‘Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb’ was an unforgettable phrase in a notable sonnet by John Donne. Immensity is something we understand somewhat better than he did back in the 17th century. We are familiar with our place in a hundred billion-star galaxy which is just one galaxy among a hundred billion. But having said that, we are a long way short of comprehending our decidedly peripheral place in the scheme of things.
We live our lives in the confidence that the sun will rise (or appear to do so) every morning. We expect the tides to go in and out like clockwork as the moon dictates. Yet if the unthinkable happened and the rotation or orbit of planet earth went out of kilter, we might in a moment know nothing about it – or about anything else. Such a disaster would not be noticed in the plentiful, though sparsely scattered, traffic in the stellar darkness. The gloomy planets of our own solar system and the nothingness of space would presumably continue as before as though nothing had happened. We are a speck of dust in a largely silent but occasionally jostling cosmos containing giants, dwarfs (comparatively so), explosive energy and dark pits beyond our conception.
The incarnation, as Donne elaborates, involved the author of this immense, faceless cosmos becoming an embryo in a woman’s womb. It is a huge paradox, beyond our imagination. But that does not make it untrue. If the world were restricted to elements within our own understanding, we should be poor indeed. And we have no call to accept the maxim ‘Big is good; small is worthless’. The nano-cosmos, too, has its secrets just as the oceans do and we are missing the mark if we allow size – or immensity – to put limits on our thinking.
Think of it like this. The mothers of Leonardo, Beethoven and Einstein carried in their wombs offspring of huge potential. Like other mothers they could not foresee what that would amount to. Yet when it became seen for what it was, men and women could only marvel. In the case of Jesus the shepherds were given an inkling of what was to come. No wonder they were staggered.
Our major poet was on to something.
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