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Real Answers™
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Copyright: ©2010 Linda Downing
660 words

SOMETHING TANGIBLE

By: Linda Downing

Sometimes we find encouragement in surprising places. If economic and natural disaster, terrorism, and other threats destroy expectation, then cynicism, like that in the first half of the 20th c., strikes. After two world wars, even some theologians said: “God is dead.” He wasn’t—and isn’t.

Evidence hid in plain sight, waiting timely exposure. In 1947 a Bedouin tossed a rock into a cave, heard pottery breaking, and found the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, tucked away for centuries, the oldest known surviving copies of biblical documents. The Isaiah Scroll and some 900 others testify to the veracity of recognized Bible translations. The finding stirred biblical archaeology, offering hope to a shaken, post-war world.  

I paid little attention to science in general until I met Father Bargil Pixner in 1988. A friend paid my way for a study in Israel called “The Galilee Jesus Knew.” When our group gathered in Jerusalem, an almost audible disappointment rose as a Catholic Benedictine monk replaced our anticipated teacher.

Today, when I need a pick-up, I hold rocks and artifacts dug with my own hands from Israel’s soil. I read Father Pixner’s words, written Easter 1990, thanking me for socks and reminding me: “Life and light will conquer. At the end is no more death, but life!” I open the July/August 2002 Biblical Archaeology Review, page 16, a tribute to this monk, a renowned excavator of ancient Jerusalem’s Essene Quarter. His unscheduled presence in my life still holds me solid as the rocks we climbed.    

Humans desire the tangible: things we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch. This longing negates neither mind nor spirit; rather, it confirms their existence. 

Some oddities, though material, are speculative at best. “People like to believe in something greater than themselves,” said Smithsonian anthropologist Jane Walsh in July 2008 when a crystal skull arrived anonymously. A note claimed Aztec origin, as do all crystal skulls appearing thus far. Walsh and science conclude they are 19th c. “fakes,” but that does not deter those who believe the skulls have supernatural powers.

After eight years charting the universe from Sunspot, New Mexico, astronomers in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey completed the most comprehensive map of the heavens ever produced. When the Los Angeles Times broke the news in October 2008, one of the scientists, Dan Long, was described as having “seen more of the universe than anyone but God.” Long, however, expressed perplexity that, despite the many discoveries made, none challenge the prevailing theories of the start and maintenance of the universe.

What Long and others seek is not only the force behind the “Big Bang” but also what (or who) holds everything together. The Bible delegates creative and keeping power to Jesus Christ—“…through whom he made the universe…sustaining all things through his powerful word” (Hebrews 1:2, 3 NIV). Those who believe that have no fear in science and religion clashing but rather expect them to intersect in astounding ways. In the words of Alan Boss, planetary theorist of Carnegie Institution of Washington, on the “new” planet spotted December 2009: “Give them [planet hunters] a couple more years and they’re going to knock your socks off.”        

Tangibles reflect intangibles. In 2007 Ehud Netzer of Hebrew University claimed to have found Herod’s tomb, and a credit-card size parchment turned out to be a piece of the Aleppo Codex, the most authoritative manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. In 2009 the Vatican called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life. Rev. Jose Funes, astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory, said: “This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God’s creative freedom.”

I hear Father Pixner’s voice from the shadow of a cave where he believed Jesus went to pray: “Ah, He whom my soul loveth was here.”   

Linda Downing, a contributor to the Amy Internet Syndicate, writes “Side-By-Side: Seeking Simple Truth,” a weekly column for Highlands Today of The Tampa Tribune.  

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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