The Felt Infinite

As a child, I always chuckled on Sunday mornings at Christ Church Exeter when I'd see in the bulletin that we'd be using Eucharistic Prayer C from the Book of Common Prayer. My brother Tom and I had dubbed this "The Carl Sagan Prayer" because of the line:

At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.

This sounded so "New Age" and bizarre that we had to laugh.

And now, I suppose, the joke is on me. Because I'm finding this phrase "the vast expanse of interstellar space" is at the forefront of my mind as I contemplate God's infusion into my every day consciousness. I feel at times that my relationship with God has a depth and breadth that may be like the vast expanse of interstellar space. In prayer, I've been experiencing something that feels almost like elastic. This stretching and moving feeling I associate as being God's Love. It has a way of reaching farther and farther, then deeper and deeper with no end to how far it will go. At least that's the sense that I've been having about it. This cognitive understanding of Love is not new for me. But this deeper felt sense of it is.

The times when I have had that experience of the "felt infinite" have been when I have stared up into the night sky, especially in a place like Missouri where out on I-70 you could see for miles across the flat plains as you head toward Kansas City. Sky and land would meet on the horizon and I could gaze into this and lose myself in the beauty of the Midwestern landscape. I feel that same loss of self in the White Mountains of New Hampshire when I stand at the edge of a lake surrounded by these giants of creation reaching up and up into the clouds. I am so aware of how small I am in comparison and yet not insignificant because I am still part of the scene, not separated from it. This isn't a case of I'm on the outside looking in; I'm on the inside looking around and experiencing being part of what is there and knowing that there is something--a great I AM-- that is there in all things.

Something greater than me. And yes, I say, "Thanks be to God" for that!