Christmas and God’s Nearness in a Vast Universe

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one form of torture stands above all others: the Total Perspective Vortex.

A person is placed inside a chamber and is shown, in a single instant, the infinite expanse of the universe and their own microscopic existence in relation to it. The experience is said to be utterly soul-crushing.

Scientifically speaking, Adams is hardly exaggerating. The field of astrophysics has revealed a universe of such incomprehensible scale that our minds can barely comprehend it. It is natural to feel that we humans must be insignificant in the context of such a vast cosmos.

But is sheer magnitude the final arbiter of value? Or, as we prepare to celebrate Christmas, might considering the coming of Christ recast our meaning through a lens other than size?

Not Superlative: Our Place in the Universe’s Scale

I begin my astronomy classes by inviting students to explore an interactive website that lets users slide smoothly across the scales of existence.

Scrolling “down” takes us past cells and water molecules to the subatomic realm of quarks, finally resting at the Planck length—a mere 10^-35 meters. Sliding the other direction, we zoom past our solar system, beyond the spiral arms of the Milky Way, and out to the edge of the observable universe at 10²⁷ meters.

The realm of the human is nestled in the “messy middle” of this cosmic span, right around the order of one meter. We are neither small enough to be fundamental to the architecture of matter nor large enough to be a significant component of the cosmic structure. We are not superlative.

I often tell my students that if they aren’t experiencing at least a slight existential crisis, they probably aren’t paying close enough attention.

As humans, we are trapped in this middle scale. We are large enough to conceive of superclusters and small enough to snatch at the shadows of quarks, yet we are unable to fully grasp or inhabit the universe at those extremes.

Even physics itself seems overwhelmed by this distance. We rely on General Relativity to govern the massive and Quantum Mechanics to illuminate the tiny. At each end of the spectrum, the math works beautifully.

But in the middle, where these two frameworks meet, the clarity breaks down—a unified “Theory of Everything” continues to elude us. The choppy waves where these two frameworks collide mirror our own internal struggle to feel significant in a vast, silent cosmos.

That is the perspective of Adams’ Vortex.

Value is Conferred by Love, not Size

But there is another vantage point, this one offered by the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich.

In her Revelations of Divine Love, she recounts a vision of a small thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of her hand:

In this light, scale is revealed to be subjective. What is soul-crushingly vast to us rests easily in the palm of God’s hand like a small marble.

Julian’s vision suggests that significance is not a function of mass or volume, but of relationship. The universe exists and holds value simply because God made it, God loves it, and God cares for it.

We see this truth embodied in the way a parent admires the “artwork” their child brings home from preschool. The objective artistic quality of a finger painting may leave something to be desired, but it is a treasured masterpiece because it comes from someone so cherished.

When God came to Earth as a baby, I like to imagine him stepping into that marble universe—zooming past forests of galaxies and swarms of stars to arrive on our small planet as a tiny child in a simple feeding trough. If value rests in scale, his significance collapses in that moment into a near-singularity.

But Julian reminds us that value is conferred by relationship, by love. And my experience as a mother has taught me that a core component of love reveals itself in a power that is difficult to overestimate: presence.

Christmas: Significance Through God’s Love

Children have a way of demanding your attention even when you’d rather direct it elsewhere.

My preschooler and toddler don’t care about the mountain of grading I have staring me down, or about the political turmoil barraging my newsfeed, or even about the burning chicken on the stove. They just want my eyes to be locked on theirs as I listen to them explain the Lego spaceship they just built, or as they babble about a piece of lint they found under the couch. They crave my full and undiluted presence.

Also read/listen:

• In A Universe So Vast, Do We Still Matter?
• Deep Incarnation and the Cosmic Story of Christ
• No Dark Sky | Wonderology
• Uniquely Unique: A Language of God Podcast Series

Selfishly, I confess that I wish I could construct LEGO creations with one hand and grade exams with the other, but I cannot. I’ve tried.

In my finitude, I find I can only operate on one scale at a time, and not always terribly well at that. Most days I am too overwhelmed trying to manage meal plans and babysitter schedules to even consider letting my mind stray toward any grander cosmic scales. I am a “uni-scale” creature, and the scale I operate on is neither vast nor fundamental.

But this is the beauty of Christmas: Jesus joined us on our level, sharing his presence with us because he made us, he loves us, and he cares for us.