"My ways are higher than your ways...

...and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:9)

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." (Arthur Stanley Eddington)

"Is that what you think about during the endowment?!" (Carolyn Head)

OK, so lets get a few things out of the way -- amazing though they are, they're science. No fiction here. No fantasy.

E=MC²

Everyone knows that equation. Right? The basis for nuclear bombs. It means that if all the energy in my little fingernail were to be released at once, it would be an explosion comparable to a nuclear blast. If all the energy in my body were to be released at once, it would be comparable to hundreds of simultaneous detonations of the largest nuclear bombs the US is thought to possess or dozens of simultaneous detonations of the largest nuclear bombs Russia is thought to possess.

That's what E=MC² says. It's not science fiction.

Ok, the significant word here is "if." We haven't figured out how to do that yet. Nuclear bombs release only a tiny portion of the energy in a very small part of a very tiny percentage of the atoms. That's enough. If we could improve the efficiency just a tiny bit more, the effect would be devastating. God forbid that we ever learn how.

The Big Bang Theory

OK, it's a "theory," but it's pretty well acknowledged. The evidence supporting it continues to grow. We think we know what the universe was like right back to 10^-43 seconds after the big bang started when all the energy and mass in the entire known universe was in a particle only 10^-35 meters in diameter. That's smaller than even the most powerful microscopes could see. There is serious controversy, but it involves conditions in the first few seconds of the life of the universe, not so much in the big-bang, itself, or that it started tiny!

OK, so now we've gotten the you-gotta-be-kidding out of the way. People might say that what I'm going to record next is deep, mysterious, far out, and, by definition, should not be preached. "Let's stick to faith, repentance, etc., and not get carried away with the mysteries."

Ha! My take is that we already have the deep, mysterious, and far out, and they seem to be valid. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take these apparent difficult-to-understand-but-apparently-valid "mysteries" and relate them to the gospel?

I think so.

So here goes.

These are all things we've heard all our lives and we accept them because we've heard them all our lives:

God has a body. His glory would consume us if we were in His presence and unprotected. Christ has a light that permeates the universe. It is the light of the stars, etc. When we die and are separated from our bodies for a time, we will consider this separation to be a prison.

Why the latter? Let's start with it. Why would we consider separation from these corruptible bodies to be anything but a liberation? Joseph Smith says that spirit matter is a fine matter (as in wispy, insubstantial matter), but it's still matter. There's no such thing as immaterial material. How big an explosion would you get if you released all the energy in a spirit body. Not much, I expect. We interact very nicely with the things of this universe because out bodies are tightly encapsulated packets of incredible amounts of energy. If spirit bodies are so much more insubstantial with so much less matter, they are much less able to interact with very much in this universe. No wonder spirits consider their disembodied state to be a prison after having had the experience of being able to interact with so much.

But God and Christ have bodies. How much energy is encapsulated in their bodies? As much as a star? As an entire galaxy? As the entire universe? As many universes? Remember that 10^-35 meter particle that contained all the energy in the universe? We have no idea what things were like when the universe was younger and smaller than this. Infinitesimal? That's how it's described. What if God's body was composed of such infinitesimals? Perhaps his body encapsulates an infinite amount of energy.

Perhaps it is the source of all energy of the universe and however many other such universes.

And people think the idea of God having a body restricts Him some way.

They don't understand physics.

But then neither do any of us -- including the physicists.

And, to the extent that the laws of physics helps us to imagine any of this -- the actual universe, the actual reality, the actual nature of God, ourselves, and this wonderful universe home of ours -- reality, that we can't imagine, that it's not possible to imagine, is likely to be much more glorious and wonderful than that. Perhaps infinitely more.