The Mystery of Faith

Today, as at every Sunday Mass at Church of the Resurrection in Ellicott City, Maryland, there came a point in the liturgy when the cantor sang, "The mystery of faith," and the congregation immediately replied, "We proclaim your Death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection, until you come again."

To me, this rather strange-sounding affirmation, even though it's a statement of faith that has the notion of death so prominent in it, offers the ultimate in hope. Here's my attempt to say why.

Heather Heyer

Let me begin by noting that our culture today seems to have crossed a dangerous line into chaos. This was recently brought home to me by the tragic death a bit over a week ago of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia. She was the victim of an automobile driven intentionally into a crowd of anti-protesters at a rally of white supremacists, one of whom was the driver of the vehicle.

Her martyrdom was a sign of cultural chaos, the seeming coming apart of America. America seems to have become a country where the center no longer holds.

I've long been interested in the sciences of complexity and chaos. Their recent additions to the pantheon of scientific insights tell us that a human culture is a "complex adaptive system." Like all other such systems, it can exhibit any of four classes of behavior. One of these classes is chaos.

"Chaos" describes a system in such flux that its future is intrinsically unknowable. It changes constantly — not in itself a bad thing — but as a chaotic system changes from one state to the next to the next, none of the novelty it has produced remains intact. As a wag once put it about human history, the arc of its history is meaningless: "just one damn thing after another."

"Order," the opposite of chaos, is represented by two of the four classes of states a complex system can be in. In one of those two classes, the state of the system is completely static. Nothing ever changes, like when a marble sits stationary in the bottom of a bowl.

In the second of those two classes of systemic order, the marble in effect circles around and around in an orbit near the lip of the bowl. True, there's change of a sort, like when a planet circling a star experiences an ever-repeating succession of seasons. Yet there's never really "anything new under the sun."

The fourth class of complex systems' behavior is the most interesting. It's been dubbed the "edge of chaos." At the edge of chaos, creation (in the form of evolution) occurs:

This means that at the edge of chaos, meaningful change happens — not the meaningless, ephemeral change of chaos per se. New things come into existence and then stick around, adapting to changing circumstances and gracefully evolving into yet newer things.

That's how our species, Homo sapiens, arose on this earth.

The thing is, edge-of-chaos behavior in a complex system can be jostled over into the realm of chaos per se. Chaos-inducing perturbations can come from outside the system, but they can also come from within the system itself.

Complexity scientists have shown, however, that being jostled over into the realm of chaos is not necessarily a death sentence. Complex adaptive systems can instead do just what their name suggests: adapt. In doing so, they can pull themselves out of their tailspin and migrate their systemic behavior back over to the fecund edge of chaos.

When sentient beings do this, one expression we have for it is "learning from our mistakes." We don't usually think of a whole society or culture as a sentient being, but a society or culture can also learn from its mistakes.

One of the mistakes this society made in the past was slavery. Now we see individuals and governments moving to take down monuments to Civil War heroes of former slave states. This movement represents a beneficial adaptation that comes in response to the recent efforts of racists and white supremacists to reassert what they see as having been White America's past glory.

We now have a case, accordingly, of a movement along the moral arc of the universe — “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” President Obama once said, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King — provoking chaos in the form of an often violent counter-movement of neo-Nazis, thugs, and racists.

The mutual antipathy brings on chaos because it at least temporarily pulls us irreconcilably apart. So is our current political chaos going to end the American Dream? No, I say. Instead, we're going to find our way back to the fecund edge of chaos.

The reason I believe in this marvelous outcome is summed up in the "mystery of faith" I quoted at the beginning of this post. That the Lord Jesus Christ died and was resurrected is symbolic of the ability of the created order to be rescued, and even to rescue itself, from chaos. That the Lord will come again is furthermore symbolic of the fact that God's creation will never lose its capacity for righteous regeneration.

Amen to that! Amen!