Article

Art

Creed

Space

26 September 2025

5 min read

How black holes illuminate love’s greatest story

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

Jake Lloyd

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.

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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The Wild God we can't coerce

Weird and increasingly encountered beyond the wilderness.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A pianist raises his arms while sitting at a grand piano amid recording equipment.

Nick Cave recording Wild God.

nickcave.com

Christianity is a wild thing.

I say this, even while only half-understanding what I’m saying. It’s something that I’m learning. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it’s something that I’m unlearning. Because, admittedly, I’m far more familiar with a somewhat domesticated view of my own faith tradition. The kind that allows me to fashion fences out of my expectations; to put parameters around God’s presence and boundaries upon his behaviour. Both of which are a farce, of course - but a comforting farce, none the less.

You see, there is nothing ‘comfortable’ about a God who cannot be wholly predicted or comprehended, let alone controlled or contained. A wild God is always going to be a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked and too unused to the sensation of being cosmically baffled.

But, affronting as it may be, I am trying my best to sit in the knowledge that the God I believe in is a wild God. And I’m finding this wildness increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps it’s all the Rowan Williams I’ve been reading, or my newfound interest in the Romantics (as in, the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, not the 1970’s American rock band). Or maybe it has more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, which I have been listening to relentlessly over the last week.

In this musical offering, Nick Cave introduces us to his ‘Wild God’, who I think is my God too. It’s just that ‘wild’ has never been the first adjective I reach for when describing him.

Until now, I suppose.

Let me clarify what I mean by wild, because what I’m not saying is that God is inherently chaotic, unruly, reckless or irrational. Wild Gods, as we know them from the myths and legends, act on tempestuous whims, and are more than a little havoc prone. They are perilous, largely because one can never truly know where they stand with them. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. The entire Old Testament - as complex, nuanced and masterful as it is - can be understood as a collection of ways in which the God at its centre is saying – this is who I am, this is what I desire, this is what I’m going to do, this is where you stand with me. If you were to read the Bible, it would become pretty clear pretty quickly: God is insistent that those who seek to know him will never have to second guess him. God’s wildness does not mean that we cannot know the essence of who he is or how he feels towards us. I like to think that we can endeavour to know him accurately, but never exhaustively.

Rather, what I’m trying to get my head and heart around is the knowledge that God, and therefore Christianity, cannot be wholly domesticated. Despite my best efforts, it cannot be made into an entirely comfortable and cozy thing. To make it so, one would have to dilute it, shrink it, bleed any truth out of it. In his poem - Sometimes a Wild God -Tom Hirons writes,

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all’.

There’s an innate weirdness to the Christian worldview, a pure wildness at the heart of it. It’s brimming with mystery and mysticism. As Hirons hints, it’s bigger and more consequential than our comfort-zones would like it to be. And, what’s more, much of it is communicated through the natural world. Biblical narratives and poetry are endlessly pointing us toward the places and spaces that are outside human cultivation – the stars, the mountains, the oceans – the things that pre-date and will outlive us.

Christianity is wild in that there’s an alluring organic-ness about it. Its truth sits beyond human manipulation and coercion.

For millennia, whole lives have been given over to this truly wild and, I believe, wildly true story. Can I give you just two recent examples? Two people who have (utterly unexpectedly) adventured their way into this wild and wonderful way of seeing the world? Two people I’ve had the joy of learning from over the past year?

First up is Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical.

Buddhism, Witchcraft – you name it, he’s tried it.

He told Justin Brierley and I the story of how he his adventures have led him to arrive at the wildest possible destination: Christianity.  

And then there’s the renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, who decided to do a 101-day wild vigil in Dartmoor. Despite not being a Christian, on the very last night, he prayed. While praying, he looked up and saw something utterly unexplainable, something ‘properly Old Testament’. And that was it – after a night of dancing, several other ‘odd’ experiences, and eighteen months of deep pondering – he was able to say, ‘I went into the forest expected to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ’.

Thinking about it, it’s probably no accident that ‘Christianity’ began on the margins, and from there, worked its way into the cities. There was a time where the prediction of Jesus’ arrival was being yelled out into the countryside, so loudly that people were emptying the surrounding towns to come and hear more. A time when rumours of redemption were being whispered in the rural hills. A time when its chief messenger was an inexplicably weird man named John the Baptist; who shunned his prestigious priestly heritage to live in the wilds, to dress in camel skins, to eat honey and insects and insist upon the imminent coming of the long-awaited Messiah. This Messiah, by the way, who would be born where animals are kept, sleep on mountains, retreat into deserts, walk on water, speak to storms, and break people (including himself) out of stone graves.

You see what I mean, Christianity is a wild story to believe and live in accordance with.

It’s the story that drove the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ of the Third Century AD to reject civilisation and all its comforts, in order to seek God in the silence and solitude of the desert. It’s the story that is still inspiring people to live in caves on Mount Athos, secluded islands just off the coast of Wales and forests in the heart of Ireland. An uncontainable message has, since its inception, been lived out in uncontainable places.

Honestly, you want weird? Christianity can darn-well give you weird.

Don’t be fooled by over-familiarity or be swayed by that pesky left-side of your brain, the part that wants to convince you that you know all that there is to know. Christianity is a story that I, myself, had forgotten was quite this wild.