Me and Mulder, We Believe

On the “X-Files,” I stood with Mulder.  His motto, my motto:  I want to believe.


In fact, I do believe.  I love the mysterious and the unexplainable because so many events in my life fall into those categories.  Accepting that sensation of ‘something more’ in my daily existence adds a personal ‘God particle.’


And for me, Scully and her skepticism constituted buzz kill wrapped in a wet blanket.  Come on Scully!  Don’t you see it?  The beauty and hope of the enigma. 


It doesn’t take too much to keep me convinced that there’s more to life than the superficial, the mundane, and the rote.  I love knowing who’s on the phone before I answer. Or when I dreamed about the long-lost friend before she called.  


It made me smile when I felt my mother, gone since 1977, urging me to pick up Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red Headed League” at the library.  Of course I knew she was a red head, but my grandma didn’t tell me until later that mom was an avid fan of Sherlock Holmes.


At a recent dinner party I sat near a lovely woman, “Ms. Jones.”  She’s a retired teacher, so we had our education backgrounds in common.  We chatted and got comfortable.  Then, as though compelled, she told me a story that floated in the halls of her consciousness: 

At home in the mode of creating order and eliminating the superfluous, she found herself sifting through boxes and stacks of papers and pictures and books, making decisions about what could stay and what must go. 

In the process, she ran across a book by Dale Evans Rogers (Roy’s wife of 51years).  The book, Angel Unaware:  A Touching Story of Love and Loss, told the story of the Rogers’ daughter, Robin, who lived less than two years. 

My dinner companion puzzled over the find.  She didn’t recall acquiring the book.  She vaguely remembered the story of the Rogers’ heartbreak, but…?  How did this book find its way into her home? 

On opening the cover, the mystery deepened, for there she found Dale Evans’ signature.  A signed copy!   

She leafed through the pages and saw that the story is told from the viewpoint of the child as she looks back to earth from heaven.  Her sweet voice recounts the trials and trauma of coming into the world with multiple devastating birth defects.  The intended ‘take away’ is that throughout their ordeal, little Robin brought joy to her parents, pulled them closer to each other and enhanced their lives in myriad ways. 

My dinner companion shook her head, unsure what to make of her discovery.  The story, while touching, had no special significance for her.  Still, without reasoning why, she knew she would keep it.  She found a spot on her bookshelf and tucked it in, then moved on to the purging at hand. 

Later that week with order restored in her home my new friend received an invitation to the 40^th year reunion of students she’d known in her classroom.  She prevailed upon her husband and they attended the event. 


She felt honored and happy to be among her former students and to find them doing so well.  Many of them approached her with hugs and fond stories of their adolescence and her contribution to their successful lives.  

As the evening drew to a close a final alum came toward her saying, “Remember me, Ms. Jones?”   In fact, Ms. Jones didn’t have a strong memory of this student. 

“I’m the one who lent you that book….Angel Unaware.  Remember?” 

Well of course she remembered, now.  She studied the face before her and listened to her former student’s story of the troubles in her life.  Remarkable.   

And the book had been a loan!  Of course, Ms. Jones made arrangements to return it to the one who now needed its comforting message. 

Now tell me, Scully, how was it that Ms. Jones unearthed that forgotten book and gave it a ‘safe’ place in her bookcase just in time to be reunited with its owner?   

Coincidence?  Sure, Scully, I’d like a neon sign saying ‘a merging of the cosmic consciousness created this meaningful episode of seeming serendipity.’   

But even without it, I believe.

The Universe Explained, and You're Welcome

So Anderson Cooper is gay.  Republicans want to repeal the newly validated healthcare law.  The Olympics are imminent.  And oh yeah, they found a God particle. 

A ‘God particle’!?  What’s a God particle, for Heaven’s sake?  Why it’s the long-sought-after Higgs boson.  Oh, of course!  The Higgs boson!  Why didn’t you just say so? 

For the layman, and other ignorant schmos like me, the Higgs boson, dubbed the "God particle," is a key piece in the scientific puzzle that seeks to explain the origin of the universe.  Duh! 

The Higgs boson appeared 13.7 billion years ago in the chaos of the Big Bang and turned the flying debris into galaxies, stars and planets.  Or so the theory goes. 

Physicists around the globe have spent decades with little wrinkles in their foreheads - not to mention billions of dollars in their hunt for an actual God particle - a tiny thingy that makes universes out of flying flotsam.  And now, scientists working at the world's largest atom smasher say they have proof of the existence of just such a, uh, thingy. 

Before you file this in the Who Cares Category, consider the implications:  According to a broad scientific consensus, the formal discovery of the God particle constitutes the greatest advance in knowledge of the universe since E=MCx2 (I can’t get my computer to make that little superscript 2 signifying ‘squared,’ but surely you’re familiar.)   

Proof of the Higgs boson is being hailed as a key to confirming the standard model of physics that explains what gives mass to matter and, by extension, how the universe was formed.  Thank God and his particle. 

Unable to resist the urge to clarify a concept that mainstream media has ranked alongside new apps offering GPS for hikers, Rutgers University physicist Matt Strassler told Reuters that without the God particle, "nothing like human beings, or the earth we live on, could exist."  

But… the fact that we do exist here on the planet sort of proves we could be here, to me at least.  But then I’ve always been easy to please.  For scientists, the particle’s existence has been only hypothetical, in spite of the fact that they themselves were standing around in laboratories, wearing white coats with pocket protectors that couldn’t exist without the flippin’ thing in the first place.   

We’re orbiting a conundrum.  It’s a cosmic chicken and egg.  And I thought working in public schools was maddening. 

In an interview with National Public Radio, physicist Joseph Lykken of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago explained the difficulty in tracking down the particle.  "It exists for a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, or something like that, and then falls apart into other particles."   

Oh I see.  Like the attention span of a Labrador retriever.  Got it.  Thank you.  

I’m not going to be the one to break it to all these eggheads, but there is another question on the edge of its seat, waiting for the confetti to hit the ground.  If you’ve just popped your champagne’s cork, you might want to avert your eyes. 

Where’d the God particle come from? 

It seems obvious to me, but as mentioned above, I’m on a simpler plane than these guys.  On the other hand, maybe I’m more of like mind with Albert Einstein than my husband would ever admit.  In describing his ‘cosmic religion,’ Einstein spoke of a "miraculous order which manifests itself in all of nature as well as in the world of ideas."  

Yeah, go on.  Preach to me Albert. 

"…I have nothing but awe when I observe the laws of nature,” he said.  “God is a mystery.  But a comprehensible mystery.  There are not laws without a lawgiver.” 

That’s what I’m talkin’ about!  Who better to create Mr. Higgs’s boson?  Or maybe what better?  I’ll grant the lab geeks that much. 

But Albert is more quotable than I am.  He maintained that "even though…religion and science… are clearly marked off from each other" there are "strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies, as aspirations for truth derive from the religious sphere."   

For Einstein, "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." 

Go Albert!  You rock.