Wailua falls, pic by StJenna
I had the opportunity in the past month to visit a few places that emphasized to me the importance of scale. A business trip took me to Maui, and a few weeks later while visiting another town I got to attend Mass at a rather large downtown cathedral, while passing by a so-called “megachurch.” Reflecting on these trips, I am struck by the messages that God sends us in letting us live in an environment where we’re surrounded by things that are much smaller and much larger than we are. At least for things that are much smaller and much bigger than we, we tend to marvel at them, though for quite different reasons.
In Hawaii, I had the great fortune to (just barely) see whales swimming a few hundred yards out from my hotel’s beach. I could easily have seen minnows or some other tiny fish swimming in the same water. Later, as I took my rental car on the famous Road to Hana, I stopped at a particular roadside park that overlooked an area popular with surfers. Our vantage point was a commanding cliff that allowed us to observe the surfers a few hundred feet above. There were many such spots on the Road, where one can spot the ocean far below or see the top of a waterfall high above. I also made little sidetrips to the many rivers and streams where the bubbling water doesn’t reach above your ankle.
Closer to home, even though my family are members of a cathedral parish I was able to visit a cathedral that was quite a bit bigger than ours. Your eye is inevitably drawn upwards due to the architecture of the building, which coincides with what the fact that our hearts are lifted “up to the Lord.” But if that cathedral was big, it was dwarfed by the megachurch which, if it didn’t have the word “Church” on it, could easily have been mistaken for some corporate headquarters.
When we encounter small things (babies, insects, cells through a microscope, flowers), we tend to marvel not just at the smallness but how they manage to survive and fit in so well with a world that could easily overlook them as insignificant. When we observe these things, we collapse our vast vision and attention down to something very minute, as if nothing else in the world matters but this tiny thing in front of us. I can’t help but think that, in these moments, God is telling us a little bit of how He views us. Even in the order of created things we individually are miniscule, but when the observer is the Creator our tinyness must seem even more so. And yet we know that He loves each of us individually more than we can possibly imagine.
When we encounter big things (whales, mountains, cathedrals, the Milky Way), we tend to marvel not just at the bigness but how we ourselves seem so insignificant in comparison. Everything that usually commands our attention (work problems, traffic irritations, deadlines) seems to melt away when you are standing beside a waterfall that is a few stories tall. The first time we encounter something huge, after the obligatory “Wow!” most people have the same universal response: silence. Our common words or concepts fail to capture the entirety of what we’re observing. I can’t help but think that, in these moments, God is telling us a little bit of how we will view Him in heaven (or even how we can view Him now during moments of contemplative prayer). We know that God is not just a bigger version of us, but there certainly must be an aspect where we see our own capacity to love as seeming tiny compared to God’s. And yet we know that the infinite love, infinite wisdom, and infinite patience of God cares immensely about each one of us.