Lazarus Entombed and Signs Relating to Societal Transformation

A Letter Emailed Under the Subject Line
"John's Lazarus and Signs Relating to Societal Transformation"
to a group of physicists, Catholic Church officials, government leaders, and other thought leaders
on March 27, 2026, Day 27 of the Iran War

Photo: "The Mindful Nest" is an image of a freestanding book exchange beside a small statue of St. Francis, supporting one bird in his hands and one on his shoulder, taken on the campus of Siena University in Loudonville, New York, USA, on March 24, 2026. Near the top of the wooden case, under peaked eaves, is a placard reading "The Mindful Nest" above a placard proclaiming, "Dedicated to Franciscan Women: Past, Present, & Future." Books are visible through glass doors. On the ground, between the two legs supporting the case, is a plaque announcing, "'We hope you enjoy this sacred space for learning and growth through literature'" above "Kiera Mitru Class of 2021."

Greetings to all,

This has been a week of signs that I would mention or discuss. I was happy to see important progress toward the compensation of victims of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany and to hear that the cause for canonization of the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen is once again moving forward. However, let’s begin discussion with the priest at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Albany, New York, USA, the last parish church I attended, seeming to chuckle at the fact that Lazarus from the Gospel according to John wound up having to die a second time. I’ll go through the story of John’s Lazarus, as opposed to Luke's Lazarus, in detail, for it is very funny indeed, and timely, too.

In verses 5-6, we hear, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days…” The priest called this strange. If it’s read in tones that foreshadow further comedy, it’s funny.

In verses 11-14, Jesus refers to death as sleep, which the disciples take literally, forcing Jesus to point out that He was speaking figuratively. We’ve heard about behavior of this kind from disciples recently, in John’s account of the Samaritan woman. It’s chuckle-worthy that the disciples are so prone to taking things literally, especially when Jesus is speaking, as if every morning they wake up knowing nothing about how their longstanding leader communicates. Does anyone else wonder whether the appearance solely in the Book of John of such an extraordinary event as the raising of Lazarus might indicate that John never intended it to be taken historically, let alone literally? Am I the only one? Does anyone else wonder this about the three wise men, another story that would be very important if historical and that appears in only one gospel, that of Matthew in its case?

Of course I’m not the only one who suspects that the details of the life of Jesus are not reliably reported in the Gospels, just as biopics today take liberties, sometimes excessive liberties. Did you read Daryl Hannah’s complaint in The New York Times about the story of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette? I feel I’m not yet gay enough to watch that show, but I am gay enough to have read Daryl Hannah’s essay and gotten angry about the invented scandalous material concerning her, a real person. This unusually egregious case illustrates how common it is for true stories to be presented in partially fictionalized form, which is often done responsibly, to great artistic and pedagogical effect, and in ways that would be obvious, and hence harmless, to contemporary audiences.

By the way, I don’t deny the possibility of miracles. I have worked, indeed continue to work, in fundamental physics. I know that science does not know what this universe is. Those who speak of a God of the gaps, a trivial being needed only to patch holes in the gloriously complete accounting of reality by science, don’t know what they’re talking about, even if they are famous physicists. I’ve written repeatedly about the mindless acceptance of assumption as fact that often occurs in science.

Truly, as I’ve pointed out before, miracles and supernatural beings would be consistent with science if our universe were a simulation or thoughts in the mind of God, a system therefore subject to manipulation by a being or beings capable of overriding the laws of that simulation or train of thought. David H. Wolpert, a scientist taken very seriously by other scientists, recently promulgated a paper developing the simulation hypothesis. I don’t have plans to read the paper, but I was pleased to note that he included a quote on Zhuangzi’s dream of being a butterfly and subsequent inability to determine whether he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi, an idea that I’ve cited as highly beneficial in understanding the epistemology of physics.

There is much more going on in mainstream fundamental physics that would shock your friendly neighborhood physicist, who is as prone to be found trying to nail God down as all too many theologians and parish priests.

You may perceive why I am so popular, being neither fish nor fowl. For example, I played high school basketball very poorly in ninth grade in Guilderland, New York, USA, while enjoying the boardgame club, occasionally mentioning my recent departure from Christianity, and professing the intent to become a physicist. The following summer, I was entombed for the crime of running away for a week, ceasing to attend school thereafter, and nothing else that was ever mentioned explicitly, in Unit 5North of the big psychiatric hospital in White Plains, New York, USA, from which I was restored to the outer world exactly one year later in what was neither my first nor last departure from a metaphorical Hades.

Speaking of Hades and having intended to point out the importance of scientists pursuing such extracurricular activities as writing poetry, I just reread Wolpert’s preface to “A Sip from the River Styx.” I wonder what kind of non-Aristotelian physics folks discussed over the campfire with Jesus, not that He’d have let anything slip that could be turned into technology, I assume. Greater awareness that some scientists are oriented in their work toward technology, others toward philosophy, and the rest toward a variety of other compass points, would facilitate communication between science and the rest of society.

Returning to John’s Lazarus, as you emerge from the tomb of my digression, raised from the ordeal by your persistence in reading, perhaps inspired by faith in the finite nature of all experience, and hence of any digression, we find in verse 39 that Martha, sister of Lazarus, is so concerned about the stench of her brother’s corpse that she is reluctant to have his tomb opened, even if this might lead to his restoration to life. Martha’s fastidiousness is funnier still, once we learn in Chapter 12 of the large quantities of pure nard, an expensive perfume, available to the family. We may find further amusement in reflecting on the fact that no matter how much we love a person, we, too, as mere animals, might well be somewhat reluctant to have a deceased family member, even one remembered fondly, if we are so fortunate as to remember any of our deceased family members with fondness, restored to our society, for such a reunion would force us to rethink our beliefs, if we have any, about how the universe works. I tell you this as a person who was amazed at the age of nine to be occasionally scared at the prospect of seeing my mother’s ghost, a completely counterintuitive, yet quite real, fear of what ought to have been wished for, made stranger still by my disbelief in ghosts.

You know, I’ll bet that John experienced the loss of someone close to him in childhood, a far more common event up through the early 20th century than today. That would account for the story of John’s Lazarus in a poignant way, as an expression of something close to John’s heart, besides the edifying ways explored elsewhere in this letter and as a comfort to those who expect in vain that God will violate natural law for their benefit on the regular. I don’t know the lives of the people who created the show, but one bit in the Netflix television series Russian Doll, where Nadia, played and partially written by Natasha Lyonne, mentions celebrating her first birthday as a person who was still young but nevertheless older than her mother ever was, told me that someone who created that show may have known things from experience that I also did. Knowledge without experience is incomplete, not that we should wish to experience everything, obviously.

Incidentally, Lyonne and Maya Rudolph explore in the Peacock streaming service series Poker Face what I see as an emerging consensus morality, which cries out for what I call Reunion between Epicurean and Stoic, Left and Right, philosophically oriented and technologically oriented, etc. If you want to feel the growing Reunion, watch Episode 5 of Season 1 of Poker Face, noting especially the conversation between the hero and the FBI agent, late in the episode, in which the hero thinks carefully, despite the pain involved, and in which the FBI agent displays edifying moral depth, quite consistent with one of the points I find in John’s story of Lazarus, right after saying, “It’s worse than that.”

Wasn’t the Jesus movement originally an effort to achieve Reunion between the Epicurean Hellenized Jewish folk and the Stoic traditional Jewish folk, in opposition to the dissolute Roman richies and the Jewish zealots? Isn’t being reasonable due to go back into fashion, at long last?

Television often provides inspiring conversation on morality between the show creators and society. I remember Peter Falk’s sympathetic monologue, delivered to Ruth Gordon at the end of “Try and Catch Me,” a 1977 episode of Columbo, a series on which Poker Face is partly modeled. Gordon’s character reminds me today of the Iranian government, which has done horrible things in reaction to similarly horrible things inflicted upon Iran, including by Britain and the United States in overthrowing the Mossadegh government in 1953.

I remember edifying lines, perhaps paraphrased in my mind, from the Fargo television series:
“Actually, Turkish delight tastes awful,” which illustrates what can be lost to an audience unfamiliar in any great depth with the culture from which the work they’re experiencing emerges.
“I own two pairs of shoes, one for winter and one for the rest of the time,” which is as anti-consumerist as portions of the Book of Revelation.
“She may be an emancipated minor, but she’s still a kid.”
“The room [involved in an early 20th-century incident in the United States] contained Irish people, Italian people, and Jewish people, but no white people.”

Frankly, the Iran War is apt to accomplish many things I consider desperately needed. It may keep the price of oil and gas high for a long time, catalyzing the next stage of the decarbonization of our economies. It may motivate us eventually to eliminate all nuclear weapons, which not only continue to endanger civilization but also have helped to drive pernicious transformation of our way of life, for example by helping motivate the hollowing out of our cities and carcentric development of outer suburbs to disperse population, in what was regarded as a defense against nuclear weapons until nuclear winter was discovered. The inflation the Iran war produces may reduce consumerism and the force driving it, namely an excessive amount of paid work. The war will also wind up destroying a considerable portion of the remaining geopolitical power of the United States. Nevertheless, I strongly oppose the Iran War not only on the grounds that it may lead to civilization-ending nuclear war or further the rise of fascism by interrupting fertilizer supplies shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, thereby creating destabilizing food scarcity and hence a pretext for fascist suspension of civil liberties, but also because I have no right to allow others to die whom I could easily save.

I’d love to say that Phil Collins taught me this last point via his song “In the Air Tonight,” but for whatever reason, and despite my fondness for the music of his former bandmate Peter Gabriel, I don’t enjoy the work of Phil Collins very much. I could say that the excellent Dustin Hoffman movie Hero taught me the point, but I saw Hero when I was already well into adulthood. There’s an outside chance that I learned it from John 11, despite what the story is supposed to mean by folk whose voices carry when they interpret the Bible.

Besides, it would just destroy me if the model of Columbo in my mind could like me only despite something I had done or could easily have averted. Even being disliked is better than that, to me.

Regardless of what they were originally intended to mean, we talk to each other in stories, so all interpretations have value. The stories wind up being funny, often by design, and how could stories of the incarnation of a monotheistic model of God not wind up being satirical, especially when the incarnation occurs among a conquered people, subject to rulers from a lapsed republic who had started being deified after death and would soon be deified in life?

These incidental sources of satire are joined to an intrinsic source: If there is but one God in a given model, and that God is portrayed as some kind of Person, the Person’s gender cannot be straightforward. Sorry, models of God analogous to people need male, female, and nonbinary aspects. I really think that my model, inspired by baryon physics and expressed pithily in the diagram at God Is Poor - Reunion, would give the Catholic Church a means to save face while modifying its model of God to include female and nonbinary aspects. For reference, I'll paste below an earlier letter in which I discuss, especially beginning in item 4), the physics analogy to my model of the Trinity. In each age, the mind is opened to new possibilities, new analogies, oftentimes by scientific, cultural, or other exploration.

The funniest part of the story of Lazarus is John 11: 45-57, in which the plot to kill Jesus is recounted, for Caiaphas, to encourage others to kill Jesus, says in verse 50, “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” Caiaphas justifies killing Jesus in much the way Jesus justified letting Lazarus die, for Jesus said that the good of the many would be served by the death of Lazarus, insofar as the raising of Lazarus would glorify God.

Chapter 11 of John satirizes all the kings and emperors and generalissimos who have sent men to die for the glory of this or the good of that, instead of finding a clever way to accomplish their ends. How glorious it would be to recognize when Jesus is poking fun at us, as we richly deserve. Verse 35 of John 11, “Jesus wept,” is hilarious when read with the knowledge that Jesus let Lazarus die, presumably with the agreement of Lazarus in advance, for the glory of the Father. Funny, too, is imagining other leaders down the ages who might have wept, had they the heart to do so, over suffering they caused or permitted to happen.

As a Usonian of a certain age, subjected to the Vietnam War’s aftermath, I think first of my country’s leaders during that war, but I’m Irish by heritage. My people were literally decimated, give or take some hundreds of thousands, in the mid-19th century because the rich Britons wouldn’t take responsibility for saving the lives of people they had exploited to fund construction and maintenance of their morally squalid Downton Abbeys. Would so many have died horribly, and so many more have suffered down the ages, if John 11 had been read all along as satire, rather than justification for inhuman detachment from suffering happening next door or a short walk away or across a strait?

Stinking imperialist richies, filth incarnate: In the glorious USA, we colonize ourselves. Right now, we’re trying to force transportation safety agents to work without pay, in order to keep their jobs, as we have many others in recent years. How does this enormity not produce open rebellion against the immorality of Usonian government? Part of the problem is that at least 40 of the 56 signers of the nation’s founding document “enslaved people or were involved in the slave trade,” including New York’s own Philip Livingston, for whom a middle school, where my maternal grandmother taught remedial reading for 16.5 years, was named in the state capital.

The richies are filth under any system, unless the religious authorities save their souls by twisting their arms. That’s another possible interpretation of the story of John’s Lazarus: By letting Lazarus die and subsequently raising him from the dead, perhaps Jesus extracted a larger donation than arriving in time and healing him would have brought forth. Regardless of the settlement announced today, the bankrupt Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany is failing its richies, endangering their souls, by not inducing them to pay God’s debts.

Incidentally, toward the end of the 20th century, when the Usonian social welfare system was largely dismantled and the richies were handed big tax cuts, why didn’t the Roman Catholic Church reinstate tithing for richies? Surely the next step intended by those who destroyed compassionate government was for churches to resume their old role as primary social welfare providers. Did this fail to happen because the Church’s leaders believe Jesus—not the Father, mind you, but Jesus—would let a man die purely to glorify God? What license to stiff creditors and truckle to richies, the path of least resistance, does such misinterpretation give the intellectual paramecia leading the practically schismatic Usonian Catholic Church, creatures not governed by rational self-interest, let alone conscience, but by the gradient of prevailing public opinion or political power in the nation where they work, as microbes move in accord with chemical gradients in solution?

I visited Siena University in Loudonville, New York, USA, this week to attend an event entitled “Interfaith Discussion on Caring for Our Common Home: Christian-Muslim Dialogue.” Here is a link to a brief video I made on the school’s front lawn but did not make public because the state of the ecology I found on campus improved, once I entered areas hidden from passersby. I may write more about this visit, but for now, please note that both Siena University and the University at Albany (State University of New York, USA) go to great expense to subordinate Nature at their main entrances, which face the public, while maintaining spectacular Nature preserves hidden far from the eyes of passersby. Similarly, the Albany Times Union publishes wonderful articles on promoting biodiversity in our front yards while spending its limited funds lavishly on an immaculate, close-cropped, monoculture lawn in front of its headquarters.

It’s as if the rich folk, or the powerful folk who do the bidding of the rich folk, cry out to Father Sky, “Look how we can humiliate Mother Nature by shaving Her at will and destroying life She would allow to crawl and slither practically to our doorsteps. You hate Mom, too, don’t You, Dad? We’ll show Her how smart humans are, see if we don’t! We know You love us, not Her!” Meanwhile, Father Sky is Jesus elevated on the cross, and Mother Earth, along with the apostle John, is right next to us as we mock Her. Maybe this spring will be different, as the Iran War makes fertilizer more expensive and makes even powerful folk notice a few things: that gardening might ameliorate the food shortages expected from the Iran War and from immigration raids that drive farm workers out of the fields and orchards; that just letting portions of our lawns grow out would provide food for pollinators and promote urgently needed biodiversity, besides giving us pretty wildflowers to look at; and that vowing to mow only where we go would cost us nothing we actually used for any purpose other than brutalizing Mother Nature.

There’s so much humor in the Gospels of Matthew and John. In an earlier letter, I didn’t convey everything I saw in the story of the Samaritan woman: Imagine the back-and-forth between her and Jesus with Julia Louis Dreyfuss as the Samaritan woman, playing the role in a manner akin to her analogous work on Veep. Last week, I got a chuckle out of John’s account of the parents who threw their formerly blind son under the proverbial bus by saying that if the authorities, who, as usual, were up to no good, wanted to know anything about their son, the authorities should ask him directly.

As Jesus recognized, alienated people are a valuable resource in an appallingly dangerous world. Please make use of us, and please don’t demand that we subordinate our thinking to your parochial belief system or model of reality, theological or scientific.

You don’t know. I don’t know. Together, we can fail to know in productive and beautiful ways, maybe sharing some laughs and using intellectual flexibility to promote the survival prospects of our species.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James

Resource:

Theology Inspired by Bishop Mark and Physics:
a letter sent January 11, 2026

Your Eminence,

Greetings! Bishop Mark’s dedication of Bishop Mark’s year to Mary, Mother of Jesus, inspired this servant of Your Eminence to devise, later that day, yet another theology that could be useful for both Catholic people and non-Catholic people. Since then, this servant of Your Eminence has allowed the theology to sit in the mind of this servant of Your Eminence, which permitted a little additional progress in its development. To describe the new family of models of God, a few facts concerning physics will be helpful.

1) Theoretical physicists frequently cannot deal directly with the phenomenon of interest, so we start with something as similar as possible but manageable. We then think about the steps needed to alter the manageable phenomenon into the interesting one. Under the right conditions, we can use those steps to find ways to learn about the interesting phenomenon, but sometimes, the necessary conditions do not apply, and we have to start from scratch.

In religion, we can think about God as a family, a father-son pair, animal-human hybrid beings, sets of abstract processes, etc. We can think about how God behaved in ancient stories to guide us in making decisions about similar situations today. Difficult arguments will arise between people of good will over how the analogies apply and over whether the analogies hold in any useful way in a given case or whether modern conditions are qualitatively different, necessitating some other starting point than ancient stories.

Hard feelings justifiably arise when, out of good intentions or ill, someone who should know better insists that the manageable case is the case of interest or that God is a Guy in the sky, unless the latter belief happens to be among the religion’s doctrines.

I think that 1) is straightforward. Now we’ll start to see ways in which physics provides a new set of stories that can serve as analogies.

2) Physicists can use radically different ways to arrive at the same answers. For example, when talking about operators, which are abstract mathematical objects representing measurements, and states of systems that might be subjected to measurement, researchers may consider the operators as unchanging while the states evolve, the states as unchanging while the operators evolve, or both operators and states as evolving, or changing with time. The choice among what are called the Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and Dirac, or interaction, pictures [, respectively,] is governed by pragmatic considerations: We use whatever is most convenient to achieve our goals.

That the behavior of God, as reported in the Bible, altered over time is obvious. Perhaps God changed. Alternatively, perhaps God’s behavior changed because people changed, causing an unchanging God to behave differently in response. Perhaps God and people changed together. These possibilities are analogous to Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac pictures of theology [, respectively].

3) Laypeople may believe that physicists could tell them in detail what happens in the world. This belief is very far indeed from the truth. For example, physicists often content themselves with knowing the initial state of a collection of particles and the final state that arises from the initial state, which can be calculated by considering all possible intermediate states, without drawing any conclusions about what actually happens between the initial and final states. When talking about processes of this kind, physicists often draw the initial state connected by an arrow to a cartoon of a cloud shape, connected in turn by an arrow to the final state. Your Eminence might recall a fight scene from Asterix, though I’m reminded more compellingly of fight scenes in Beetle Bailey. The meaning in physics is that some unknown, possibly hideously complex, set of events, known only to God, if such knowledge is meaningful in principle, connects initial and final states.

Insofar as God may be pictured, in accordance with 2), as being in transition from an initial state, which existed prior to the origin of the vexatious species humanity, to a final state, which will exist after humanity gets its act together or ceases to exist, the current confusion as to the nature of God is perfectly understandable: We’re trying to understand God through the veil of a Beetle Bailey fight cloud or, put another way, demand of God a more thorough accounting of God’s nature in a transitional era than a physicist would ask of mere electrons.

Even if Your Eminence believes God to be of fixed nature, Your Eminence may find value in 3), for the picture from 2) that we apply is not selected to conform to truth, but rather to provide useful insight in the most convenient way. After arriving at an insight via a Heisenberg or Dirac version of theology, in which God can change, the servant of God should verify that the same insight arises via the picture in which the nature of God remains fixed. Then people who insist that God never change may benefit from the insight without relinquishing any of their beliefs. Folks benefit all the time from reasoning according to what they consider to be fiction, n’est-ce pas? That situation holds in physics, too, though often without any concern over whether it’s fiction or truth that’s used to connect one truth with another.

4) As Your Eminence knows, people and our world are composed of atoms, each of which has zero or more electrons and a nucleus containing at least one proton and zero or more neutrons. In order for one or more electrons to be bound in atoms, there must be one or more protons in the nucleus to exert an electromagnetic attraction on the electrons. In order for more than one proton to be bound in the nucleus, there must be neutrons to exert sufficient strong force attraction to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion between the protons.

One point of interest for religious purposes is that in order to have familiar forms of matter, which enable life as we know it to exist, there must be chemistry, which, in turn, depends on the electrons in atoms, meaning that on a fundamental level, chemistry needs, and hence we need, quite different things coming together in stable configurations, surely a salubrious example for society when we draw analogies between electrons and protons and neutrons, on the one hand, and, for example, culturally flexible folk who can form bonds between peoples and culturally conservative folk who aren’t shy about their demands and culturally conservative folk who serve gently to keep the peace and the society intact, on the other hand, respectively. More succinctly, one may profitably think of electrons as archetypal Epicureans, regardless of vocation, protons as archetypal military, business, and government Stoics, and neutrons as archetypal Stoics in religious and family life.

Your Eminence is cautioned that this servant of Your Eminence is not trained in philosophy and so uses technical philosophical terms with a layperson's clumsiness. Innocence of philosophy on a detailed level, however, is consistent with the multidisciplinary advantages of the work of this servant of Your Eminence.

In the analogy at hand, our society is running short of neutrons, endangering its stability, as even Church and Church-related institutions either chase more money than they need, depriving others in desperate situations, or fail to demand in the name of God what’s required for their own proper functioning. While I was moved by Bishop Mark’s dedication of Bishop Mark’s year to Mary, Mother of Jesus, I noted that when Bishop Mark pleaded complexity of the diocese’s bankruptcy as reason for the protracted nature of paying the diocese’s debts, Bishop Mark failed to note that had the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany extracted enough money from its rich communicants, a vital function of the Church, God would not have gone bankrupt in Albany, a truly shameful chapter in Church history. Furthermore, when Bishop Mark mentioned sacrifice, Bishop Mark did so on screen with many hundreds of dollars in poinsettias, no doubt property of the cathedral parish and not of the diocese, though a no less troubling discordant image in a parish in a bankrupt diocese, a typical oversight from an infuriatingly arrogant institution, in the mind of this servant of Your Excellency and possibly of other witnesses to the spectacle.

5) Protons are modeled as containing three particles from the category designated “quarks,” specifically two “up” quarks and one “down” quark. Your Eminence should be made aware that not all physicists are enamored of the whimsical nature of names bestowed by physicists. I think it was Dr. Detenbeck, to whom this servant of Your Eminence referred in the last letter addressed to Your Eminence from this servant of Your Eminence, whom this servant of your Eminence once heard lament the origin of this nomenclatural predilection in the assigning of “barn” to designate an exceedingly tiny cross-sectional area for scattering experiments, in a humorous nod to the saying about hitting a barn door with a projectile.

Neutrons, on the other hand, are modeled as containing one up quark and two down quarks. For present purposes, the point is that quite different behavior arises from trading out only one of three subcomponents, where the subcomponents are of only two kinds.

What this servant of Your Eminence writes in the next two paragraphs may seem incredible, but Your Eminence is assured that what Your Eminence reads will be longstanding standard physics, not some avant-garde idea conceived by this servant of Your Eminence.

Most of the mass of protons and neutrons comes from the interactions between quarks and the motion of the quarks in consequence of the interactions. There really is no conceptual difficulty here, except with the misleading preconceptions people attach to the idea of mass, which in many everyday situations, is functionally equivalent to weight. There is no fundamental understanding of what mass is, so no new information a person receives about mass should trouble them. Rather, people would do well to remind themselves frequently of how little humanity knows, in comparison to all that could be known.

Next is an issue of what can’t be known, for a charm quark, another frivolously named particle that has greater mass than either a proton or neutron, will appear briefly, from time to time, inside a proton or neutron. Your Eminence, please allow this servant of Your Eminence to remind Your Eminence, assuming Your Eminence has not cast aside this letter in disgust at the preposterous nature of the preceding sentence, that this servant of Your Eminence is a trained physicist, not a particle physicist, to be sure, but more than adequately conversant with the principles of the field in general to convey the fact that, yes, the mass of a particle is a time-averaged quantity, subject to fluctuation in keeping with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which, for our purposes, states that preposterous things, subject to certain constraints, can transpire, as long as they do so in tastefully brief fashion.

The lesson, of course, is that what people often consider normality is a curated set of phenomena that omits, among other things, what actually happens on sufficiently small temporal scales, including phenomena that a more religiously oriented person might call “miraculous” in place of “preposterous,” making miracles far more common than rutabagas, with apologies to Dr. Detenbeck for the frivolously specific choice of vegetable.

This servant of Your Eminence hopes that the genuine admiration of, and gratitude to, Dr. Detenbeck behind the words above is apparent. This servant of Your Eminence is actually on his side in this matter of nomenclature, assuming that this servant of Your Eminence is recalling correctly that he was the one who complained in the presence of this servant of Your Eminence about cutesy names in particle physics.

A potentially fruitful family of models of God using the above physics is the following:

Family of models: The Trinitarian God is undergoing a transition from the initial state of this God, in which the Trinity contained Father, Son, and Angel of Death, to an unknown final state that some claim will contain Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where to at least one person, the Holy Spirit may be usefully considered a guise for the Mother. Some other people seem determined to bring about a final state containing Father, Son, and Angel of Death, as existed in the first place.

Why might this model prove useful? First, fleshed out in conjunction with idea 3), that even physicists are often incapable of achieving detailed understanding of intermediate stages of system evolution, people might find compassion and understanding for notions about God that they fail to find congenial. That is, the Church’s teaching that God can’t be comprehended, that God entails mystery, would be reinforced for audiences that struggle with the concept and its application to the question of judging other people for their beliefs about Who God is, who they are, and how their existence relates to God. Some of those audiences, of course, can be found within the Church, including at high levels of Church leadership.

Second, the Angel of Death, and death in general, played a prominent and diminishing role in God’s behavior in the Old Testament. From an ecological standpoint, most animals that might swell in number beyond the limits of the ecology require predation or other sources of deaths in their ranks to limit their numbers and thus preserve the ecology on which they depend. However, people are clever enough to replace premature death with other means to keep themselves within ecological bounds.

In the model of God preferred by this servant of Your Eminence, the end state of God to be desired is Father, Son, Mother, in no particular order. Mothers tend to have readier access to ecological wisdom than others. The bodies of human mothers suffer grievously in creating offspring, as pointed out during the expulsion, after consumption of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from the paradise of living as ignorant animals. The ecological cost of each child who survives is felt directly in monthslong physical burden and intense pain, followed by yearslong physical burden.

The Father, as an archetype, suffers the burden of population, too, in having to provide materially for His children. The Son, as an archetype, suffers in having less resources, the greater the number of dependent children who exist in the family and the larger the population relative to the current carrying capacity of the ecology.

War, pestilence, famine, deaths of despair, human sacrifice, and secular infanticide via exposure were among the means of keeping human population under control in the ancient world. I hear that when God directs Abraham’s hand to be stayed, rather than sacrifice Isaac, the end of human sacrifice is being depicted, according to some. God promises never to send another Great Flood. God slaughters the firstborn of the Egyptians without repetition that this servant of Your Eminence can recall. The extreme Old Testament methods of warfare commanded by God give way to the less sanguinary New Testament. As time passes, God is clearly becoming more reluctant to impose death. 

Voluntary childfree lifestyles reduce the need for the Angel of Death, and lo, the Church paid institutional honor to such lifestyles until the leadership of His Holiness Pope Francis, who attacked them. If Church leadership is well aware that His Holiness Pope Francis created children, a sensible explanation for attacking what would otherwise be a cornerstone of the life of His Holiness Pope Francis, along with such other explanations as His Holiness Pope Francis having been blinded by misbegotten economic theories or zeal to reform the priesthood, this servant of Your Eminence insists that the facts be made public, for the sake of all whose lives have been led, from before birth, under the shadow of their possible descent from people who broke oaths of chastity, an issue in which this servant of Your Eminence may well have a personal stake.

This servant of Your Eminence goggles at the filth that existed among those Catholic leaders responsible for the current Catechism and hence the official Catholic moral code. When is the Church going to find a couple of miracles to ascribe to Shuhada' Sadaqat, née Sinéad O’Connor, and commence her cause for canonization? Witness all her work, which stands in the best tradition of the ethical loyalty embodied by Jesus and in contrast to the obedient loyalty exemplified, and menacingly promoted, by Joe Pesci in his Saturday Night Live appearance the week after Sinéad O’Connor threw away the lion’s share of her popularity for the sake of the defenseless.

After watching the performance by the future saint, how could any person oriented toward ethical loyalty fail to be transported by the power of the divine Mother? Depending on where it turns next, Catholicism may be ahead by virtue of being behind, for the Church still honors its origin as the state religion of the Roman Empire, including near-worship of the Mother of God, and the last may yet again be first.

And that’s the Church’s path to guide Western civilization in the correction of its ways:

A) Acknowledge the mathematically obvious fact that every trinity implies seven distinct entities, namely the three persons, the three pairwise alliances of persons, and the singular whole of the trinity, as embodied at a deep level of Nature by the quark model of protons and neutrons.

B) Reverse the ionization by which the Church has lost far too many electrons, and welcome all into a truly catholic Church by devising seven distinct moral codes that worshipers would be free to choose among, with suitable limitations on code switching, or declare a new ecumenical theory based on the equal legitimacy of contradictory moral codes found in various Christian and non-Christian religions.

C) Justify B) as reasonable under the current, transitional nature of humanity (Schrödinger-type theology), God (Heisenberg-type theology), or both humanity and God together (Dirac-type theology).

D) Pay God’s debts. This servant of Your Eminence awaits the outcomes of the meetings this month, to which Bishop Mark alluded, concerning the bankruptcy of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany. This servant of Your Eminence strongly counsels against resolving the matter in the cheapest possible way and in favor of taxing rich diocesan communicants to make the claimants as near whole as possible, including via funds for their benefit set up after the bankruptcy proceedings are closed. The organization of Your Eminence gains power by adhering to higher moral standards than some restaurant or sporting goods store after the folks who sit at the left hand of the Father finish draining its accounts and ruining its credit.

E) As a gesture of good faith and of praise for ethical loyalty, which too often gets short shrift in comparison to obedient loyalty, fast-track the canonization of Shuhada' Sadaqat and Fulton Sheen.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God or moral codes, so long as the moral codes conform to local law or protest it as openly as practical,
James

P.S. When this servant of Your Eminence shares theologies inspired by the physics of mass, a quantity the fundamental nature of which cannot be known, owing to the inability of humanity to probe length or time scales anywhere near those believed to be fundamental, this servant of Your Eminence does so as a physicist who has published in a peer-reviewed journal; whose dissertation has been downloaded in at least 32 countries since this servant of Your Eminence started publishing, in April of 2024, small pieces commingling physics and broader philosophy; whose main work in graduate school was on a model intended to explore possibilities for what mass and similar quantities might be; who tossed a large, completed paper on mass, approved by a highly competent practitioner of fundamental theoretical physics, in a drawer six years ago, rather than seek to publish it at a time when humanity clearly has too much power over Nature; who had the honesty to reject Catholicism openly as a young teen, to the peril of this servant of Your Eminence, as this servant of Your Eminence sees things; who dropped out of high school, out of the top graduate program in condensed matter physics in the United States, and out of science to do more important work; who included a preface in that dissertation, describing thoughts on the nature of God; who worked out a framework for understanding God and the basis for morality within a couple of years of rejecting Catholicism the first time; and who has lived in accordance with a strategy, from no later than age fourteen, of preparing to arrive at the proper moment with the gifts this servant of Your Eminence now lays before Your Eminence.

P.P.S. And some people get annoyed when this servant of Your Eminence lays similar gifts before them. Hmmm.