The Spiritual Nature of All Things

This is the written version of the Sunday sermon I gave at the 2024 Midwest Pilgrims retreat.

Last year it came up in a conversation that I studied physics. Someone asked me if I thought physics was a spiritual discipline. I had to think about that for a bit, but eventually I told her yes. The image that came to my mind was this cross section of a GaN nanowire. I was analyzing it with my advisor and there was this moment of awe as we started to understand its properties. GaN can have a cubic crystal structure or a hexagonal crystal structure. This nanowire had both types fitting together. Additionally, parts of the nanowire with the same crystal type had the structure oriented in different directions. The boundaries between the sections are a little messy. They aren’t perfectly comfortable with each other, but they still managed to grow together and become one thing. I find it amazing and awe-inspiring to figure out how our universe works. The clever ways humans take advantage of that knowledge is a marvel to me.

I chose to study physics because I like to start at the beginning of things. I knew that physics was the basis for chemistry and chemistry was the basis for biology. If you were to order matter by size, it goes something like this:
◦ subatomic particles
◦ atoms
◦ molecules
◦ cells
◦ organisms
◦ ecosystems
◦ the earth
◦ planets and stars
Studying subatomic particles and atoms is typically associated with physics. Studying atoms and molecules is chemistry, molecules and cells is microbiology, organisms and ecosystems is macrobiology, ecosystems and the Earth is earth sciences, and planets and stars is astrophysics. We’re back to physics! I like to think that physics encompasses all of science. During my schooling I did research in material science. One of the materials that I have experience studying is carbon.

One familiar form of carbon is diamond. If you have a diamond ring, the diamond is made of carbon atoms. The carbon atoms in the middle are all bonded to four other carbon atoms. The crystal structure looks like this:

These bonds are very strong and they are equally strong in all directions. This makes diamond the hardest natural material.

Another familiar form of carbon is graphite. The “lead” in a pencil isn’t made out of the element lead. The lead of a pencil is graphite, which is another form of carbon. These carbon atoms are arranged in sheets of hexagons. The bonds between the carbon atoms in an individual sheet are very strong. The bonds between the sheets are weak, so the sheets slip against each other which allows you to make marks on a piece of paper.

Graphite and diamond are both made of the exact same element, but the atoms are arranged in a different structure. The structural difference gives these two materials very different properties. The exact same element can have opposite properties when it is in a different structure.

I’m going to make a kind of silly analogy: You are a carbon atom. You will behave differently when you are in different social structures. You will behave differently when you are in different spiritual structures. I’m going to say that the church is like diamond. It can look very pretty. It can be hard to alter. The atoms on the surface of a diamond are in energetically unfavorable positions. Atoms in the center of the diamond are bonded to four other carbon atoms. Atoms on the surface are not. They may only be bonded to two other carbons. They want to have more bonds so they can be more comfortable. The surface atoms may deform the lattice structure to stay on. They may skitter along the surface hoping to find a better spot with a ledge. They may pop off the surface altogether and may or may not ever get back on. Carbon atoms on the surface of a diamond will readily bond to other atoms like hydrogen or oxygen. These surface bonds affect the properties of the crystal. Depending on what the carbon bonds to, the surface may be hydrophilic or hydrophobic, insulating or conducting. The surface of a diamond can be engineered to meet specific needs.

It’s energetically unfavorable to be at the boundary of the church too. Some of us are engaged with the church, but feel discomfort. Some of us have found church engagement untenable for whatever mix of reasons. I want to suggest that you can engineer your church relationship to meet your life’s needs. People at the boundaries of the church have extra influence with how the church interacts with the outside world. You can decide what that looks like for you.

For me, pilgrimage is like graphite. It is a space where I can experience what it feels like to be in a different spiritual structure. I always make new connections and new relationships here, and my brain is flooded with new ideas. I always feel so creatively energized after pilgrimage. A pencil is a symbol of creativity and learning, so graphite works really well as a metaphor here. For me, going to pilgrimage is a totally different experience than going to church. At pilgrimage I can communicate my spiritual experiences in different ways than I am allowed to at church.

There are other forms of carbon. If you have a spherical shape it’s called a fullerene. You might have heard this called a buckyball. There can be balls inside of balls and that’s called a carbon onion. A single sheet of graphite is called graphene. Graphite and graphene can be rolled into a cylinder to form carbon nanotubes. The sheets can be rolled in multiple orientations and that affects the properties of the carbon nanotubes. They can be either conducting or semiconducting. That small change affects the material’s properties. Engineering is all about creating the correct properties for the desired application. The end goal dictates your parameters. If your spiritual life isn’t giving you the desired result, experiment with structure. Even small changes affect the properties!

Carbon bonds not just with itself, but with so many other elements in so many other structures. This is the basis for organic chemistry and biology. We say that we have ‘carbon-based life’ because it is such a prevalent element in the molecules and compounds that support our existence. Science fiction writers sometimes try to imagine what life could be like without an abundance of carbon, but the fact is: we really don’t know. This magical life—our bodies, minds, souls, the whole experience—life as we know it exists because carbon combines so readily with other elements.

I want to take a break from science for a bit and talk about God as the creator of life. Years ago I read Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. This taught me that early societies worshiped female deities and tended to envision Her as being Mother Earth, often a fertility goddess. Later societies tended to worship male deities and imagined a separation from this Father. Often this was a sun god, inconceivably far away. I read that, and I wanted both!!! The ideas of earth-Mother and sun-Father are compatible. We hear about sun-Father all the time at church. He lives in the celestial kingdom, represented by the sun.

Many of us ache for a deeper connection with earth-Mother (Sometimes we call her Heavenly Mother. The earth is in the heavens, thank you Copernicus.) A few years back, so many of us came to pilgrimage wearing tree necklaces as a symbol of the divine feminine. I’ve come to understand the tree as representing an individual’s need for both divine feminine and masculine. The tree needs nutrients from the soil of earth-Mother, the god of here and now. The tree also needs light from the sun-Father, the god of yearning for something inconceivably far away. The tree needs both of those in order to grow. I see sun-Father and earth-Mother as analogies for different aspects of divinity. I see them as different parts of the same thing. If the concept of god is a little itchy for you, when I say ‘god’ you can think ‘the source of connection and relationship’. In physics terms, that’s what gravity and electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces do: they create relationships and connections between matter.

We’re all familiar with Moses 1:39. “This is my work and my glory: to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man[kind]” I interpret that as sun-Father’s work. If you flip the words, you get a feminine version: Earth-Mother’s work and glory is to bring to pass mortality and temporal life. Temporal life is a time of darkness, a time of unknowing, a time of growth. I want to share a quote from The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit (p. 185).

“Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next….Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born.”

That’s beautiful. At some point though, this gender binary wasn’t big enough for me. I took my older daughters to do baptisms at the temple. I stayed outside with my youngest. It was a beautiful summer day and she didn’t want to go in the stake center to play with the other kids, so we spread a blanket under a tree and played games. She wondered about a maple spinner that whirled down next to us so we started talking about plant reproduction. There were daylilies all around the temple, so we dissected one. We stained our fingers with the pollen from the anthers of the stamen. We felt the sticky stigma and looked for the ovary in the pistil. She was amazed that the flowers could be boys and girls at the same time! There is an artificial binary inside the temple. One of my daughters had told me that it seemed wrong to her that women have to be baptized for women and men have to be baptized for men. The natural world, with all its varieties of God’s creations, shows us so many other ways of being.

Where do God’s creations come from? Let’s start with how science understands the creation of the elements. I’m going to tell you the story of one of my favorite scientists. Her name is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. She was born in England in the year 1900, and she loved science from the time she was a little girl. She started studying paleobotany at Cambridge. There had been a recent total solar eclipse in the southern hemisphere. Cecilia was lucky to get a ticket to an astronomy lecture where Arthur Eddington was presenting the results from his observation of the eclipse off the coast of Africa. His observations confirmed that Einstein’s theory of general relativity was correct: the mass of the sun does warp space. Cecilia was mesmerized. She went home and wrote the whole lecture down from memory and quickly changed her major to physics. The women’s college had a telescope that wasn’t being used. She restored it to working order, began hosting observation nights, and started keeping a journal of topics she wanted to study. In England, there were no research jobs available to women in physics. She could only be a teacher in a girl’s school. Cecilia didn’t want to teach, she wanted to do research. She won grants and fellowships that allowed her to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts and study at the Harvard observatory. The director there wanted her to measure how bright the stars are, but Cecilia had her own funding, so she could study whatever she wanted. She wanted to figure out what the stars are made of.

Light from the stars is made up of lots of colors of light all added together. You can separate the light into its spectrum using a prism. You can do the same thing with starlight. Stars have dark lines in their spectra. So does the sun. Different types of stars have the dark lines in different parts of the rainbow. The dark lines aren’t completely black, just not as bright as the surrounding colors. Cecilia took careful measurements of the dark lines in the spectra of many stars and found that all types of stars are mostly made of hydrogen and helium. Previously, people thought that the proportion of elements in the stars would be similar to the proportions found on Earth. Cecilia’s thesis was published as a book, and it helped astronomers figure out how stars shine and how elements are made within stars.

How do stars make new elements? They take the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms and fuse them together to make helium. This reaction gives off energy that warms up the Earth and makes life possible. Once the star runs out of hydrogen in the center, it starts fusing helium into heavier elements. The types of elements a star will eventually create depends on the star’s mass. The mass also affects what happens at the end of a star’s life: whether it will become a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. I’m going to talk about how a neutron star is made. The iron in the core of the star has a nucleus surrounded by an electron cloud. The gravitational force is too strong for the atoms, so the electrons are crushed into the protons. When the electron and proton combine, it creates a neutron. A neutron is much smaller than an atom with its electron cloud, so the core of the star is suddenly much smaller. The outer parts of the star fall inward and then rebounds in a supernova explosion. The heavy elements created by the star are recycled to help form new stars and rocky planets, like Earth. The Earth that we are on right now is recycled old star. Earth and everything on it is made out of stardust. Our sun is mostly made of hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang, but it also contains heavy elements from a more ancient star, from something that came before. So the sun is also made of recycled stardust, just like the Earth.

We are like these atoms under pressure. Women at church experience pressure on their orbitals from things like correlation and excommunications and church policies. This pressure isn’t comfortable, but it’s also not bad: it can be transformative. If women transform from an atom to a neutron, it can lead to a creative explosion with far-reaching, long-lasting consequences. The comments on the church’s Instagram post after the Relief Society broadcast was a small explosion. It was exciting because of the mass of women telling their experience directly to the institutional church.

The Sun and Earth have very different properties and different proportions of the elements, but the origins of their heavy elements are the same. I’ve been saying that the sun is Father and the earth is Mother and also that the sun and earth both originated from something earlier. As old as the sun and the Earth are, it all came from something even more ancient. I see sun-Father and earth-Mother also being from something older and bigger. Father and Mother are tiny but crucial parts of God. The ancient source made more than just the Earth and Sun. It also made the other planets, other stars and solar systems, other galaxies. As far as humans have been able to discover, life is the exception, not the rule in the universe. Celestial bodies that we have not deified have inspired curiosity and motivated human innovation. Studying astronomy has fueled so much innovation and technology. We’ve been to the moon, gotten robots to crawl around Mars, and sent Voyager and other space probes out into the unknown. Studying astronomy has given us new software, GPS, x-rays, CT scans, PET scans, MRIs and more. This is all because humans want to know more about black holes, dark matter, galaxies millions of lightyears away, exoplanets and the possibility of other life, and the origins of the universe.

Ancient stars created the atoms of the Sun and the Earth. The atoms of the Earth constantly rearrange themselves. I want to share an excerpt from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (p. 3)

“The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself—shape, size, color, species-affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly. That’s much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of you head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.”

Wow! I am all those things, even though I don’t remember being them. And they are all me for this brief moment in time. I am the air the dinosaurs breathed. I am the water molecule that hid at the bottom of the ocean for a thousand years before finding its way to my water bottle this morning. This makes me feel so small, but also so connected to all of creation. I am the dust of the Earth. You are the dust of the Earth. We are stardust. Amen.