The above picture of the Southern Cliff in the Lagoon Nebula is from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) blog. It is beautiful and five light years high. From Earth it cannot be seen with the naked eye. The whole Lagoon Nebula is barely visible to the eye. Our entire Solar System, including the Oort Cloud of icy fragments that slowly orbit the Sun, is about 3 light years across. I had imaged a God that created our Solar System, beyond that was more like images on a sky shell.
Clearly my image of God was too small. The Lagoon Nebula is 4,000-6,000 light years away. The estimated size of the visible universe is 93 billion light years across, a size I find unimaginable, as the Scriptures and mystics claim God is.
Today’s Richard Rohr meditation, An Evidence-Based Emergence, talks about how God is revealed in Creation and how science can tell us more about Creation and so about God. Many in the institutional church resist that, often violently, as they resisted the scripture writers, the prophets, and the mystics during their lifetime, then canonized them or made the Doctors (Latin for teachers) of the Church after they were safely dead.
I sometimes think there are more mystics and people with a direct experience of God among the scientists than among the pews.