Greater Than Our Hearts — Twenty Third Week of “Ordinary Time,” September 8-14, 2012

All my life I’ve prayed, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit” — without an inkling of what I was saying.

I knew the Father, Son and Spirit were the Three Infinite Persons of the Holy Trinity. But in praying, I half-consciously visualized them in human dimensions: not exactly as an old man, the human Jesus, and a descending dove, but something like that.

Then a Jesuit from the Vatican Observatory showed us slides of the universe: two hundred billion stars in our universe, and our sun with its solar system is only one of them. Just to find our little planet in the whole universe, one would have to be God!

And that is just the spatial dimension. To translate the age of our universe from “light years” into calendar time, I would need to know mathematical symbols that I never learned. I could not even say to someone in ordinary speech “how many years old” our universe is.

Then one day, praying the “Glory be...” it dawned on me: the Father is this immense Being reaching “from one end of heaven to the other.” The Son is as vast as the Father. And the Holy Spirit, whom I have been asking to come down and inspire me like a visiting dove, is all-encompassing. A Being too huge to imagine. And all the description just given doesn’t begin to approach the reality, being couched in physical images.

These are the Persons I am talking to!

And this God has existed “from the beginning” — beyond the reach of mathematical calculation He “is now,” when I am increasingly aware of how contingent my own being is. And he “will be forever,” when I — and everyone, everything I know — will no longer be even a memory on this earth.

This is the “eternal Life” these Three Persons are sharing with me!

I understand why the monks, when they say this prayer to end each Psalm, bow low from the hips.

Ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard of? (Deuteronomy 4:32).

No, not from the beginning. It only “is now” that the Word made flesh has revealed him. And it “ever will be” revealed to all who “in Christ” will live with him forever — “world without end.”

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