Sunday Superposition #41
My melancholy victory; supermassive black hole on the loose; the Last Laugh
The last Sunday of each month features Sunday Superposition, historically a special thank you for my paid subscribers, whose generosity helps keep me writing here each week and ensures that my content remains free. Each edition is a collection of candid personal story, my favorite science news of the month, and something to make you laugh. It’s truly one of my favorite things to create.
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My melancholy victory
I posted an article last week about the reality of converting from atheism to Christianity. As of this writing, it’s my third-most-popular article. Every time I see it on the front page of my Substack I wince. I found the experience of writing that piece… unpleasant. Unpleasant not only because admitting hard truths about your life isn’t fun, but mostly because it was scented by the fragrance of failure. There’s an unspoken culture in American Christianity that marks “success” as a follower of Christ by how happy you are. Hands in the air, singing with joy, worry and confusion buried with the crucified Christ and emerging from the baptismal water as joyful serenity.
That’s not me.
“Jesus saved me and turned my life around” is a sentiment I’ve heard over and over, before and after my conversion. I have no doubt Jesus saved me and turned my life around, but that has mostly been through a painful process—more akin to corrective surgery or having a bad tooth removed than being the recipient of a breezy spiritual makeover. People rarely look down on others for needing surgery or dental work, so why do I agonize over this corrective work Jesus is doing in my life? Why does it feel, well… humiliating?
I have never been a hands-in-the-air kind of person, even when I feel happy. I’ve literally danced with joy exactly once in my life, and I don’t remember what it was over. I’m intense, brooding, moody, socially reserved, and tend toward melancholy.1 I’m sensitive, I have issues with control and perfectionism, and I overthink nearly everything. I imagine my mom holding me for the first time in the hospital, and as she glowed with new motherhood I was probably already stressing about the plan for the day.
Despite expectations, allowing Jesus Christ into my life hasn’t fundamentally changed those characteristics—I’m still intense, moody, and wrestling with who exactly is in control. But when I reflect on what really matters, there is a victory—albeit not mine.
Allowing Jesus into my life saved me from eternal destruction. Hands-down, the most important “success” in my life. It gives me hope in my darkest moments. It’s also given me a new perspective on the world, and especially other people. That guy who left a brain-dead drive-by comment on my post? An image-bearer of the eternal God. That careless woman who nearly T-boned me and my family at an intersection last night? Bearer of the imago Dei. I’m allowed to be annoyed with these jerks, but Jesus commands that I extend them the same grace God extends me every second of my existence. Because, let’s face it, I’m a jerk, too. We all are.
It’s not all struggle. I’ve found peace letting go of anger toward people who “deserve” it. I’m less anguished over messy situations and loose ends. Most happily, I’ve been released from ego-driven conversations. Conversations in the past were often marked by an unwholesome desire to dominate the discourse. To prove… what exactly? That I was the smartest person in the room? I look back on those days and wonder what I was thinking. Is anyone won over by being “owned” in a debate? Hearts and minds aren’t changed by snarky comebacks, no matter how clever. The truth is, my responses in those debates were driven by pride and insecurity. My relationship with Jesus has since changed how I see myself, other people, and the purpose of communication.
Someone once told me, “You may be the only ‘Bible’ someone ever gets.” A haunting thought as I contemplate years-old battlefields strewn with the corpses of opportunities to witness. When I put my ego aside, something miraculous happens: I feel peace. It creates space for the Holy Spirit to maneuver the conversation. I can better understand the perspective of the other person. I can more often hear the heart message behind the criticism. I can accept legitimate criticism. It releases me from the burdensome need to prove something other than Jesus’ redeeming love. Sometimes that involves pushing back on nonsense, but I no longer deliver that as a warhead fueled by pride. I still sometimes find myself beginning a response in the wrong spirit, but the “delete” key has since become the most Holy Spirit-influenced part of my keyboard.
I relish these successes (His successes, not mine), but I’m still left with a sense of defeat over my fundamental personality, which Jesus has not flipped like a light switch. I feel melancholy much of the time. A lot of that is over the sheer amount of pain and suffering in the world—in which my own pain and suffering occupies an outsized space. I attend Celebrate Recovery meetings every week. My main hangup? Control. As much as I would like to believe my despairing over the state of the world is virtuous, it’s not—it’s a desire for control, born of a combination of fear and pride. I know better than God. I wouldn’t allow these terrible things to happen.
At every CR meeting we recite the full Serenity Prayer twice: “Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.” After three years, why hasn’t this become my motto? Is it osmotically sinking into my cranium, micron by micron, or am I just resisting turning over the reins? I don’t know. But I do know Jesus is working on me, every moment, every day. He is turning my life around. Slowly, painfully. I accept this, not with my hands in the air but mostly with my hands over my face.
And that’s okay.
His victory in me is real, and so is the unfinished business. I live in both at once. The hurt often feels humiliating, but in a sense that seems right. The cross was the greatest humiliation of all time, and Jesus bore it for us. Death is the ultimate humility. If the old me is to be crucified and buried with Him, it can’t be without humility.
Foundations for Faith
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” — Galatians 2:20
“…being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 1:6
“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” — 2 Corinthians 4:16-17
“And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” — Philippians 2:8
“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” — Genesis 1:27
Featured Science News
My favorite science news story of the month
Supermassive black hole on the loose?
[New Scientist Magazine]
Maybe you played catch with dad growing up and his fastball really scorched. But can you imagine playing catch with God? He may be flinging supermassive black holes across the universe at thousands of mph.
A few years ago Hubble spotted this thin, oddly ruler-straight streak of light 7.5 billion light-years away. Astrophysicists have argued that it’s the wake of a supermassive black hole flung out of its galaxy, leaving a trail of newborn stars behind it. If real, this would be the first serious “runaway” black hole candidate.
Not everyone agrees, though. Some astrophysicists think it’s an extreme edge-on galaxy, like the famous Needle Galaxy.
Now another research group has reverse-engineered the kick. To get the kind of speed they measured you need to start with two supermassive black holes: one spinning very fast and about six times more massive than the other. When they merged, so the story goes, the resulting gravitational waves carried momentum one way, and the new merged black hole gets launched the other way at roughly a thousand kilometers a second. According to calculations, this only happens in a minority of mergers, which makes the whole scenario even more improbable, but also more interesting.
I worked on this problem when I was a researcher at UT-Austin. My group produced several papers about how black hole spin, mass ratios, and orbits can (or can’t) produce recoils strong enough to eject a supermassive black hole from its galaxy. In principle, we should’ve found a few. We pored over tens of thousands of quasar spectra in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey searching for clear examples of kicked black holes. We never settled on any strong candidates, but this recent discovery may be promising.
Whether this starry streak is the real deal or just an impostor, the physics of ejected black holes is real and intriguing. Black holes can, in principle, get flung across the universe. The question is, what’s going to catch them?
The Last Laugh
Funny because it’s true. How many scientific and technological breakthroughs were predicted by science fiction? More than scientists probably care to admit. This is another favorite from Tom Gauld’s Department of Mind-Blowing Theories. I also recommend Gauld’s Moon Cop. My daughter and I love its sweetly melancholic take on what it would be like to be the last policeman living on the Moon.
What’s a superposition?
It’s the quantum phenomenon in which a system exists as a combination of multiple possible states at the same time. Confusingly, it’s neither a simple “AND” (both happening together) or a classical “OR” (one or the other). Quantum superposition is a deeper, inherently ambiguous kind of possibility that produces effects no ordinary uncertainty can explain—that is, until a measurement “collapses” the system into a single outcome.
In the human world, we also exist as a combination of multiple possible states at the same time—faith and doubt, joy and struggle, wholeness and brokenness, the sacred and the ridiculous—all in perpetual superposition, until it gets collapsed into one reality in eternity.
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"...but I’m still left with a sense of defeat over my fundamental personality, which Jesus has not flipped like a light switch."
Don't feel defeated. Your personality is the one God gave you. And it's a good one! The world needs people like you. Jesus isn't going to take that away. He might help you from having aspects of it turned up to 11, but you are loved as you are. "Come, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest."
As always, a great read. From 1 Peter 5 10 And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore, strengthen, confirm, and ground you. 11 To Him be might forever and ever. Amen.