Over the past two years I have been working on a spiritual memoir exploring the beliefs essential to my faith identify as they have been shaped by the circumstances of my life, in particular love, suffering, death, and resurrection. The foundation of my belief occurs in experiencing a relationship with the divine, whom I call God. Though I know God as the single unchanging presence in my life, my relationship and my understanding have definitely evolved. How could I possibly contain the infinite in a single metaphor or encounter?

Several years ago, searching for the God within and around me, I could best “see God” in the goodness of others. Otherwise the invisible divine was “out there”.  But in truth I wanted to feel myself submersed in the God of love. I wanted to experience an unbreakable connection. Watching the sunlight pour through the window over my shoulder, I noticed for the thousandth time the specks of particles dancing in the sunbeam, matter that would become invisible when the sunlight moved

In that moment I grasped as never before that all that seems like empty space – within and around me – is filled with the presence of the divine. It is so difficult to feel alone when I am surrounded by the teeming waves of God’s infinite love. It is difficult to feel powerless when I am wrapped in the energy of God’s love pulling me forward.

Recently I began to read Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics described on the flyleaf as “All the Beauty of Modern Physics in Fewer than a Hundred Pages”, a “book about joy of discovery”, and “surprisingly easy to grasp”. How I could I pass up this “best selling” opportunity to expand my horizons into the broader universe – in less than 100 pages.

The first chapter – I read at least three time – describes one of the great insights of Einstein which parallels the transformation in my understanding of God. When imagining the force of gravity that draws all material bodies towards one another, Newton described bodies moving through space, a great, empty container. “What the ‘space was made of, this container of the world he invented,” Newton could not say (5).” Later Einstein in a “stroke of pure genius” realized that Newton’s “space” through which things move, and the “gravitational field” are the same. Space is no longer distinct from matter, it is an “entity that undulates, flexes, curves, twists.” How about that! Space in not emptiness, nor is it a fixed container. Neither is God. And the universe, as I read it, says Amen, so it is. How about that!