A reflection by Jenna Griffin
The priest had said, in his homily, that scientists today understand that everything we perceive—stars, planets, galaxies, our own life-sustaining globe—all of this accounts for only 5% of the universe. The other 95% is beyond us in nearly every way—dark matter and dark energy that we don’t know how to detect, let alone understand.
“Mystery!” he had proclaimed, arms open wide to us as if offering a gift, or a piece of particularly good news. Mystery. It is, after all, the lifeblood of faith.
I am alone now in my car on the five-lane highway, passing through Albuquerque, hurtling towards the Sandia mountains, and there are hundreds of souls hurtling along on all sides of me. I feel a vague sort of anxiety on roads like this, all of us hurtling, all of us commanding a ton and a half of steel with fragile, fallible hands. I have learned to sew this year, and so maybe that is why the lines in the road look suddenly like the measured stitches of some great quilt, rolled out before us all. These stitches hold it all together. They hold us in our places so that we can get where we are going.
I wonder, where is that 95%? Is it spatially beyond us, too far from us to reach with any human technology? Is it temporally out of reach, just on the outside of our grasp of time? Or is it stuffed in the empty pockets of the here and now, the unseen slipped in between the pages of the seen? I have no command of this science, not even enough to know if my musings hold any kind of weight or if I have (and this is most likely) wholly misunderstood the significance of these percentages. But still I can’t help but wonder: are the spaces between us packed with dark matter, pulsing with dark energy?
On this highway, passing now through the mountains, it is the space between us that keeps us alive. We must stay apart. Those great stitches remind us that it is separation that keeps us ultimately together. If we must collide, it must be an invisible sort of collision—some imperceptible part of me reaching out to some imperceptible part of you, bonds forming between us because we are both here, now, sharing the time and space of this road. It almost seems possible here, as we float above this road, our bodies transcending themselves with the aid of material turned machine. We have shortened distance and time—we have stepped outside of the natural limitations of our physical selves. What else might we be capable of? I wonder if there is a similar 5:95 ratio of seen to unseen in our very beings.
It seems illogical that anyone could know, or even guess, these numbers if the 95 is wholly undetectable, but scientists say they can infer them from the movements of that which they can perceive. There are few explanations to what they see other than this: there must be something more out there. Much as we, in the church tent turned sanctuary, inferred the existence of God all morning.
Mystery.
I pull away from the highway, snapping myself from the frenzied energy of so many bodies moving so very quickly. At the base of it I’m wondering about love. Does love have mass? Does it have energy? Is it a force that we can infer, an invisible majority? The Sandia mountains retreat in my rear-view mirror, the sky stretches deep blue above me, and I slow down onto the near-empty road, following the single set of stitches that will take me all the way home.
Jenna Griffin is a writer and community development worker based in the Jiu Valley, Romania. When she is not writing or working with the youth at Fara Limite, she enjoys making art, foraging in the mountains, studying foreign languages, and rock climbing.