Isaiah 40:12
Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand?
Who has marked off the heavens with a span?
Who has enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure?
Who has weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?
Antonio Canova, a sculptor, lived from 1757-1822. His last seven works are currently on display a the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Four of the seven panels represent the Book of Genesis. The other three, the Gospel of Luke. Barrymore Laurence Scherer in today's Wall Street Journal (Jan. 28, 2014) describes one of the works like this:
"Perhaps the most wondrous panel is 'The Creation of the World.' Borne upon a cloud, God exudes divine rays that pierce the halo formed by his swirling veil. Watched by the moon, he extends his left hand toward the sun. God seems to invite this speeding orb to shine upon the newly formed Earth beneath his right hand, and specifically on Italy, incised at its center. Of all the passages in these valedictory reliefs, the is the most personal and the most touching."
I like Canova's Creation. I really do. But in recent months I've been struck by our smallness in all of the vastness of the universe. Some images stay with you, and one that stayed with me is the photo that Voyager took as it left the solar system, as it turned around and snapped a panorama of our microscopic earth in our tiny solar system in our small galaxy tucked away in some corner of an enormous universe.
And yet Isaiah wrote that God measures even the heavens -- the universe perhaps -- with the span of his hand. Are you kidding me? Dr. Seuss was right in Horton Hears a Who, and he had no benefit of the images we receive today.
So Canova had it right, kinda. But his scale was off. I admire him for the vision he had. But I cannot begin to imagine the immense enormity of the Creator.
The immense enormity of the Creator: in anthropomorphic terms, he measures the universe in the space between his thumb and his pinkie. Not the solar system. Not our galaxy. But perhaps the whole of 13+ billion light-years of distance and the entirety of time, all of it. Between his little finger and his thumb. No wonder Isaiah came undone.
In some ways, it only makes sense that all we see -- from the reality I experience each day when I simply drink my morning coffee to the awe I realize at moments when I think about things like the complexity of cell specialization that produces fingernails and toenails just where they are needed and not elsewhere (usually!) -- is initiated and sustained by One who is inexplicably greater than us. Words fail.
The clearest thoughts of God do that to you.
Cosmic accident? Bullshit. Can we really believe that all this just accidentally happened -- out of nothing, for no reason? That this vast expanse of what we know as reality -- the universe and all it contains, most of which is uninhabitable -- somehow concocted the amazing conditions that create atmosphere and air and water and food to sustain a marvelously complex world of life and thought and consciousness and sentience and ethics and morals and values and beauty and awe? Maybe some can, but I can't.
This God I know is enormous. He is "immense" in Merriam-Webster's full definition of that word's meaning -- "marked by greatness especially in size or degree; transcending ordinary means of measurement; supremely good."
And yet this is the same God who also asks me to be his friend.
Incomprehensible.