I may be achieving a breakthrough. Or possibly I’m losing my mind. Or it could be the new medication I just started taking…

I got up this morning to put in my two hours of writing (okay, it’s more like an hour and a half when I deduct bathroom and tea-making time). Then I went to the gym, as usual. And while I was driving there, I had this epiphany. It rose, I’m pretty sure, partly from the lingering effects of reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. And from Mark Helprin’s Paris In the Present Tense, which I’m re-reading. It’s a novel about a musician, with all kinds of metaphysical implications.

Anyway, it occurred to me that (as best I understand physics, which is probably not as well as I think) the universe is made up of atoms, which are made up of particles and charges and empty space and stuff. Every solid thing is actually just energy in motion. What makes things exist is movement and attraction and repulsion and waves and so on.

In other words, the universe is music.

Which works just fine with my theology. The Bible says that God said, “Let there be light.” The light – energy – was spoken by God. Light is energy in a pattern. That’s pretty much like music.

Tolkien used this metaphor in The Silmarillion.

After I thought, “The Fall introduced discord into the music,” I found myself shouting out loud (in my car): “CHRIST RESOLVED THE CHORD!”

Well, it seemed profound to me at the time.

Of course I used this space not long ago to explicate a theory that the universe is a Story.

So which is it, Walker?

Maybe the universe is a ballad. No metaphor is every perfect.

Above, a little music from that most theological of composers, the Lutheran J. S. Bach.