Holy, Wholly Negligible as a Metaphor

    In human experience we may grapple with trying to conceive of greatness in terms of quantity and we use the word “infinity” to refer to an impossible quantity.

    We perhaps use infinity as metaphorical attribute of God.  We may use infinity to refer to space, time and matter as a way of measuring the limits of human experience.

   The notion of infinity would present us with what is impossible to know.  If an infinite number of things are in relationship with each other, how would it be possible to know fully cause and effect relationships?  How could we gauge the effect of the flapping of butterfly wings on weather patterns?  We might say that the effect would be trivial, negligible or insignificant or unable to be registered in our methods of perception.  But what is the totally negligible effect of all of the events for which we have no access in measuring the sum total of all untraceable events?

    It could be that the intuitions about God have to do with human beings feeling very small in the face of what we cannot experience; we sense the effect of an infinite number of negligible and so we might indeed confess God as the Holy Negligible, or the effect of the infinite number events that we call insignificant because we cannot register in knowable ways their direct or collateral effect upon us.

     In the face of what we cannot know, in the face of the great negligible, humanity has had to tell stories to give purpose and meaning and science has been one of the stories of coming to meaning and purpose.

    Historically, we can note that when we did not travel very far in the world, we had people telling stories about travels in purgatory or the afterlife, in a place in the sky called heaven.  Such places were regarded to be knowable places in human experience.  So, persons  in medieval Europe knew how to get through purgatory, but they did know not know the existence of Tokyo or how to get there.  As knowledge has grown and the earth become to be discovered as a globe and gotten smaller through travel, there has been less concern about purgatory and the afterlife.

    As we have conquered more of the negligible, the nature of speculation about the unknown has been more along the lines of science fiction.

  Modern science has not ended the negligible; it has seemingly changed how we define and approach the negligible.  Modern science has not removed the negligible; it has but cleared up some of the immediate fog of the negligible.  But we are still small because the more area of the negligible that has been discovered, the more we have come to appreciate vastness and plenitude; the more we have come to appreciate the microscopic and the nanoscopic.

We are less certain about details of heaven and purgatory today, even while we can appreciate the meaning of interior and creative parallel world and its relevance to our external world.        
 As people of science we are elated with discoveries that become technological products, there remains tentativeness about any discovery or products because the once seeming negligible has been exposed to be not insignificant.  In the discovery process we view the negligible afresh but now standing on the pedestal of the latest discovery. 

  We as people of faith can embrace  tentativeness of our lives because of the sum total of the negligible that we encounter at any time.  This could help us be humble about presuming to use the poetry of our revelations as causative absolute agents of the world as it is.  Rather our Biblical metaphorical poetry should teach us respect for God as Holy, Wholly Negligible.