Letter #203: The Fractals Declare the Glory of God

Bounded in a nutshell, indeed.

Fractal created by Wolfgang Beyer with the program Ultra Fractal 3., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dad,

When I was growing up, my saintly mom and dad (perhaps you’ve heard of them), used to keep this wonderful library of books around the house. The one rule was that the books were never organized according to author or subject. I know this because I tried once. That’s the kind of twelve-year-old I was.

So we kids went roaming free-range through the shelves, and the ingenious trick was that because you couldn’t find anything easily, you were always stumbling on things. To this day when I say that God prepares my reading lists, I’m talking about that uncanny serendipity I learned to notice among the shelves of my childhood. This at least was mom’s clever way of making peace with the fact that you refused to organize your books.

There was one book in particular I never set out to find, but it kept finding me. It was about fractals, and the pages were full of these gorgeous color images, sprawling and spiraling like tie-dye through the text. All these years later I realize it was my first exposure to the Mandelbrot Set, a pattern of numbers that repeats infinitely within a finite range, at smaller and smaller scale. Zoom in ever-further and you’ll find ever-smaller variations on the same theme, endless creativity within a bounded structure, like “the heavens measured within a span.”

Hugo Spinelli, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

That was another thing that came to mind when I ran across the little squib of brain I showed you, unfolding under a microscope into infinite variety. It looks like galaxies cast far into the outer reaches of space from an initial singularity, like “the kingdom of heaven in a mustard seed,” like “a world in a grain of sand,” like fractals and yes, like an eternal soul “bounded in a nutshell” between two ears.

It looks like all those things, and probably others besides. This inexhaustible theme—limitless complexity arising from a few simple rules—seems essential to God’s character. A Freudian would tell you we attribute this pattern to God because we find it in nature, but you and I don’t have to waste more words explaining why that’s all hooey. We find it in nature because it comes from on high.

After all, here’s the thing: we have no instrument of flesh that can fully capture the fractalline glory of God. Even the colors we assign to represent various metrics in the Mandelbrot Set are just that: representations, visual language to express the invisible perfections written into the very architecture of mathematics and of existence itself. Not if we had a stylus the width of one electron could we chisel out the final pattern of creation—there would still be a new layer of order waiting under that, declaring the endless fullness of life’s wellspring.

Just so our church teachings, our little lives, our fragile bodies—they contain, but can never exhaust, the word of life whose clouds of glory we come trailing. And when the vessel crumbles into dust, the word shall stand forever.

Love,
Spencer