'The Big Thing'

 Fr. Daniel O’Leary

The image of God offered by many churches struggles to resonate with the vibrant, intoxicating God of Creation, of Christ and of human hearts. Thomas Aquinas said that a mistake in our understanding of Creation will necessarily cause a mistake in our understanding of God. Have too much love and beauty been lost in translation?

Einstein cherished ‘a feeling of utter humility towards the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos’ and saw himself, before the mystery, as he put it, ‘in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages’. Here we have the wonder of the mystics, the silence of the contemplatives, the new images of the sacramental vision. Fearful religion, adrift from its source, blocks out God’s mystical flow in and through all things. It cannot cope with a God so big.

Unmasking God: Revealing God in the Ordinary

[I was told that a minister at a Unitarian church told his congregation that he preferred to call God: The Big Thing, because that name communicated more of the unknown of God, though of course, ‘Big’ is much too small a word.]