Text of the First Part of a Meditation given by Father Stephen Morrison, o Praem, of the Premonstratensian Canons of Chelmsford, at the Recollection held at the Little Oratory on Saturday 25th March 2017. The second part will be published tomorrow.
Prayer: O Jesu, vivens in Maria, veni et vive in famulis tuis, in Spiritus sanctitatis tuae, in plenitudine virtutis tuae, in veritate virtutum tuarum, in perfectione viarum tuarum, in communione mysteriorum tuorum, dominare omni adversae potestate in Spiritu tuo ad gloriam Patris. Amen. (Abbé Charles de Condren, Cong Orat. 1588-1641)O Jesus, living in Mary, come and live in Thy servants, in the spirit of Thine own holiness, in the fullness of Thy power, in the reality of Thy virtues, in the perfection of Thy ways, in the communion of Thy mysteries, - have Thou dominion over every adverse power, in Thine own Spirit, to the glory of Thy Father. Amen.
Welcome to this Lady Day retreat day, and thank you for
inviting me! What a great feast this is, especially for us as Englishmen –
since we have at Walsingham a shrine known as “England’s Nazareth,” and we are
celebrating the feast of the Annunciation of Gabriel to Our Blessed Lady in
that holy house which across the centuries has inspired so much devotion. If
you go to Nazareth to see the Basilica of the Annunciation, you will see the
famous Latin inscription: “Hic Verbum Caro Factum Est” – Here the Word became Flesh. And in just a few words, words at which
we genuflect each time they are read at Mass, is summarized the greatest ever
event of human history: the Incarnation. God became a man, and dwelt among us.
I want to talk about something slightly different today… an
exercise for the brain, before we feed the soul, as it were. I want to tell you
about something which happened to me recently: while I was at school, I hated
studying Mathematics. I thought I was useless at it. But I always knew that,
somehow, I thought sometimes in a mathematical way; I was aware of shape and
proportion, of measuring, calculating and estimating. So it was a great
surprise to meet a young lady parishioner of ours who is a maths teacher, who
succeeded where my two mathematician uncles had failed, since she told me I
absolutely could understand and enjoy
mathematics, if I wanted to. True to her word, a short while later a book
arrived in the post, entitled “Alex’s Adventures in Numberland,” by Alex
Bellos. I devoured it. The second volume swiftly followed: predictably,
entitled “Alex through the Looking Glass.” As an aside, I recommend these books
as an interesting introduction to the world of numbers for those of you who,
like me, thought it was beyond you. Incidentally, I noticed that the Lewis
Carol references were clearly lost on the American audience, where these two
books were published under different titles, respectively: “Here’s Looking at
Euclid” and “The Grapes of Math.” Which I thought was pretty hilarious.
What I particularly liked was the fact that numbers, when
you think about them, can boggle the mind. And just as in theology and
philosophy, maths has its mysteries. No surprise then, that the ancient
philosophers were also mathematicians: one only has to think of Pythagoras,
Plato, even Saint Augustine… who all contemplated, according to their gifts,
the harmony of the spheres and the order of Creation in numerical as well as
conceptual terms.
Children love numbers. Perhaps some of you have helped
children learning to count; they start with their fingers, and count to ten,
then they learn more numbers, up to 20… and so on up to 100. When they are
starting to learn, numbers like 90 seem huge,
until they grow a little more and a number like 1000 seems pretty big. Once I
was counting with my little cousin Daniel, and he got to about 25, before
looking confused. Thereafter I said a number and he said the next one: 36, 37,
38… and then, things got a little odd. He blurted out “Sixty!” – so I followed
with 61. What would he do now? He had heard of some bigger numbers, and these
now came out, in no particular order: “70! 84! A hundred and twelve!” I was
just about to say “113” when he blasted out “INFINITY! I win.” And the game
ended.
Infinity… that mathematical mystery which has tortured and
enthused mathematicians in equal measure, even in our own times when computers
have overtaken mental and mechanical arithmetic, and given us prime numbers so
large that we cannot imagine them, and the digits of the infamous “irrational
number” Pi (3.14159…) have been calculated to many trillions of decimal places.
Even before examining the nature of infinity, large numbers
already make the mind boggle, and how quickly one can get to them. No wonder
people count sheep in order to get to sleep – the mind can only cope with so
much! In the book of Genesis, we read: “And God brought Abram outside, and
said, ‘Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number
them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’” (Gen 15:5) Even
with the most sophisticated telescopes and galaxy-gazing technology known to us
today, new stars are always being counted and named. The sheer size of the
universe – constantly expanding, we are told – is baffling to us. The Psalmist
sings to us in Ps 147: “Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our
God; … He determines the number of the stars, he gives to all of them their
names. Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond
measure.” (Ps. 147:1,4-5)
If God’s understanding is infinite, man’s is certainly not…
There is a charming myth, which some of you may know, concerning the invention
of the game of Chess. It illustrates well how sometimes human beings can
underestimate number and quantity entirely. The scene is either Persia or India
– there are several variations on this story – and the venerable Sage who
invented the game of chess inspires a King with enthusiasm for the game also.
The King becomes so enamoured of the new game that he sets the Sage a
chess-challenge, with the promise of a prize to the victor. The Sage agrees,
and then proceeds to beat the King at chess. The King, faithful to his promise,
says to the Sage, “Ask what you will as a reward, and I will grant it.” The
wise old Sage says, “I am fond of rice. All I ask of is this; there are 64
squares on this chessboard. Place a grain of rice on the first square, then two
grains on the second square, and carry on until the 64th square,
doubling the previous square’s quantity each time.” The King laughed and said,
“Is that all you want as a prize?! Some rice?! Of course, you should have it.”
The courtiers then proceed to lay the grains of rice on the squares of the
Chessboard as instructed.
On the first square, there is one grain of rice. On the
second, 2. On the third, 4. On the fourth, 8. On the fifth, 16. On the sixth,
32. On the seventh, 64, and so on. At the last square on the first row, there
are 128 grains of rice. So far, so manageable. On the second row, things
escalate a bit. Half-way along, the total is up to 2,048. By the end of the
row, the total number of rice grains would need to be 32,868. The courtiers
begin to look worried. They calculate quickly the amounts for the remaining
squares. Even with just half the chess board covered, they are already at 2 billion
grains of rice. In order to fulfil the Sage’s “innocent” request, the number of
grains of rice on the sixty-fourth and last square of the chessboard was
astronomically huge. Adding up all the
rice grains now on the chessboard, the total number of grains of rice would be:
18 quintillion 446 quadrillion 744 trillion 73 billion 709 million 551
thousand, six hundred and fifteen. The prize would weigh over 460 billion metric
tons, which would be a heap of rice much, much larger than Mount Everest. This
is around 1,645 times the global production of rice in 2014. Allegedly such an
amount of rice would be sufficient to cover the whole territory of India with a
layer of rice a metre thick. At ten grains of rice per square inch, the above
amount would require rice fields covering twice the surface area of the Earth,
oceans included. The debt could not possibly be paid…
How quickly, by simply doubling, did the chessboard take us
up to numbers my nephew could not possibly have imagined existed. 264-1
is a convenient shorthand for this number, but it’s still amazing, an
unthinkable quantity. And yet, although Daniel might have enjoyed the activity
(for a while, at least), one cannot count up to infinity. While you count, you
are in the realm of the finite. The mystery of the infinitely large, or the
infinitesimally small, will always baffle the human brain. The fact that we
cannot calculate the exact area of a
circle except by approximation, in practice, by using Pi to as many decimal
places as we need, is a timely reminder of the limits of our reason. Some
things are beyond us. The universe is steeped in mystery. This should be no
surprise to the believer: for God, as the Scriptures remind us, is eternal,
omnipotent, and infinite: “the Alpha and the Omega, who was, who is, and who is
to come.” As such, we cannot comprehend him totally; if we could, he would not
be God. We can try and imagine the breadth of the Universe, and fail to grasp
its magnitude at all. We can try and imagine no universe, no created thing, no
God, just oblivion – try imagining absolutely nothing – and our brains hurt trying. St Augustine says: “The past
and boundless eternity during which God abstained from creating man is so
great, that, compare it with what vast and untold numbers of ages as you
please, so long as there is a definite conclusion of this term of time, it is
not even as if you compared the minutest drop of water with the ocean that
everywhere flows around the globe.”
The psalmist expresses once again the greatness of God in
these words:
“O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me! Thou knowest
when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar. […]
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend to Heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. […]To me,
how mysterious thy thoughts, the sum of them not to be numbered! If I count
them, they are more than the sand; to finish, I must be eternal, like thee.”
[Ps. 139(138)]
We can see how the mathematical zeal to explain infinity was
often connected with man’s quest for the truth, whether by counting or by
believing. The writer Brian Clegg calls it “The
Quest to Think the Unthinkable”- “the
ultimate in number, and the ultimate reality – the Creator of everything.” (Cf.
B. Clegg, Infinity p.46). But the
very divine nature of the problem can also lead to pride, the desire of Adam
and Eve to be “like God.”
It has long been the practice of thinkers and philosophers
to speculate on eternity and infinity, and to take little mental trips to
staggeringly impossible questions, such as whether this world is the only one.
Is this universe is the only one in existence? Multiple universes? Endless
possibilities? The seemingly unattainable can bring out the best in man, or the
worst… Plutarch relates that, “Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus
that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking him if any
accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: ‘Do you not think it a
matter worthy of lamentation, that when there is such a vast multitude of them,
we have not yet conquered one?’” [Plutarch, On
the Tranquility of the Mind]
I propose that we, on the other hand, follow the psalmist
once again, who prays: “O Lord, my heart is not proud, nor haughty my eyes. I
have not gone after things too great nor marvels beyond me. Truly I have set my
soul in silence and peace. A weaned child on its mother’s breast, even so is my
soul. O Israel, hope in the Lord both now and forever.” [Ps. 131(130)]
The whole wonder of the Incarnation is that the Infinite
God, beyond all measure or comprehension, having created the world, and man in
his own image, resolved to enter into his own finite creation, and take on
human flesh. The condescension of God! The Humility of God! To come down to us.
No wonder that we genuflect at those words: “Et Verbum Caro Factum Est.” The
eternal one took on human flesh; God became a baby. Why? Because that Fall of
Adam and Eve, in wanting to be “like God” was a sin that needed Redemption. We
will sing at Easter of the “Happy Fault” that won for us so great a Redeemer,
but we should also remember why the
Incarnation happened, as well as how.
Today – and every day – our model of humility and grace when
faced with the question of God’s Infinity is the Blessed Virgin Mary. We honour
the vessel for the Infinite Godhead, the one chosen from before all ages, to be
the God-bearer, the finite human being chosen to be the Virgin Mother of the
eternal Son of God. Blessed art thou among women!
We will reflect on this mystery more in the second talk. For
now, let us contemplate in the Holy Mass the humility and condescension of God,
and the wonder of the Infinite dwelling within the finite. “Jesus, living in
Mary…” Within her womb, by the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost, the Virgin
conceives the Son of God, simply by her consent: “Let it be done unto me
according to thy word.” She says yes to the infinite, and becomes the vehicle
for the salvation of the Human race. It was not the last time that Mary would
offer her flesh for the numberless generations of men and women who would need
Salvation – she would do it again at the foot of the Cross, when she might have
pointed at her Son and correctly said, with him: “This is my body, given for
you… Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.” Let us ask Our Lady to show us how to
see an eternal purpose in the finite things around us, and particularly in the
Sacraments. She will show us, in this Holy Mass, how to glimpse the eternal in
the temporal, the infinite within the finite, or, in the words of William Blake
which might well apply to the Holy Mass we are about to celebrate:
“To see a World in a Grain of
Sand,
and a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”
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