The Calculus of Awe
by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
“What’s calculus?” Gwyn asked over dinner. Fourth grade awakened in our daughter a love of numbers. Exponents, factorials, variables, and other mathematical terms I hadn’t used since high school became a regular part of conversations. Despite the fact that both Emily and I took calculus, neither of us could answer Gwyn. I’d promptly forgotten everything once I took the AP test and Emily was tongue-tied, because how do you explain calculus to a ten-year-old?
“It has to do with measuring amounts that change over time, like a car picking up speed,” Emily tried. “Maybe?”
A week later we were at church preparing to serve a free meal. Tables were set with paper placemats, folded napkins, silverware, glasses. The room smelled of baked ziti and garlic bread. While waiting for the crowds to descend, we struck up a conversation with our pastor Paula, a white-haired, mischief-loving lesbian. Gwyn has two moms steeped in feminist, earth-centered, spiritual work who wake up early to read books of incarnational mysticism as though they’re thriller novels; she’s only ever had female pastors and attended liberal congregations committed to radical social justice, evidenced tonight by feeding the hungry, and yet this stubborn child thinks of pastors as men who wear gaudy rings and fancy robes to preach about “God’s wrath.” She’s absorbed Christian stereotypes by osmosis. God, she insists, is a bearded white dude in the sky. She doesn’t believe in Him, and who can blame her? Sometimes, though, I worry that she with the rest of our culture will throw the baby of faith out with the bathwater. So I asked Paula for help.
“God’s just another name for love,” Paula said to Gwyn. “What makes you think God’s a he?”
Gwyn shrugged.
“What about nature?” Emily tried. “God’s the force of life coming up in trees.”
Gwyn glanced toward the side table where we’d stashed our bags. “Can I just go do some math?” she asked.
“Math?” Paula asked, surprised. “You like math?”
A smile broke out on Gwyn’s freckled face.
“That’s great!” Paula said. “I did too when I was your age, but somewhere along the line I got stuck, and my relationship with math stopped growing. I wish that hadn’t happened.”
I knew what she meant. In grade school, arithmetic’s certainty thrilled me. In ninth and tenth grades I appreciated algebra’s symmetry and geometry’s elegance, but by trigonometry the drudgery of memorizing formulas and plugging in numbers eclipsed math’s internal life. If every math problem had a solution (and solutions were all my teachers seemed to want), where was the mystery? What did math contribute to human relationships, meaning-making, or story? After turning in the bubble sheet for the calculus exam, I abandoned math entirely for disciplines more suited to my narrative inclinations.
With math as her lens, Heather glimpsed the beautiful mechanics of creation.
My closest friend in college, however, was a genius who’d started undergrad math at age eleven and lived, breathed, and dreamt it. To hear Heather talk, you’d guess math is a game people play to uncover secret metaphysics. At her thesis defense, Heather bounced in front of a coordinate grid mapping something that looked like a sideways tree, enthusing about dimensions way beyond four, while I sat in my folding chair, stupefied. The math I knew measured what was static and predictable; it was unrelated to the invisible structural wonders of Heather’s universe. With math as her lens, Heather glimpsed the beautiful mechanics of creation. I’d missed out. It was as though my English teachers had used Shakespeare to illustrate the workings of grammar, making Macbeth into a progression of nouns, verbs, and dependent clauses. Grammar is exciting only in the bigger context of storytelling. No one ever showed me that math has bigger context, too. I felt stunted, and sad.
That evening at church, Emily, Gwyn, and I worked the cold table; I poured dressing on people’s salads, Gwyn handed out fruit, and Emily distributed the cookies. A man came through the food line balancing his plate on a textbook. “Studying over dinner?” I asked, ladling ranch on his lettuce.
“Yup.”
Gwyn handed him an orange. Instead of offering him a cookie, Emily asked, “Is that calculus?”
“Yup.”
Twenty people waited in line while Gwyn and I turned to listen.
“Can you explain calculus to us? My daughter wants to know what it is.”
Without blinking he said, “Calculus deals with the properties of derivatives and integrals of functions, by methods originally based on the summation of infinitesimal differences”—or something like that; I copied out this definition because his words went in one ear and out the other. The three of us were struck dumb. This hungry man had simultaneously made calculus as ordinary as a Sunday dinner and utterly esoteric. We thanked him. He took an oatmeal cookie.
Later, Gwyn and I called Heather. She, predictably, was delighted with Gwyn’s question. She posited problems about walking on a mountain if you don’t want your altitude to change and measuring how steep a mountain is at different points, and if you’re on a mountain and want to walk down as quickly as possible, which direction should you go? I closed my ears to Heather’s meaning and heard sheer energy, as though she were describing a double layer chocolate frosted cake and figuring out how exactly to dig in. Gwyn got it; her eyes widened and her whole body expanded with wonder. I didn’t. I was too absorbed in watching Gwyn. I’m Heather’s children’s godmother, commissioned from birth with nurturing their spiritual lives, and while I’ve been a good auntie I’ve never ushered them into a relationship with mystery the way Heather did in that moment with Gwyn. I felt humbled. Later Heather said, “It’s all about the stories.”
Writing this I begin to grasp, just barely, that calculus helps us figure out the area under a curve. So much in our world stops and starts, builds up and decreases, in complex and ever-changing relationships, and calculus measures these dynamics. I may be able to solve more sophisticated math problems than Gwyn, but my love and awe are stuck back in fourth grade. Gwyn has surpassed me in wonder. She’s entered the temple of math where I’ve been unwilling or unable to go.
Heaven’s not at the top of the mountain; heaven is a hidden dimension of existence we can scarcely imagine that permeates the mountain, the empty space around it, the climb up it and the fall back down, the climber herself and the invisible forces that press her to the earth.
Of course Gwyn conceives of divinity simplistically—she’s ten, still a concrete thinker. And goodness knows, in the mind of a pre-teen, patriarchal images of God, influenced by Michelangelo and Santa Claus and Hollywood, take precedence over the wisdom of one liberal pastor and two contemplative moms. But God as father figure applies a static measurement to a dynamic process; it’s looking at one inadequate grammatical possibility rather than the whole magnificent drama. Now I see that my job isn’t to debunk Gwyn’s image of God or panic at her rejection of religious mystery. It’s to keep a sparkle in my eye when telling her a good story. Heaven’s not at the top of the mountain; heaven is a hidden dimension of existence we can scarcely imagine that permeates the mountain, the empty space around it, the climb up it and the fall back down, the climber herself and the invisible forces that press her to the earth. Heaven is a young girl’s rational sensibility and a homeless man’s hunger for learning and the bonds of lifelong friendship and the limitless dynamic of growth. Faith is heaven’s calculus, and wonder is its gate.
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Memoir of Bisexuality & Spirit; the collection of personal essays, On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, & Holiness; and two books on writing: Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice, winner of the 2019 Silver Nautilus Award, and Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art & Practice of Spiritual Memoir. You can connect with her at www.spiritualmemoir.com and www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com.
