, because here’s the point of all this: It’s the corrupted text, the part that doesn’t make sense, that offers the most intriguing area of study, and yields a potential insight (at least an hypothesis) that could make the passage mean just about the opposite of what it seems – and could shed a gracious light on an otherwise ugly scenario.  That’s the kind of thing that really turns me on – just like the physicists get turned on when the experimental results throw them for a loop.

I think this has everything to do with what the Apostle Paul was getting at in his second letter to the Corinthians.  He talked about a “thorn” that was given to him in the flesh.  We don’t know what that was, apparently some physiological problem that he struggled with through at least his adult life – maybe a chronic disease, or a physical impairment, or epilepsy, who knows?  But Paul saw in this thorn in the flesh something of great value.  He rejoiced in it, and said, “Whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”

You and I yearn for a simpler life.  We’d like to be free from travail, exempt from frustration.  We imagine that the best in life are those days when we zip effortlessly from one simple routine to another without any glitches.  We dread the thought of having our plans interrupted, our dreams crumpled, our expectations frustrated.  And we’ve got it all backwards.  We could learn a lesson from the physicists and from the apostle Paul.  It’s the hitches in our plans that offer the greatest possibility for finding new directions.  It’s the places where we get tripped up that afford us the best chance of learning something.  It’s the struggles and difficulties of life that point the way to a deeper and more meaningful existence.  Angst is not our enemy; it’s a blessing!

Stop and consider for a moment what life would be if everything were simple and always went smooth as silk – no troubles, no worries, no surprises, no glitches.  Sounds like paradise, right?  Think again.  Nothing new; nothing challenging.  Nothing to adjust to and become more of a person because of.  Without the possibility of discovering something dreadful there is no possibility of discovering something full of wonder.  Without dead-ends there are no new roads to travel.

Here’s my thought.  What if the angst that seems to be part of our lives is, in fact, like a Higgs field permeating the very fabric of our existence and making life possible?  What if every event, every encounter, every experience of life moves through this field encountering angst and gets slowed down enough to acquire true essence – like a quark or an electron gains mass moving through the Higgs field?  If the analogy is apt, then you and I couldn’t really exist – we wouldn’t be people of substance – without the traumas, frustrations, and pains that are our constant companions.  In fact, these are our treasures, because they so invariably point the way to new possibilities and larger lives.  They strengthen and teach us.  When you stop to think about it, maybe this all does have to do with a sort of “God particle.”  Maybe the fact that existence is chock-a-block full of challenging, eye-opening, soul-stirring frustrations and problems is proof enough for the existence of the Almighty.

So, I leave you with the words of Paul: “Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”