You have weight when you’re not in free-fall, that is, you have weight when you are kept from traveling the shortest path, or geodesic geodesic, from your current location to the center of gravity of whatever system you’re in. When you’re weighed down, by your own bodily mass or that of other entities you are helping to support, you are experiencing forces exerted to keep you from traveling towards the local center of attraction, the local gravitational center which is found near the center of the earth.
Free-fall in physics is the state where an entity is moving along a geodesic towards the local center of attraction, itself moving towards a more regional center of attraction, right on up to the global center of attraction, the universal center of mass in a manner of speaking. Weight is the result of fighting gravity — on our part or on the part of the crust of the earth which supports us this far from the local gravitational center.
Viewed this way, gravity isn’t a force. There’s no force pulling that moving entity towards the center. A so-called ‘fictitious force’, describable in terms of a coordinate change, causes that entity to move in the way that a ball-bearing spinning around the rim of a bowl will gradually move downwards towards the bottom of the bowl. It’s an interesting analogy but only if you can imagine away the force of gravity and picture the bowl stretching itself in front of the ball-bearing in such a way as to direct its movement without exerting a ‘true’ force. Then the ball is guided towards that bottom of the bowl because of the stretching of the very structure of spacetime. You can maybe make the imaginative leap a little easier by thinking of the ball-bearing moving on a rubber membrane stretched over a bowl. You can see the rubber stretching and depressing itself to bring a sufficiently heavy ball-bearing towards the center and you can imagine you’re seeing spacetime stretching and bending underneath, for example, the earth as it revolves around the sun.
Some say we should stay out of God’s way, but they don’t mean we should be passive or uninvolved but rather that we should give ourselves up to the will of God. Augustine of Hippo said that the man who truly loves God can do as he wishes. Clearly, that great saint meant to claim that the true lover of God would then be doing what is right as much as he can humanly understand the right and reach its standards. But we can get still closer to the truth by saying we should stop fighting against God and do His will as He draws us towards His Son at the center of Creation.
The path of moral right, the path of what is good and true and even beautiful, is a moral geodesic where we follow the path where we exert no force and, we can pray, no other entity exerts sufficient force to keep us from the Lord at the center of Creation. When we give ourselves up to Christ, we exert no force to prevent ourselves from being captured by this fictitious force and that force will then move us in a relatively painless and effortless way to the center where we meet Christ.
God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, do all the work, creating spacetime, creating the matter of which we are made and which we need to survive, moving created being and stretching the very shape of Creation to bring us to the center where Christ awaits us.
I simplify as you could guess from the discussion about movement towards a local center of attraction and then to a regional center of attraction and on up to a movement towards a universal center of attraction. We cluster first into communities of various sorts, forming perhaps complex systems of multiple sorts of communities which then move towards a center of attraction shared with other similar communities. The larger communities then move towards greater centers of attraction. By way of a self-ordering process directed by the shape and nature of Creation, we move towards that center which is Christ, the Head of the Body of Christ.
And now I feel a little more confident I can use the richness of abstractions drawn from modern physics to speak of the non-physical aspects of Creation. Much needs to be done for us to gain a newer, a richer and more complex understanding of Creation and of our relationship to the Creator, but I feel to have taken a small step in the right direction.