Any preacher worth his tithe will tell you mankind is sinful and is separated from God. This is Gospel 101 stuff and is part of the opening pitch in presenting the Good News. Numerous visual aids are available to illustrate this separateness: impassable gulfs, insurmountable mountain ranges or bridgeless, lava-filled gorges – mostly geographic features for some reason. However, these illustrations fall short in two categories. They do not allow for the paradox of God’s simultaneous closeness nor a vivid, accurate understanding of our separateness.
In the book of Acts, Paul quotes a Greek poet relating humanity’s proximity to God saying “In Him we live and move and have our being”. Later, speaking to the men of Athens he tells them “He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.” (Acts 17:26,27). How do we reconcile our nearness to God with our separation? In what way are we close and in what way alienated? And how is this truth relatable to a society which has lost nearly all Biblical literacy?
I would like to provide an illustration to characterize the dynamic between God and sinful man, which is all of us, by nature. As a caveat, I would like to offer a word on heresy. Heresies start when a man tries to codify what God intends to remain mysterious. My intention is to provide an illustration, an analogy, not to define our actual or physical spatial relationship to God. End caveat. This explanation is adapted from Carl Sagan’s television show The Cosmos, just so you know how close to heresy I am starting. This will require your imagination.
Sagan wanted to give the average television viewer, perhaps elbow deep in a bag of Funions, an understanding of layers of our dimensional reality. Most of us have a passing familiarity with them. First dimension is a straight line (x-axis, for those who are following along at home on their cartesian coordinates). Second dimension adds a y-axis and allows for planar geometry like circles, squares and triangles. Moving up to the third dimension you got your cubes, spheres, pyramids and 3D James Cameron blockbusters (z-axis). Lastly, the fourth dimension is the dimension of time. Here the 3D object moves through time in a series of moments like in a Wallace and Gromit claymation movie. Here we are in the 4th dimension, our bodies jutting out at soft angles in the x, y, and z axis as we move through time.
Sagan then has us imagine a world of 2D beings living flat on a sheet of paper. From our perspective above the paper we can see the triangle scooching about, a square going to the grocery store, a circle carrying on an illicit affair with a trapezoid. From their perspective, however, they see only the other shapes as lines either moving toward or away from them, side to side. There is no “up” or “down” in a 2D space, neither is there an “above” or “below”. The adorable little shapes haven’t a category for anything in the 3rd dimension.
Now imagine a 3D object, an apple, for example, decides to visit this 2D neighborhood. Because the objects of the plane have no category of “up” the apple could be hovering an infinitesimally small distance above them, yet at the same time be categorically inaccessible. If the apple decided to descend onto their plane, into their reality, it would appear as if out of nowhere, a slice of 3D at a time, scaring the hell out of the 2D shapes. Did the apple truly appear out of thin air? No. It was there all along, so close, so tragically close, yet completely imperceptible to the beings because of their limited dimensional reality. The apple was imminent; the shapes, ignorant.
Physicists seem to think there are ten dimensions but to understand them you have to collect four cat laughs and then swallow your own face. That’s what I am told. Regardless, you and I in the 4th dimension are as ignorant of the 5th dimension as the 2D shapes were as clueless of the 3rd dimension. Follow me? Our separateness from the 5th dimension is a categorical one, not one of magnitude.
To say that mankind is separated from God by a vast distance or some other metric of magnitude undervalues the truth of our separateness. I am 4.4 lightyears from the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. That is over 20 trillion miles. I cannot fathom 20 trillion miles. But I can fathom one mile, which is using the same scale as the light year. Categorically they are similar. When we imagine our separateness from God to be in terms of distance of some kind, it gives a false understanding of our separateness. We aren’t on the same scale only a fractional distance of the way. We are on an altogether different dimension, where measuring far or near in terms of distance doesn’t come into it. Miles, inches, leagues, picometers – the normal metrics of separateness -are meaningless. We are dealing with a separateness of another kind.
Practically this separation presents itself in the idea of “good works” or karma. God is morally perfect, we are told, and it is my sin that separates me from God. He demands perfection, eh? Well, I may not be able to perform all moral actions, but I know what it is like to do one. All that is left is to figure out how to do two, then three. Categorically, theoretically, God is accessible; now we are just dealing with a scaling problem. Far from discouraging self righteousness, I daresay it encourages it.
On the other side of things, defining our relationship to God in terms of a vast expanse of impassable space removes us from how close he is to us. In him we live and move and have our being. The question at the bottom of all our longings, who am I?; that white stag which always eludes capture, is right under our nose. Our uniform experiences of goodness, beauty and truth are because of His image inside of us. For in him all things were created; things in heaven and on earth… We interact with his handiwork, we live out the stories he writes for us, while all the time groping with our desire and a blind feeling of world’s not realized.
This calamity is the spiritual reality that we live in. The dimensional divide cannot be bridged or jumped or sewn up. In the deepest recess of our spirit, the emptiness we feel, the poverty of being, the fumbling with our dead sanctities, is an unsolvable problem in the dimension we occupy. It is a sad and tragic closeness indeed, casting a long shadow over the worst any Greek or Shakespearean tragedy could dream. And it would be sadder still if that were the end.
Thought Butter 