Filling in the gaps.

Where oh where is the missing 90 percent of the cosmos? Frantic scientists search in vain for the invisible "dark matter" of the universe. Theoretically, the missing matter ought to exist somewhere, but how? The most recent excitement comes from new findings that suggest the universe's omnipresent but invisible neutrinos may possess mass after all; this helps resolve a bit more of the puzzle.

As an ardent advocate of science, I follow these cosmological debates and indulge in speculation over how the visible relates to the invisible universe. I also notice that I have no trouble giving instant assent to accounts of all sorts of unseen mysterious events like quantum-mechanical particle transformations. After all, science has always progressed by discovering that beneath the world of appearances an unseen order operates.

As a psychologist, I've joined the hunt for the most elusive and engaging quarry of all: How does consciousness operate? How does the physical brain produce the invisible mind? On reflection, I see that the drive to understand what isn't immediately apparent to the senses has been a lifelong preoccupation.

I can remember lying in bed as a child trying (rather fruitlessly) to visualize the end of space. Indeed the whole natural and social world seemed alive with hidden meanings, if only I could grasp them. You mean like sex? Assuredly, but death preoccupied me even more.

In the middle of World War II, people we loved were being blown up, and megadeath was a constant. What happened to the dying when they disappeared from our ken?

To feed my insatiable desire to know everything, and to indulge in gluttonous pleasure, I read day and night. (By flashlight when necessary.) For long hours of many days I successfully avoided the command to go out and play. Well, from time to time I enjoyed manic bouts of neighborhood kick-the-can or hide-and-seek orgies, but generally I'd rather have been reading.

Obviously I was becoming the kind of adolescent ripe for conversion to the Christian mysteries. All the more so because of opposition by my parents who felt religion to be an unhealthy superstition best avoided. (Intellectuals were also suspect, and religious intellectuals were worst of all.) Thank God at just the right moment, I stumbled upon a spirit-filled Protestant church that could confirm and spur on my intellectual and spiritual quest.

Forty-five years later, still reading, I was snapped to attention the other day by a theologian's stark assertion, "If God is invisible, then the invisible is, indeed, of vastly more importance than the visible." Aha. Is then the invisible part of creation even more wonderful and important than the one that we can see? And do divine spiritual realities exist beyond the invisible dimensions of the universe?

Reflecting upon the Incarnation, it would make sense to envision one holistic interpenetrable reality. On the track of the unseen, I scurried back to Newman's sermon on "The Invisible World."

Like Plotinus and Augustine before him, Newman sees "another world all around us, though we see it not, and more wonderful than the world we see...." For Newman, these hidden spiritual realities are "present, not future, not distant." On that great day when the kingdom will come, the veil will be removed. Then we will be able to see the living Christ along with all the millions upon millions of individuals who have died and gone before us.

Do we have problems, Newman asks, believing in the invisible world? Then imagine that the hidden kingdom of God can be manifested just as nature shows forth its hidden powers in the spring. Blossoms and fruit burst into being from seemingly barren ground. Moreover, we can look to the many invisible worlds we already encounter--in physical nature, in the many different circles of human society which function unknown to each other, and in animal life.

Animals? I had forgotten Newman's interest in what we would now label as an ecological approach. But then, when I last read this essay, I had never heard of the word "ecology," so naturally I wouldn't recognize, resonate with, or remember Newman's paean to the mystery of animal life. The animals, he maintains, give us a message about the universe because they exist in "such countless multitudes, so various in their natures, so strange and wild in their shapes."

Although we cannot understand creatures who are strangers to us, we can acknowledge and wonder about their hidden life. Or, as a modem philosopher asks in a famous essay, "What is it like to be a bat?"

I also must have been motivated to forget this nice bit of Newman's argument because he goes on to use the mysterious world of animals below us to argue for the existence of angels above us. The great chain of being and all that. These other unseen "inhabitants of the world invisible" are powerful, "blessed spirits" who "are actively employed among us in the church." Indeed, "no Christian is so humble but he has angels to attend on him, if he lives by faith and love."

Angels? Oh dear. Here my intellectual skepticism emerges in full force. I'm absolutely allergic to talk about angels. Where do they stand in the hierarchy of truths to be believed anyway?

Yes, I can recognize the thrust of Newman's arguments and his reminders of the many many references to angels in Scripture. I also see how ironic it is for me to believe in invisible neutrinos streaming through all the matter in the universe and yet balk at angels. But my resistance to angels and larger invisible spiritual conflicts is tied to my inability to accept Satan, evil spirits, demonic possession, and exorcism. (Chalk up another victory for Screwtape!)

I'm still disturbed by arguments last year with some fundamentalist Christian psychologists who believe in the demonic approach to certain manifestations of abnormal behavior (as does Scott Peck, for instance). They tied their belief in invisible evil spirits serving Satan to their belief in invisible angelic spirits serving God. And you better believe it, they too could quote Scripture to support their case.

O.K., so I've got to work out this demon thing with a lot more learning and research in theology and psychology. I will return. It's enough at the moment to accept the importance of the invisible world. I'm willing to affirm with Emily D.: "This world is not conclusion/A species stands beyond/Invisible as music/But positive as sound."