The Big Book of God’s Love

Every day that my son, Henry, and I walk to school is an opportunity to see. Henry is my Nature Boy, the one who gets his boots (and pants and coat and gloves) muddy, gleefully. He’s the one who spends hours in the woods with his friend making forts and finding toads.

Henry sees the world, and what catches his eye are often things I’ve overlooked. While I’m quick to mention the way the sun hits the remaining ice on tree limbs and makes the whole landscape silver, he sees the small things—the squirrel, the rabbit, the minnow, the toad—and points, “Look!” His curiosity about the world brings home from school all he’s learned about the universe and the mushroom, life cycles and water cycles, meteors and erosion, and I am the lucky listener to hear about all that he’s observed.

In an increasingly manufactured and urban world, many of us have to be intentional about seeking and exploring the wilderness. There just aren’t as many wild places left. As a result, it’s  easy for us to become disconnected from the world as God created it, stuck in the world we manufacture, to our own disadvantage.

What do we lose when we lose our connection with creation? We lose access to God’s big book. John Scotus Eriugena, an early Irish church father, taught that God speaks to humanity through two books—the “small book” of Holy Scripture, and the “big book” of the universe. John Philip Newell sums up Eriugena’s words in his book Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul:

We need to read both books, [Eriugena] says, the sacred text of scripture and the sacred text of the universe. If we read only the little book, we will miss the vastness and wildness of the utterance, everything vibrating with the sound of the divine. If we read only the big book, we are in danger of missing the intimacy of the voice, for the book of scripture calls us to faithfulness in relationship, including faithfulness to strangers, refugees, widows, and the poorest among us.

There are many, many psalms and passages of Scripture that remark on the vastness and beauty of the creation God has made, but if we only read the “small book,” our hearts will never quake with awe the way they do in the natural world. If we only read the “small book,” we miss standing along the wrack line of an ocean, listening to the rhythmic push and pull of water across sand, the sea churning underneath the glow of a moon whose magnetic force drives the ebb and flow of the waves. 

If we only read the “small book,” we no longer know the names of the birds of the air and lilies of the field that Jesus said are clothed more elegantly than Solomon in all his glory (Luke 12:27). We are unable to see within the diversity of creation God’s immense attention to beauty and detail, God’s love for the unique and unusual, God’s care for even these common sparrows and blossoms. 

If we only read the “small book,” we might begin to think we have God pegged, that we now possess all knowledge and wisdom there is to know about God, that we are right and everyone else is wrong. We might begin to think that God fits neatly into our particular religious box. When the wild and unpredictable world just gets more complex, the more we put it under more powerful microscopes, the farther out we stretch the lens of our telescopes. God is not boxable. God is as wild, vast, and mysterious as the quarks in our atoms or the faintest shimmer of a star that has reached us from a galaxy millions of light-years away.

If we only read the “small book,” our smallness and God’s largeness become disproportionate—we have no way to grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ . . . that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18–19). We can miss that God’s love is bigger than the ocean, than this country, this people, and this time. It is bigger even than this solar system, this galaxy, this universe. 

Oh how wonderful, oh how marvelous! It boggles the mind and makes our hearts sing. God’s love should do that. But if we never do things like stand under the stretching canopy of an old-growth sequoia tree and wonder at a thing being that tall, that wide, that old (over 1,200 years old by the time Jesus was born), if we haven’t looked up into that growth and let the Spirit lead us to contemplate the even larger expanse of time and space, it’s easy to believe we’re the most important thing in the universe. It’s easy to lose sight of the mystery and massiveness of God. It’s easy to forget we are just dust, valuable and precious dust made by our Creator, but dust nonetheless.

My son’s love for creation draws me forward into creation again and again. It challenges me to stand in awe of something, anything, for a few minutes each day. Maybe today it will be the way the songbird came back this spring as soon as the ice began to thaw, the way the crow caws, the way the oak stands resolute through every season, the way the sun etches its colors across a changing canvas every morning and evening. However God speaks to me through the marvelous, wonderful creation, I want to be here to see it. I want to let wonder and awe return me to God’s love; God’s singing, thawing, cawing, resolute, and everlasting love; a love that spans horizons and expands, even as the universe itself expands; the way a mother’s love expands as she adds another child to her family; the way a heart keeps making room.

–Written by Sarah M. Wells. Used by permission from the author. Click here to connect with Sarah.