Article
Art
Creed
Space
5 min read

How black holes illuminate love’s greatest story

The universe’s darkest mysteries hold strange parallels with Christ’s Passion

Jake is a former BBC journalist turned writer and speaker about art and faith.

A spital galaxy coloured red, white and black.
A composite image of Andromeda galaxy.
NASA/JPL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks to the BBC radio show In Our Time, I’ve found a new pleasure in life. It is this: to learn about the enormity of outer space, and the absurdity of what goes on there, and to share what I find with anyone who’s interested. By ‘anyone’, I mean my wife. But now that Seen & Unseen have published this, I mean you too. 

Or that mysterious cosmic rays from deep space regularly sail straight through the bodies of each of us, and scientists are baffled as to what might have created them? Did you know that a tiny, pale area of the night sky once named the ‘little smudge’, is now known to be the biggest thing anyone will ever see with the naked eye: the Andromeda galaxy? And did you know that the strength of gravity on Venus would crush you instantly? I could go on indefinitely. 

The centrepiece of all this galactic trivia, however, is reserved for black holes. Almost everything about them fascinates, baffles and scares me.  

Black holes are the remnants of dead stars that have collapsed in on themselves, creating a gravitational field so powerful that nothing – not even light – can escape. If you were to pass over its threshold, you’d be obliterated as you get pulled towards the black hole’s infinitely dense centre.  

They get even stranger though. Inside them, astrophysicists say, the laws of physics break down completely. Time and space somehow swap places, they say. And even though anything pulled in by a black hole's gravity is crushed by unimaginable force, in some sense it may be preserved and – in theory – might end up elsewhere, in a new form. It is a death that might not in fact be the end of us. 

There are many black holes – there’s one at the centre of our galaxy. But even though we can study them and develop scientific theories about them, we have not come close to grasping them in all their terrifying and monumental glory. What goes on inside them is, and perhaps always will be, an unfathomable mystery. 

This is why I’d love to see them refracted through the eyes and hearts of poets and artists, philosophers and theologians. What might their strangeness tell us about their creation, their creator? What might they tell us about how to live our lives? And if gravity at its most intense can upturn the laws of science, bamboozle great minds, and maybe even turn death into new life, then might other forces of attraction that do not adhere to known laws of physics, like love, do the same?  

Scenes from the Passion of Christ by Hans Memling.

A painting of a medieval cityscape.
Hans Memling, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In dwelling on questions like these, I have found this painting to be strangely helpful. It tells a love story that – in terms of its sheer intensity, its pull upon us, its utter strangeness, its death-defying endpoint – is not a bad match for a black hole. It’s called Scenes From The Passion Of Christ, it’s by the northern European painter Hans Memling, and when I first saw it I thought it looked silly.  

Why cram onto one small canvas over twenty scenes from the final eight days of Jesus’s life on Earth? It’s like a cartoon strip without the white lines to divide up each scene. We see Jesus welcomed by a crowd, betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, sentenced by Pilate, stripped by henchmen, humiliated by another crowd, crucified by soldiers, and buried by loved ones. We see him upending a table, praying for an escape route, sharing bread and wine, carrying a cross, emerging from the grave, and appearing to his followers.  

It reduces the crucifixion to a few square millimetres at the top. It sidelines the heart of Jesus’ story – the resurrection – to the far right edge. It shrinks Jerusalem to a tiny labyrinth resembling an MC Escher painting. It is daytime and nighttime. It is disorientating. And it is claustrophobic. But I think it is also brilliant, and it’s made me look in a new way at the strangest of weeks in the story of the world.  

By showing us so much convening at this moment in space and time, we sense how impossible it would have been for Jesus’s followers to compute anything that went on during that week. As each event unfolded, they would have had to rethink what might come next, whilst dealing with some pretty overwhelming emotions. They would have had no time or space to process any of it. It seems perfect, therefore, that in this painting, we don’t either.  

But as I look at it now, I wonder: have we actually processed these events, two thousand years later? Do Christianity’s attempts to explain everything that went on here really do justice to a story in which divine love does some of the unfathomably strange things that a black hole does? Or do these explanations tell us more about our own way of thinking than they do God’s?  

I think there is a tendency – which I see in myself and in most churches I have attended – to resist the weird, mysterious and inexplicable nature of this story. We draw heavily on logic and evidence to try and explain a story that defies both. But just as it is within the boundaries of a black hole, so it is within the frame of this painting: the old rules no longer apply. Divine love manifests itself in ways we cannot yet fathom. Pretending otherwise saps power from the story.   

At the top right corner of the painting, there is a tiny dot on the seashore. It’s the last image of Jesus in this painting. And next to it, a church. Here, the baton is being handed over from Jesus to those who follow him. The church is now the ‘body of Christ’, tasked with embodying infinite love in a world that badly needs it.  

What a daunting task. Frankly, it can be easier to believe in a bizarre series of events from two millennia ago, than in a church here and now, comprised of people as flawed as I am, that is meant to be capable of embodying a world-changing love.  

And that is why I am so drawn to black holes, and to this painting. In them, I see that impossible things can and do happen; that unfathomable mysteries are littered throughout reality; that these mysteries are not so much problems to solve as they are wonders to revel in; that the narrow, rational mindset in which I too often dwell is small and limiting; and that an overwhelming force of attraction can and will overpower anything in its way. 

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Explainer
Creed
Old Testament
Politics
Weirdness
6 min read

Lady Mary's guide to Old Testament gangsters

How the weirdest characters in the Bible's ancient story apply to today's politics.
A renaissance picture depitcs Jacob and Esau, in contemporary clothing, around a table
Jacob and Esau.
Matthias Stom, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Have you looked at the Old Testament lately? In terms of how much better it can make you feel, I mean – particularly in the face of modern politics? No, me neither. Or at least not until a few days ago. Having not been a Christian for most of my life, I’d fought shy of the Bible rather, and the oldest bit in particular. Too remote, too ferocious, too weird, it seemed to me. Full of unpronounceable names and lists of strange rules. How could those be applicable? And then I made the mistake of going to evensong with my friend Alice, an agnostic animal lover, and we got a reading from the book of Judges about that heroic strongman Samson tying foxes together, setting fire to their tails and letting them loose in the Philistines’ crops. Which sent us both running out of the service and finished off Alice’s church career, terminally I think! 

But as always in life, exploring new territory can be made enjoyable or otherwise by who you go exploring with. And a couple of weeks ago in a second-hand bookshop, I found a thin volume entitled Unread Best-seller: Reflections on the Old Testament by someone called Mary Stocks, which looked interesting. So I bought it and started reading it that day. I finished it that day. Then I read it again the next day, and I might read it again this week actually.  

Mary Stocks, it turns out, was extremely posh (she became a baroness eventually, and a life peer in the House of Lords); extremely scholarly (she did a whole series of talks for the BBC in the 1950s, when not many women did such things), and extremely funny. She also adored the Old Testament. Not only is it full of glorious language she said, but it also offered great emotional resonance and satisfaction – particularly since she was writing during the Second World War, and finding many parallels between her own time and the fierce and far-off past. ‘Deborah was, I think, the Winston Churchill of her people’, she said of one outspoken prophetess, who inspired dispirited Israel (‘a remnant against the mighty’) to new efforts – and ultimate victory – over the King of Canaan. The battle of Megiddo that they won was the very same Megiddo fought over by General Allenby in the First World War, alongside some of Lady Mary’s own family. Echoes upon echoes. Elsewhere she described seeing a young serviceman, clearly not a regular church goer, listening to the Song of Deborah during ‘one of the blackest weeks of the war’ and saying ‘quite loudly, because he couldn’t help it, “Splendid”.’ ‘People are not often provoked to behave like that in Church’, she continued. ‘But there are lines in the Bible which, coming suddenly right at one, might prompt that sort of outburst.’ 

With all that as precedence, it doesn’t half shed a different light on the awful new sorts we’re coping with at the moment. 

From my point of view though, the most thought-provoking insight I gained from Lady Mary was centred around how dreadful a lot of the Old Testament heroes were. Jacob, for example. Jacob – the founding father of the tribes of Israel! He swindled his brother Esau out of his birthright, by pretending to be him in front of their poor old father Isaac, who was blind. ‘Esau was an hairy man’, we are told. So smooth Jacob magically became an hairy man too, by strapping sheepskin to his arms, which Isaac fell for and pronounced his blessing upon him, the cheating git. And Samson, cruel to foxes as we saw above, was also vain, selfish and violent to boot. Not to mention David. Shiny King David, glorious poet, heroic defeater of the giant Goliath and ancestor of Christ himself, was first a voyeur (spying on beautiful Bathsheba while she was washing) then a date rapist (seducing same Bathsheba) then a murderer (seeing off Bathsheba’s husband Uriah by ordering his comrades to abandon him in battle). Even Noah, who I’d assumed to be a good sort (seeing as he’d rescued all of creation from the Great Flood in his ark) was given to drunkenness, and behaved very badly to his grandson who’d seen him flopped on his bed without his clothes. 

In fact from the time that Adam and Eve disastrously ate the forbidden apple onwards, the whole book contains a litany of cowardice, lying, stealing, cheating, bullying, fighting, stupidity, killing and I don’t know what else. But this is where it’s got weird for me. Suddenly, I can see Lady Mary’s ‘emotional resonance’ – because our world today also contains exactly that: a litany of cowardice, lying, stealing, cheating, bullying, fighting, stupidity, killing and I don’t know what else.  

But the point is that God doesn’t seem to mind this terribly: he engaged directly with all those awful old sorts – and despite their flaws, they became the heroes of the Old Testament and the agents of his will upon the earth. Moses might have murdered an Egyptian overseer and run away and hidden because of it, but he also was chosen by the Lord to lead the Israelites to the promised land. God’s actual game plan didn’t get corrupted, just because the pieces on the board were bent and chipped. 

So with all that as precedence, it doesn’t half shed a different light on the awful new sorts we’re coping with at the moment. A menacingly orange person with a foul mouth and an unpleasant attitude towards women need not be a source of dismay – even as the new president of America. A friend once described Mr Trump as ‘God’s wrecking ball’, which made me roll my eyes. But perhaps that’s exactly what he is. If David could be ‘a man after God’s own heart’ as the book of Samuel calls him, sexual misdemeanours notwithstanding, there is no reason why Donald couldn’t be a force for good, when wielded by the Lord. Bad manners and a felony conviction are small beer compared to other things God has tolerated in his servants. 

‘Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid,’ says Jesus in the New Testament, about a thousand years after David’s death. Having been keeping company with Mary Stocks and seeing the big picture of what the Old Testament has to tell us, I might now manage not to be so troubled – at least not by Mr Trump. And the Bible has some tremendous stories about what happens to the seriously wicked. King Saul killed himself when he realised the battle was lost. Well, you know, so did Hitler. And the appalling dictators of Romania in the 1980s – Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu – came to an end not unlike wicked Queen Jezebel’s, who was thrown from the windows of her palace and trampled by Jehu’s army. Bad King Nebuchadnezzar ‘was driven from the sons of men; and his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses’, says the book of Daniel. Which makes me remember Saddam Hussein being dragged out of a muddy sort of burrow at the end of the Iraq War in 2003, looking completely dishevelled. And come to think of it, didn’t Osama bin Laden – architect of the Twin Towers attack – also spend a lot of time hiding in caves in the wilderness of Swat before he was eventually caught?  

Mr Putin, Kim Jong Un and the other bad hats of the world might like to watch themselves: it is odds on that the Lord ‘shall also blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble’. It says so in the Old Testament.  

‘Splendid!’ as Lady Mary would say. 

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If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

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