Gravity and Love sustain the Universe

by Giuseppe Guarino

 

I bought an amazing paperback book, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I am reading it slowly, as it is quite complicated. I must get the hardcover edition.

It’s an excellent book, and I am trying to read it, although it’s quite difficult because I have never studied physics seriously

Strange as it may seem, it took a science book like Hawking’s to help me piece the puzzle together and gain a deeper understanding of love.

Hawking writes: “The universe is governed by a set of rational laws that we can discover and understand.”

Then I meditated on the greatest of these laws: the law of gravity. Gravity set the universe in motion and continues to sustain it. If gravity were to cease, even for a moment, to govern distance and motion, the universe would collapse in an instant. Yet, none of the stars or planets rebel against God’s laws, and this is something we admire when we consider the beauty and order of the universe, the planets, the stars, the galaxies, and the constellations.

In the Lord’s prayer we say: “your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

It is evident, when observing the world around us, that God’s will is not done on earth as it is in heaven.

Since we are intelligent beings capable of ‘discovering and understanding’ God’s laws, what about on earth? What is the law that should be at work here, but which is not so obviously in action?

Just as the law of gravity dictates the perfect relationship among the masses, I realized that God gave us the law we must apply to make things work here on earth: love.

“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”  (Gospel of Mark 12:29-31)

First, we must love God, for without this, we cannot accept Him as the sole ruler of the universe. Only then are we ready to live among each other, loving our neighbor as ourselves.

We can talk endlessly about this, but it doesn’t take a great mind to understand that if we all lived by this rule, the earth would be as beautiful and perfect as heaven above.