By Tom Dinell
We humans have a problem trying to grasp the infinite. We are finite. Our language is finite. And yet we, including me, seek to describe a God who is so far beyond us that our words fail us. “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9) We blithely say God is omnipotent, but do we really know what that means?
There are 2,000,000,000 galaxies in our universe and approximately 100,000,000 stars in each galaxy, plus or minus, and God created and knows every one of them.
And if there are parallel universes, then God created and knows them too.
There are 7,600,000,000 people on earth each of whom has 37,200,000,000 cells in his or her body and God created and knows every one of them.
We tend to create God in our image, to cut down God to a size we can grasp, which results in a very limited and finite god. Actually, God created us in his or her (pronouns fail us) image, but we have trouble knowing what that means.
So God sent the prophets and finally his only Son to us to try to help us bridge the gap between our small, puny selves and the infinite God. We have had a lot of difficulty over time implementing the message the prophets and Jesus delivered to us and all-too-often have butchered it.
We all know the key concepts — love, forgiveness, non-violence, humble use of power, love of enemies — but we have a heck of a hard time making the consciousness of Jesus our own consciousness. The infinite, even when it is spelled out in finite terms, evades us.
We need to move beyond rational belief systems and convenient formulas that do not move us off dead center. We need to actually experience God in our lives. A leap of faith, a faith-filled imagination, the mystical approach, contemplation, centering are all means of moving us beyond where we are to the starting line of having God living in us and we in God.
Then and only then will we have bridged the chasm between the infinite and the finite. Doing so does not make us mini-gods but rather finite humans fully conscious of our divine origin and of our divine mission in life.
Dinell is the former diocesan director of Catholic Charities
