Cat-in-a-Box

I want to talk about something I often notice in faith and church. But first I need to go through a brief science lesson. Please bear with me…

1. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us that we can only accurately know the position of a particle or its momentum at any one time.  So, we can work out exactly where a particle is at a given moment, but not how fast it is traveling or we can know a particles speed, but have no idea where it is.
2. Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment that involves a cat trapped in a solid box with a radioactive substance and a vile of poison.  There is a chance that an atom in the substance would decay, setting off a geiger counter, and causing the vile to smash and the cat to die. Equally, there is just as much chance of nothing happening and the cat living.  Whilst the box is sealed the cat can be said to be in both states, that is dead and alive. It is only when the box is opened and the cat observed that we can know which state it is in.

These are basic, and maybe not 100% accurate, descriptions of these principles from quantum mechanics but they have helped me in reflecting on the issue of having to put things into words.

I work in the words business, each week I spend hours preparing to speak and then on a Sunday, preaching.  When I preach I am often trying to explain something that words don’t really do justice to.  You may have done similar when trying to tell someone about a sunrise you have seen or the feeling you got at the last concert you went to.  Sometimes words just can’t say all that needs to be said, they fall short and can leave people unimpressed or sometimes confused.

Words also make things concrete.  When we speak or write, often from positions of authority, we are understood in solid, rigid, black and white terms even if that is not what we want to do.  We can try and explain a mystery, grasping at words that best fit what we have experienced or learnt and end up creating a  mis-shapen statue that is a poor reflection of what we had in mind.

We use words in all our life.  Blog posts, newspapers, instructions, books, sermons, conversations, doctrines, prayers, explanations, leaflets, etc etc etc all involve words. They play a major and often important part of our every day life but they can also cause problems.

How then does Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat fit into our use of words.

If we take the uncertainty principal and reword its description to look at words and not particles we get something like this.

If we put into words the current position of where our faith/work is we cannot know its direction/momentum.  Vice versa, if we say where our faith/work is heading we cannot easily explain where it is at this present time.

For an example of how this works we can look at how I and others preach. When I stand up and preach I am often speaking about what God is doing with me and what he is wanting to do with the church in that place, at that moment in time.  I want to talk about the nitty-gritty of real life and about how scripture and faith in Jesus helps me at work and at home that week.  This means when I talk I am often talking about my position at this point in time and where I see God in it.
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If I preach on the same verses in a year or ten years time, there is a chance I will not be in the same place.  My faith will have grown and changed and be in a different position to the one I hold now.  The problem comes when people take my position, or anyones, in the moment it was uttered or written down as the ultimate truth on the subject (and we have been doing this for centuries).  Putting things into words creates a snapshot or a ‘selfie’ of the moment.  It doesn’t give you the full picture of what is going on inside someones head and heart and what God is doing with them and where on earth their faith is going to end up.  You just have to take someone like the apostle Paul to see that where he starts in his understanding of Jesus is a long way from where he finishes.  The same goes for the Church fathers and mothers and probably for yourself.

This works the other way as well because there are times when we try to describe where we are heading, our direction or the momentum we have in getting there.  When we speak or write in this way we are talking about our vision, of the place we may end up and the work God is doing in us.  We are talking about our dreams and motivation but not about where we are in this moment.   The difficulty with this is that where we are now looks nothing like what we are describing.

The same goes for movements like pioneer ministry or fresh expressions.  Putting into writing where something is in this moment can create a ‘model’ which others try to repeat.  They see the here and now but miss the momentum that has brought it to this point and that which will take it forward.  Certain fresh expressions like messy church and cafe church probably ran into the issue.

Again taking the reverse view we can see that churches and ministries can talk about where they are going and why they are going there. They can talk about what they hope to become and what they want the church to look like.  But if you turn up on a Sunday morning it may look nothing like this. We know their direction but not their present state.

On to the cat in the box.

One of the many answers to Schrödinger’s experiment came up in our description at the beginning.  That is that whilst ever the box is closed we cannot say what state it is in.  We have to talk about it as both alive and dead.  It is only when the box is opened that we can observe whats happened inside and safely say which state the cat is in.

This connects with me because I like the idea of allowing something to just be, out of sight and allowed to develop and become what it needs to be without being defined.  Is it dead… is it alive… has the radioactive substance morphed the cat in to the latest superhero.  Allowing our faith, fresh expressions or pioneer ministries to develop in this way would give them all space to be.  It would allow them to develop and grow in a way that did not mean they had to always state what or where they are.

The cat can only stay in the box for so long though.  At some point it has to be opened and observed.

Words are important because they help us communicate with others our thoughts and feelings.  It allows us to tell others about where our faith is and what God is doing in a particular place and at a particular time.  Words have a wonderful place to play in our lives.  They will help us and hinder us but I hope we can hear them in a different way.

That we could always hear words with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in the back of our mind.  That we would understand that what is being said isn’t the full picture.  It is only a description of one state, one part of a whole.  The cat is often still in the box and we aren’t know exactly what it is until we see it in its fulness.