Irma Dillard rscj  | Whoever wrote the Prologue of John's gospel was obviously a mystic as well as a poet, and was probably writing in a sort of mystical code. To decode even the first two words I thought it might help to look at them from the point of view of what most young children can now tell us about our universe.
Take the "beginning". One can only suppose that the writer of the Prologue with the imagination of a poet, and the insight of a mystic, and without the benefit of mountains of mathematical formulae, would have no problem in coming to terms with the question of our cosmic origins. The notion of a spaceless timeless point where all locations are the same location would probably be the obvious starting point. The initial "singularity", for most of us unimaginable, from which flared the dancing flood of energy that is our universe, or multiverse, would be a contemplative commonplace, a trace of the Divine.
Then take the "word". This apparently is poetry and in poetry words create rather than describe. The "logos" of the Prologue, according to Northrop Frye, is "rooted in the metaphorical phase of language, where the word was an element of creative power? the creative agent that brought the thing into being...oddly contemporary with post-Einsteinian physics, where atoms and electrons are no longer thought of as things but rather as traces of processes". (The Great Code p 17-18)
The "word" of post-Einsteinian physics is beautiful but immeasurably elusive. It is what it does. It is deep, wild, unpredictable and chaotic. Whoever hears it must be tantalised by its anarchic rhythms and its weird energy patterns, and be mystified by its microscopic madness. It is complex, random, indeterminate, uncertain, turbulent, chancy, and in constant motion. It teems with probability and possibility. It is supremely paradoxical and profoundly relational. Whoever finds it and speaks it, gives it form. It is the stuff of life and it is poetry. It is the "word" in quantum terms It is a trace of the Divine. For the writer of the Prologue perhaps it echoes the "logos" that was "in the beginning".
But, no matter what point of view we take, and from whatever "beginning" and in whatever form the "logos" comes to people, at its coming ordinary language seems to break down. Physicists talk in a strange sort of poetry. Mystics talk in riddles. And prophets are speechless.
"Quarks and quasars, muons, gluons, hadrons, mesons, branes baryons and bosons" babble bemused scientists.
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God, the same was in the beginning with God…! puzzles John the Evangelist..
"Ah ah ah Lord" groaned Jeremiah the Prophet Nan MacKinnon rscj
Armagh, N. Ireland
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