On Cemeteries and Black Holes
When I was a girl growing up in the suburbs of northern Virginia, there was a cemetery we passed by every time we drove into Washington. Some of its stones were cracked and broken; others had bullet holes from when they were used as line defenses in the Civil War. I knew these things because my father talked about them. He used to suggest we go look for historic markers among the cemetery’s towering oaks and pink-flowered azaleas; I, however, never acquiesced. I was terrified of cemeteries. Every time we drove by one, my vision would blur, my palms would sweat and my heart would race in what might be described today as a full-fledged panic attack. I was certain that ghastly ghosts would fly out to get me. I’d heard some kids at school say that if you closed your eyes before you actually saw the cemetery then no bad luck would come to you. I wasn’t sure I believed them, but even so I’d squeeze my eyes shut at the sharp bend on South Washington Street and beg my parents to tell me when the cemetery was out of view.
My fear of cemeteries remained with me in later life, until I moved into a little white Cape Cod style house that was almost across from an old cemetery. By then I was teaching high school history and was curious about the old families buried there, but I couldn’t bring myself to go into it until one night I had a dream. I was walking through an old cemetery at night when a long-haired hairy monkey-like creature with beady red eyes jumped out from behind a tombstone. I screamed and took off running down a path into the woods. The creature followed suit; it was closing in and I was too out of breath to keep running. It soon caught up and leapt onto my back, its hairy arms wrapped in a stranglehold around my neck. I almost passed out, but then a calm came over me. I gently placed my hands over the monkey’s furry arms and said, “It’s OK for you to ride on my shoulders for as long as you want to, but I’m not ready to come with you yet.” Then the creature released its hold and rode home on my shoulders. After that dream, my fear of cemeteries evaporated. I began taking my dream's monkey on long walks through the cemetery and meditating under a favorite maple tree. I did find tombstones of some of Guilford’s oldest families. I even brought my watercolors and spent hours there painting. Death had lost its sting.
For fifty years, I've had a similar fear of black holes. I learned about their possibility in a history of science class at Wellesley College. It seems that during the First World War, a German physicist and astronomer named Karl Schwarzschild had read Einstein’s theory of relativity while bunkered down on the eastern front. He wrote to Einstein with a mathematical solution based on the premise of black holes—matter so dense they suck whole stars and galaxies into their relentless gravitational pull. Black holes lurked in the universe, as inescapable and terrifying as death. I tried to push them out of my mind and became afraid to learn anything more about them or even to look too long into the night sky.
Then, not too many years ago, I chanced upon a new discovery. In 2018 Yvette Cendes, a research associate with the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, reported on the phenomenon of “burping.” Years after swallowing a star or galaxy, a black hole sometimes emits explosive shock waves so powerful they may trigger the formation of whole new stars and solar systems. It might be that the Big Bang responsible for our own existence is the result of such a burp!
The Hindu religion has long hypothesized such kalpas, or cosmic cycles, the 4.32 billion year unit of world creation, destruction, and re-creation. Each kalpa is considered a day in the life of the creator god Brahma because he creates a world when he wakes up and destroys it when he goes to sleep.[1] The universe has seen many kalpas. Its entire lifespan is one maha kalpa, a length of 311.04 trillion years or the duration of one breath of the god Vishnu.[2] I can’t help but think the writers of the ancient Mahabarata might have been on to something. It’s enough to make my head spin— and to look at black holes in a new light.
One day when I was looking at some Hindu mandalas or yantras, I got to thinking about the kalpas and black holes. It led me to create this mandala. In its bottom right corner is a broken flower of life, the unraveling of our universe that Hindus suggest is taking place in the present age, the time of moral decline known as the Kali yuga. Its edges are frayed and pieces have broken off as it is drawn inexorably into a black hole’s gravitational pull. But that isn’t the end of the story. The broken pieces have been burped out to seed a new creation of wholeness and spiritual life. Perhaps black holes, like the Hindu goddess Kali, are not only a terrifying force of destruction, they are the refiner’s fire that allows new life to emerge. Black holes have become a source not of fright but of fascinating possibility.
For me today, this mandala symbolizes the message of my upcoming memoir, All God If God There Be: A Journey through Incest into Incarnate Light. On the left is the maha kalpa of my childhood with its questionable moral teachings and deplorable lack of sexual boundaries. As a young woman I was sucked into a darkness of depression and despair from which I felt completely powerless to escape. And yet, over the course of half a century, I have been reshaped within that darkness. Through the power of the Spirit I am being burped out into the love that I’ve come to experience as God in Christ. Writing this memoir has been the latest step in a lifetime of spiritual healing. I hope that reading it may become the same for some of you.
[1] Gombrich, Richard. “Ancient Indian Cosmology.” In Ancient Cosmologies. Edited by Carmen Black and Michael Loewe, 110-142. London: Allen and Unwin, 1975.
[2] Goyal, Amit. “Age of the Universe according to the Vedas.” https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~goyal/age_of_universe.php