Religion takes many forms, obviously, in our world, and has taken a great many more across time – from chanting in caves to invoke a successful hunt,  to the ritual of Roman Catholic high mass,  to the perfect stillness of a Buddhist meditation retreat,  to animal sacrifice by a tribal high priest,  to a carefully thought out and persuasive sermon, 

But I would venture to say across all that variety, the religious enterprise exists primarily and essentially to address the seemingly universal human sense of disquiet about being limited. 

We feel that we are limited in time – in other words, that we are mortal.  We will not go on existing forever, but will die.  There is a part of us that rails against that limitation and fears it.

Then again, we experience ourselves as limited in space, very limited. 
We are aware of ourselves being in here, and everything else being out there.  And there is a lot more that is not-me than me. 

Somewhere in our hearts, we feel isolated and vulnerable to annihilation.  Sometimes it is said that we feel small. 

We may try to compensate and make ourselves large – to live longer, gain more power, and so forth.  But in that we find only temporary relief at most. 

We might manage to live somewhat longer – but still, mortality looms.   We might manage to gain more power (say for instance, in the form of money) and be treated by other people as a big, important person. 
But it can never be enough to solve the problem of being limited.  
The most powerful person in all the world still confronts limits every day and every hour. 

We can push back the limits, but there is a part of us that knows we are just fussing about on the margins.

We see ourselves as finite; yet we yearn for infinity – to be more than just this small self for the brief span of our lives.  It is a deep religious or spiritual need to touch the infinite. 

Some religions speak of eternal life, or returning to God. 
Some say we are God’s children. 

They present us with stories and rituals by which we can experience ourselves in some sort of intimate relationship with that which was before us, and will be after us, and includes us and other people and the animals and plants and the entire world – seen and unseen.   

The world’s religions and spiritual traditions, in a great many different ways, tell us that on some level, this smallness and separateness that we experience is not all there is to the story.  In some way, in some sense, we are involved with a transcendent reality. 
There are so many, many ways of saying that. 

And yet we are so deeply conditioned to finiteness that when we try to give conceive infinity, we may only be able to think of  “a lot more.”  Even our conceptions of God tend to be this way.  How common it is to portray God as like a human, but wiser, more powerful, ancient, and undying.  We take ourselves and add incrementally to the margins. 
We create most often, not a sense of the infinite, but of “myself, only bigger and better.”

And of course, these stories and doctrines and so forth, are found by many of us to be not only inadequate bridges to the transcendent, but grotesque idolatry.  Taking aspects of ourselves, sometimes even the most confused and immature aspects of ourselves, crafting them into a crude image, calling it divine, and worshipping it.

Infinity can never be grasped.  Our conceptual frames all revolve around the finite domain.  Do you see what I’m saying:  It is the nature of our words and ideas to express limitation and separateness.  They cannot, in any straightforward way, speak of the infinite. 

But just as a finger can point and thereby lead to a perception of the moon,
even though it is not the moon, I wonder if perhaps by contemplating realities so vast, so far beyond our ordinary frames of reference, we might be able to make the mind go “tilt” – where it gives up trying to make reality fit into its limited conceptual frames and opens into a proper sense of awe. 

To that end I would like for us to engage in a little imagination play.

While we have intellectual knowledge that the universe is stupendously vast in all dimensions, we tend to live in a world that is very small.  Limited to planet Earth, certainly.  Within that, most of us, I reckon, relate to a rather small section of the Earth as our world.  And really only a very select set of familiar places and people and ideas within that section of the Earth. 

Even right here in Salem, there are people living in very different worlds – some very focused on work and getting ahead,  some absorbed in creating art,  some whose world revolves around children,  some for whom scoring another dose of a drug is the all-consuming preoccupation,  and so forth and so on.  We tend to live in very narrow worlds within our minds, although we “know” our universe is vast. 

But then, who among us has never found ourselves under a clear night sky, away from the city lights, gazing upward and outward into the fathomless depths of darkness and light, and felt a deep stirring?  

A sort of deep remembering:  Oh…  There is more than this world. 
So very, very much more.

Such contemplative experiences may not change what we do in practical terms, but perhaps they do affect how seriously we take the details of our life’s dramas.  Perhaps by glimpsing the transcendent, we can feel less limited.

No guarantees, but I invite you to come with me on journey of imagination. 

Let’s make an experiential model of the universe, starting with our living experience.  When we stand at the ocean or look out from a high place, we can see to the far horizon, and the vastness of it often brings us to a state of mind that is at once humbled and exalted. 

Now let’s build a model.  Say this green ball is the sun.

Let’s put that in the center of the room… 

Now the Earth…  Well, Earth is this little bead one-quarter of an inch in diameter. 

It is circling about 215 feet away – across the parking lot about at the intersection of Cordon Road and Center Street .  I won’t make anybody walk it out there; just try to picture it there.

Now that Pluto has been denied planetary status the most distant planet is Neptune . 

On this scale Neptune would be this blue ball,  1.2 miles away at Lancaster Drive . 

Picture it… 
There’s the sun. 
There’s the Earth out at the intersection.
and Neptune over at Lancaster Drive. 

We don’t often think of it this way.  We have probably seen pictures of the solar system which have given us a wildly distorted view.  To present a picture of the solar system on paper that is to scale, you would have picture of the sun on one page, thousands of blank pages and then a planet, which might be the size of a period at the end of a sentence.  Publishers just won’t go in for that. 

So they make the planets appear much bigger than they are and squish them all onto one page as though they were much closer together. 

It’s kind of hard to think of the Earth as just a tiny bead.  Let’s try it another way, and see if we can get Earth onto a better scale.

Let’s say the Earth is this ball. 

Remember that awe-inspiring view from a mountaintop?  The view to the horizon in all directions takes in just a barely perceptible dot on this Earth.

At this larger scale, the Sun is about the size of this sanctuary –
fifty feet in diameter. 

And the Earth is circling it at a distance of one mile –
not quite to Lancaster Drive . 

The planet Jupiter is about 5 feet in diameter [show with arms]
and about a mile the other side of the Willamette River . 

And Neptune is now thirty miles away, at the southern fringe of the Portland metro area, by Tualatin.

Picture it:  The sanctuary is the sun.  The Earth a mile away at Lancaster Drive .  Neptune up by Tualatin. 

Now let’s take the whole solar system out to Neptune and squish it down into this little ball.

The nearest star would be a little speck the size of a pinhead one block away. 

We are part of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains over 200 billion stars.  In this model, the far edge of the galaxy would be about at Minneapolis , Minnesota (1600 miles).  Picture that. 

Solar system.  [yellow ball]  Vast sea of stars all the way to Minneapolis …

Now shrink the galaxy down to the scale of this disk.

On this scale, the nearest galaxy would be fifteen feet away.

The universe contains over 100 billion such galaxies.  Imagine these inconceivably vast galaxies scattered about.  And the farthest one is eighteen miles away – at about Woodburn, or Silver Falls State Park .

Roll that around in your mind, if you can…

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Now let’s turn the whole thing around and get small.

Take a one quart container and full of medium-gauge grains of sand
[.5 mm].  You have about one billion grains.

Now fill an Olympic-size swimming pool with that sand and you have the number of bacteria in a typical human body (one million billion).

You are a galaxy unto yourself.  The scale of minute complexity inside you and me is every bit as staggering as the vastness of the universe.

We’ve just scratched the surface.  Let’s look into one of those grains of sand.  How many atoms do you suppose there are in a grain of sand?  Take that Olympic-size swimming pool.  Fill it with sand, and ten million more like it, and you have the number of atoms in a medium [sized] grain of sand. 

Olympic swimming pools filled with sand, placed end-to-end around the world 12 times – give or take – that is the vastness of atoms within a grain of sand. 

And how about the atom?  Let’s take an atom and blow it up to the size of this sanctuary.  The nucleus, the part that is really substantial, would be a speck about one fifth the size of a grain of sand.  The rest is the electron field – empty of matter.

So let’s take stock of the total picture.

In the solar system, vast space between the planets.

In the galaxy, vast space between the stars.

In the universe, vast space between the galaxies.

In our bodies, a vast sea of cells and microbes.

Inside the microbes, a staggeringly vast sea of atoms.

Inside the atoms, vast space.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

We tend to think in terms of things, but our universe is a heck of a lot more space than it is stuff. 

And what is space?  It is possibility. 

Stuff is in a sense determined.  It is what it is.  But space, literally and figuratively, is completely open to potential. 
Anything could happen in space. 

The Tao te Ching testifies to the value of space:

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel;
it is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room;
it is the holes which make it useful.

Profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

When we look at the night sky, what do we see?   Probably the moon and stars.  What if we saw the space?

There is the tale of the astronaut who came back to Earth and said,
“I saw God.”  The people leaned forward, “And…”

The astronaut continued, “She is black.” 

I was talking with my stepson Miles a while back.  He was seven years old and he asked me a very interesting question:  “Which is faster, the speed of light or the speed of dark?” 

At first I thought he was playing with words.  Ha!  There is no speed of dark! 

But then it struck me, and moved me deeply:  the speed of dark is faster.  Dark is already there.  Light is very fast, but it still takes time to go from here to there. 

Dark is already there.  Not very fast, infinitely fast.  Infinitely present.  Infinite potential.  Dark is infinite.

I know that some people contemplate infinity, or even just the vastness of the universe, and it makes them feel small. 

My feeling about it is the opposite.  I contemplate the stupendous universe, with its vast space out there and vast space deep in here, and
I feel that we truly are the expression of a transcending mystery. 
Children of the infinite.

We are not separate from the fathomless galaxies or the vast inner space of the atom, even though we have the idea that we are.  The idea of separateness makes us fear death.

But there are realms as vast as universes inside our bodies.  Universes enfolding other universes.  And we are part of it all.  Humbling, yet also exalting.

We don’t need to control this.  We don’t even need to understand it. 
We just need to feel it, every once in a while at least. 

So keep an eye out for infinity.  You will never see it of course, but you may discover portals through which to recover the sense of it.

*  The sky. 

*  The ocean. 

*  The eyes of a living being – infinite consciousness.

*  The depth of this present moment.  The only time there ever was,
or ever will be, is the infinite present moment – and we live in it. 
That’s eternity.

 I close with the words of William Blake:

To see the world in a grain of sand
and a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand.
and eternity in an hour.

Meditation

I invite you into a time of quiet for meditation, prayer, and contemplation. 

Allow the breath to flow through you freely and fully. 

Let the mind come to repose,
and be renewed.