By Frances Lee Menlove

Several years ago, I attended the retirement gathering for a prominent physicist. In the middle of his brief speech, he dramatically held out both arms and said: “The most amazing thing, the most awesome thing, in my entire lifetime has been the revolution in astronomy—it is a revolution that is as big and as mind boggling as when Galileo’s observations demoted our planet from being the center of everything, to one planet traveling around the sun.”

His voice was filled with awe and even reverence as he spoke of his amazement at the radical discoveries made during his lifetime—this golden age of cosmic discovery. In the years since any of us were born, the frontiers of our universe have been pushed outward in ways that take language to its limits—beyond its limits. “Infinity squared” is the way I think about it. I know that “infinity squared” doesn’t make any logical or mathematical sense, but it speaks to me emotionally. Gazillion just doesn’t cut it.

Lend me your imagination for the next few moments, and we’ll perform a thought experiment.

Imagine that all time, from the beginning of the universe to today, were collapsed into a single year. That single year’s events would look something like this:

1 January: The big bang occurs.

2 October: Life begins on earth.

26 December: Mammals show up.

31 December, 11:53 p.m.: Homo sapiens arrive.

31 December, 11:59:50 p.m.: Recorded human history begins. (Ten seconds before midnight!)

I recently asked a professor if the above way of expressing the sweep of time was accurate. He said he uses it in his presentations—with the addition that, when children are in the audience, he always adds that the dinosaurs came on Christmas day.

Is your mind as boggled as mine is by this way of illustrating the vastness of time? If you are somehow boggle-free, let me add one of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s favorite facts about the universe:

“There are 100,000 times as many stars in the universe as sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived.”

Go ahead, boggled one, read it again: “There are 100,000 times as many stars in the universe as sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived.”

On the first day of creation, “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good” (Genesis 1:3–4, NSRV). That litany is repeated at the end of each day of creation: “And God saw that it was good.” Now that we have tried to grapple with just how puny our perceptions of space and time are, we can appreciate even more our in-the-gut knowledge that God transcends images, names, and definitions. “And God saw that it was good” takes on added gravitas, added awe, added wonder, now that scientists have given us a vastly bigger glimpse of creation.

Expressing much of the same reverence and awe as the retiring physicist did in recalling the profound revolutions in cosmology that he’d witnessed during his lifetime, a favorite religion teacher of mine confided to us his lifetime’s distillation—what he calls his “one sure thing.” That one sure thing is “to trust smallness.”

All around us we see poverty, human misery, war, troubles of every kind that we yearn to fix. But “don’t succumb to despair,” he urged us. “Trust smallness.”

What does he mean? Jesus’ words give us a hint: “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade” (Mark 4:30–32, NRSV).

The kingdom of God can arise from smallness—from mustard seeds. For example, do you remember Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the first South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town? He won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in a nonviolent struggle against apartheid in South Africa. After receiving the award, he was asked to recall some of the formative experiences of his life. He replied,

One day I was standing in the street with my mother when a white man in a priest’s clothing walked past. As he passed us he took off his hat to my mother. I couldn’t believe my eyes—a white man who greeted a black working-class woman!¹

Imagine it! A young child is imprinted—his heart engraved for life—by the mere tip of a hat; a small gesture that communicated to a small child unfeigned respect. Tutu carried that warming gesture in his heart for decades until it blossomed into one of the bravest and most compassionate revolutions the world has witnessed. A mustard seed if ever there was one!

Another story: Oscar Wilde wrote in his memoirs of walking handcuffed between two policemen from his prison cell to the Court of Bankruptcy. A crowd lined the path as he was taken on what we might call today a “perp walk.” As he trudged past the onlookers, his head bowed in humiliation, one man in the crowd “gravely raised his hat.”

Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that. . . . It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss a leper on the check. . . . I store it in the treasure-house of my heart. . . . [T]hat silent act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken and great heart of the world.²

“Where there is sorrow there is holy ground,” Wilde concluded.

My family has its own mustard seed story. My grandmother died during the flu epidemic of 1918. Only eight days passed from the first symptom until her death, leaving my grandfather a widower with five children, ages one to eleven. My mother was the middle child. My grandfather’s mother and his young sister, Vera, came to live with the family and ameliorate this tragedy.

My mother told me this mustard-seed story when I was about ten. One day, my mother’s Aunt Vera took her to downtown Logan and treated her to a store-bought haircut. In my mother’s family, haircuts normally took place in the kitchen, a bowl likely used as a shaper. But this time, Aunt Vera took my mother to town to get a store-bought hair cut. Just the two of them. None of her sisters came along. Just my mother and her aunt.

That’s it. That is the story.

Except it has lived on for decades. For some reason, that action, like the tipping or raising of a hat, cheered that little girl, told her there was a future, that she was a person of worth. This little excursion touched and warmed the heart of this motherless child for the rest of her life.

My mother was more than eighty years old the last time I heard her speak of Aunt Vera and the “real” haircut, but her voice contained the same warmth toward this beloved aunt that I remembered when I’d heard the story the first time decades earlier.³ My mother, in her sorrow, was on holy ground; and the seed of love that Aunt Vera planted sprouted, and hope sprung up.

  A mustard seed of love planted and growing is like the kingdom of God. An unprecedented tip of the hat, a respectful raise of a hat, a special excursion for a grieving child; these give us glimpses of the Kingdom. Remember the line in the Lord’s prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” As John Dominic Crossan is fond of pointing out in discussions of this passage, we are praying for the kingdom here on this earth since, we believe, heaven is already in great shape.

We live with the mystery of a cosmos more wondrous than our imaginations can grasp. This planet we call home is circling one of billions of suns. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies, perhaps 100 billion in the universe. Our earthly home, racing through space and playing dodgeball with killer asteroids, is still evolving, the boundaries of the continents not yet settled. As a result of the March 2011 mega earthquake, Japan has moved several feet closer to my home on the Oregon coast. We live on a restless planet in a restless universe.

During our lifetime—eons shorter than one second in our imaginary universal year—our notions of the universe have been completely revolutionized; the cosmos has been rocked; even time has been curved. No doubt this new understanding of the universe is transitional, just as our ancestors’ understandings were transitional.

God creates a universe full of wonders and calls it good. That is the vast, incomprehensible story. But the small story is just as staggering. Tiny seeds of love can flourish beyond the sower’s wildest imagination. There is no end to the good we can do on this planet.

Trust smallness. Jesus trusts smallness: a child, a lost coin, a sheep straying from the fold, five small loaves, two fish, a pinch of yeast, a sparrow, a mustard seed.

“Do your little bit of good where you are,” Bishop Tutu tells us; “it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” Every day we have opportunities to sow seeds of love, kindness, and forgiveness, never knowing what beauty will burst forth.

We are a marvelous mixture of dust and divinity—infinity squared and mustard seeds. These are the mysteries with which you and I keep company.

I will end with a prayer:

In a universe more wondrous than our imaginations can conceive, help us go into the world mindful that the spending of love is our one assignment. Thank you, God, for our moments of wonder, awe, and radical amazement at the power of both the very large and the very small. And God, please remind us daily not to neglect small acts of compassion so that you, in turn, might fill them with your great love. Amen.    

NOTES

1.  Desmond Tutu, “Award Ceremony Speech,”   NobelPrize.org, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_
prizes/peace/laureates/1984/presentation-speech.html (accessed 21 December 2011).

2.  Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis,” http://upword.com/wilde/de_profundis.html (accessed 28 November 2011).

3.  Vera Carter Lewis was born in 1899 in Preston, Idaho, and died in 1996 in Ogden, Utah.