A Black Hole and our Capacity for Wonder

This is the image of the day. No, the image of the year, surely. Maybe of the decade. I find it magnificent. Wondrous. Humbling. And yes, I admit it. Moving.

This is of course the first ever image of a black hole. Its mass is 6.5 billion times that of our sun. It is about 54 million light years away, at the heart of the galaxy known as Messier (M) 87.

I’ve no hesitation in saying that this image, redolent of a doughnut, will prove to be as emblematic as that famous photo of the earth rising above the surface of the moon. (That and other famous astronomical images are here, thanks to the Guardian.) There are some photos you know you’ll never forget, because they burn themselves into the memory and the imagination. This is one of them.

As a milestone in scientific collaboration, this image is already a spectacular achievement. It is the result of networking eight radio telescopes across the world into what’s been called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The effect is to create a receptor dish as large as the earth itself with a vastly increased reach into space. It’s an amazing feat of technology in its own right, not to mention the extent of partnership and team working among all the research agencies involved. When human beings pool their knowledge and their talents, there seem to be no limits to what can be done.

As for this ring of fire, I think it would need a poet to do it justice. As we know, black holes can’t themselves be seen directly since all electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, is pulled back inside these super-massive objects by their immense gravitational fields. What we are looking at is the event-horizon, the fiery perimeter-zone where matter in the “accretion disc” is being sucked inside the black hole at nearly the speed of light and generating such prodigious quantities of energy that it becomes visible in its last gasp.

So as the name implies, black holes will always be deeply mysterious. Astrophysicists refer to them as singularities where the “normal” laws of physics break down. Beyond the event horizon is unknowable, so distorted is the space-time continuum by the massive gravitational effects of black holes. But what we do know is that these objects power the galaxies they lie at the heart of. That includes our own galaxy, the Milky Way. We can look forward to seeing “our own” black hole, Sagittarius A*, in due course, thanks to the EHT.

We owe a great deal of the theory of black holes to Stephen Hawking, especially what happens around the event horizon. It’s a tribute to his extraordinary mind that observation is on the point of confirming his theoretical models. It may possibly refine them too: falsifiability is a key concept in establishing sound scientific hypotheses. But behind him stands another of the twentieth century’s greatest scientists, Albert Einstein. His theory of general relativity will also be tested by these latest revelations. Relativity theory was itself a refinement of Newtonian physics whose accuracy failed near extremities and singularities like very massive objects. Will his theories too need further modification in the light of the research that will follow this image of a black hole?

What we need to remember is the key role that is played in science by the imagination. The periodic table, the Benzene ring and the structure of the double helix in DNA are all attributable as much to the imaginative capacity to think in new ways that break out of the boundaries of accepted models as to observation by itself. The black hole was imagined long before it was theorised about let alone observed in its own right, as has been this year.

Which is where the arts can perhaps add their commentary on this dazzling image. I saw two allusions in it that have stayed with me this afternoon. The first is a poem by the seventeenth century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan:

I saw eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Drive’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.

“Calm” a black hole is not. It is a vortex of furious uncontained violence. And yet from half way across the cosmos, it radiates a sense of timeless stability. The perception gets me thinking about time, eternity and God, what is transient, what is enduring, where we came from and where we are bound on this little speck of stardust we call Earth. Spirituality comes into things when we look up at the heavens and read how they “declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19.1).

The other allusion is to Wagner’s cycle of four music dramas The Ring. Here the connotations are altogether darker, more true perhaps to the catastrophic forces of a black hole. The ring is a symbol of naked power, stolen from its rightful owners the Rhine Maidens and thereafter destroying everyone, god or mortal, whom it touches. (Cross reference J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings where many of these themes recur.) In the final scene of the fourth drama, The Twilight of the Gods, the ring is returned to the Rhine, the old corrupted world is destroyed and out of fire and water a new, redeemed order rises up. Black holes, conjectures Hawking, play a vital part in “recycling” the matter of the universe which, if you think about it, is a redemptive image. Wagnerian in its scope, you might say.

I began by saying that I was humbled by this image of a black hole. It put me in my place, and put my worries and concerns into a larger context. It’s not that they don’t matter any more, simply that when we look beyond ourselves and contemplate the wonders of the cosmos, it has a curiously calming, healing effect. To me, that makes this iconic image religious in character. And that should drive us to our knees.

The Spirituality of Solstice: Wintry Thoughts from the North

It's the winter solstice. Here in Northumberland, on Latitude 55 degrees north, the sun rises a full half hour later than it does in London. Today at the destined time of 8.32am, it was barely light. Squally rain was tipping out of a gunmetal sky as I waited at the church door for morning prayer. Arduously, the day succeeded in climbing clear of the long night, but at what effort. For a while the sun emerged, its horizontal light irradiating the valley to magical effect. (Which is why photographers love winter - the light is so much more magical than the glare of high summer.) Then the rain returned once more. By turns it's been bright and it's been sombre. And each has its different kind of northern beauty.

This year's solstice brings a change to the weather. Gone are the quiet high pressure days of the past week or so. You can tell that meteorologists don't care for calm weather when nothing much happens, however well that suits the rest of us. We have one in the village. He is also a retired priest. He takes daily readings of maximum and minimum temperatures, precipitation levels, cloud cover and wind speed, and issues a monthly bulletin to villagers who are interested. He admits that he likes eventful weather. And have you detected the glint in the eye of TV forecasters now that storm Barbara is on her way, just in time to blow away the festive travel plans of millions of people across the country?

But back to the shortest day. "'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's" wrote John Donne in his famous midwinter elegy (at the time he was writing before the reform of the calendar, the shortest day fell on St Lucy's Day, 13 December). Church of England people will know that in the Book of Common Prayer, the winter solstice day 21 December was observed as St Thomas's Day. Famously the doubting apostle, his themes of knowing and unknowing, certainty, questioning and faith seemed ideally suited to a day when darkness ruled. And though the season turns and the days grow longer again, it is so imperceptible to start with that you wouldn't know it - not for a week or two, anyway.

Painters call this chiaroscuro, the interplay of light-and-dark that masters like Caravaggio excelled at. The accentuation of contrasts often gives a painting or a photograph a strikingly dramatic quality (compare the genre of film noir which has given the cinema some of its greatest achievements in the era of black-and-white). But drama isn't what the technique is fundamentally about. Look at the dark areas of a great painting and you'll see that the darkness has as much vitality as the light with its attention to detail, its subtle treatment of muted colour, its "negative" response to the shapes that are illuminated, and as often as not, activity that is far from obvious that you wouldn't notice if you didn't stop to give your full attention to the canvas.

This gives me a metaphor of religious faith that I particularly prize in midwinter. It seems to me that "doubting" Thomas is the disciple who dares to inhabit chiaroscuro, is not afraid of the difficult or challenging truth that may emerge when you study the darkness carefully. That's true of our own personal darkness or "shadow" in particular. At the end of The Tempest, Shakespeare has Prospero say of Caliban, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine". It's a profound line that can be read at many levels. The misshapen, unlovely Caliban has plotted Prospero's death. And no doubt Prospero partly deserves it - he is no saint in this great play. But he has thrown away his staff and renounced the power of illusion. This recognition scene is the moment of truth-telling. In the same way, if we banish our fantasies and illusions and start telling the truth of our condition, if we recognise and acknowledge - even befriend - the darkness that is "mine", we find we are on the road to recovery, transformation and healing.

Spirits can sink low at the solstice. I'm not so much thinking of the affliction called SAD - seasonal affective disorder - brought on by too little light. It's more the spiritual ennui that can set in when hope is at a low ebb. This year, as 2016 comes to an end, it's easy to lose heart. We wonder what has become of our world, our nation and ourselves when there is so much bitterness, hatred and contempt around, and apparently, so little compassion to act as a life-giving antidote. It doesn't always help to quote too quickly Mother Julian's great saying "all shall be well". That's true, but it may not address the immediate present. In times of struggle and conflict, what counts I think is simply to know that we are not alone. To enter someone else's darkness and be present to them without the need to speak is perhaps the greatest gift we can bring them. In dark times, words, even the best words, can run out. But the touch of compassion - "suffering with" - never loses its capacity to make a difference.

It would take a St John of the Cross to do justice to the spirituality of chiaroscuro. But here's a solstice insight that helps me. On this shortest day, the meteorological outlook is full of stormy threats. And though I say it with a heavy heart, this seems just as true of the outlook for our world in 2017. Yet as we contemplate the future and possibly feel afraid, we also know that from now on the days are getting longer. We don't see it for a while, yet we know that it's true as an astronomical fact. Equally, to stop us taking things for granted at midsummer, we know that as the days grow warmer and holidays beckon, the nights are already drawing in. Winter's lightening-in-darkness, summer's darkening-in-light: this is chiaroscuro. It mirrors the light-and-darkness of our human lives. It helps us recognise the ambivalence of who and what we are. Above all, it stops us rushing headlong towards light when all along, God may be more present to us in the dark.

Henry Vaughan has a great poem, "Night". The last stanza makes the extraordinary claim that "there is in God, some say, / A deep but dazzling darkness". Earlier he has painted a picture of faith in this way:

 

Most blest believer he!
Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes
Thy long-expected healing wings could see,
When Thou didst rise!
And, what can never more be done,
Did at midnight speak with the Sun.

I don't pretend to have grasped the paradoxes of this way of believing. But it rings true to my experience. And, I guess from what we know about him, St Thomas's too. So at this winter solstice, I want to acknowledge the truth that lies hidden in the questions and doubts that feel so real and compelling. Sometimes I can't even be sure if it's my own personal despondency that I'm experiencing, or whether it's an empathic aspect of being part of a world in pain that any human being who feels anything knows only too well at times like these.

Into such a world an Infant was born. He came to give us back the lives we had lost. The Holy Child comes to us today as Immanuel, "God-with-us". That's the meaning and the promise Christmas gives to the solstice. "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light" said the prophet in words we treasure in Advent. For if he is present among the dark wastelands we have made of our world, and if he is alongside us in own darkness, then our hearts can be strangely warmed, and our spirits begin to sing again.