IN THE CLOUD? (SCARY. COMFORTING.)

Reading about Moses, about the Lord moving into Solomon’s Temple, and about the Transfiguration, there is that sense of Immensity suddenly moving right in. The Cloud, in each case, is hard to imagine: something like ball lightning only MORE, more intense, huger, and not going away. This is how the Creator manifests Himself to very occasional, very chosen and doubtless very terrified little humans. 

It made me think about the insanity of scale. I have shown before, on this blog, the current astronomers’ map of the Universe, above, with its Googols of constellations and Googolplexes of planets. If (and there is no reason to assume it’s not so) the God we woship created all this, how --- the stammering consciousness asks itself --- can this be the same God whom we call Father, to whom we pray about our little souls, and in whose presence Brother Lawrence so cheerfully cooked potatoes? When I think about this, my synapses very nearly short out. Of course, one can say that this is yet one more proof that Christianity is nonsense. Judaism, at least, preserves a sense of scale in that God is concerned more with a people than with individuals; Islam seems to be more about trumpeting God’s infinite greatness than about any interest of His in small human matters; and there is Christianity teaching us to worry about what the Creator of the Universe (see map) thinks of what we said to our spouse last night. When you fully take that on board there is the sound and smell of burning connectors. 

And yet. And yet. Keep thinking. Imagine, not that we Earthlings are merely an accidental breadcrumb on the skirt of the Universe, but that we inhabit something deliberately unique. Perhaps SETI is doomed to failure. Perhaps we really are alone. Is that depressing? Not necessarily. Imagine that this gorgeous tiny blue jewel of a planet was created by a joyous Creator in an outlying corner of the Whole, as an experiment, as a laboratory where, over the millennia, something was made to grow that could think, could react to Him, could create in its turn – Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. 

But He too saw the insanity of scale – well, let’s say the extremity of scale. So first He chose a people, and communicated with them in ways they could (just) understand. And they behaved, of course, as humans will. But/And, in the end, He saw they were ready for a new way to bridge the scale gap. And He created, for and with and out of His Son, the Second Person of His triune Being, the Incarnation. An ordinary human that humans could talk to. Incredible! I remember my colleague Irving Layton, a wonderful Canadian Jewish poet, saying to me, “But Roger, Jesus is my Jewish brother. My brother farts. Does God fart?” What could I say? “Yes, Irving.”

And so, yes, we have the map of the Universe; but we also have Yeshua bar Yosef, the builder and rabbi from Nazareth in Galilee (an ordinary town, now a city, been there, my son-in-law comes from there). And now ordinary fishermen and their wives, Roman sergeants, unpopular tax collectors, quiet scholars and provincial hookers could talk to – to HIM. To YHWH. To the Creator. He healed people. He had moods. He cried for his friend. He was loved by at least one man and one woman. 

Yes, well. And then, being human, they fucked it up. Exactly as he knew they would, they killed him. So much for that experiment. But no. Because in that unimaginable night of Easter, He – now again all of He, one again within the Triune God -- killed Death. Not death – death is still around and will take us all, for a while. But Death. 

And so the experiment continues, at a new level. The Universe is still there, unfolding (as Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said) as it should; our little blue ball is still there, with us humans busily overcrowding it; and (and this is the point) he, Yeshua bar Yosef, Yeshua Meshiach, Yeshua the Anointed, Yeshua Christos, having risen from the dead, is still here also. Here to be talked to. Here to be loved, here to be confided in, here to heal broken hearts. Here as human, here as God. Here to be communicated with in every Communion, in every Mass. Being the little stumbling creatures we are, could we ask for more? The synapses glow again, the energy flows. Gratias agimus tibi, propter magnam gloriam tuam.