Cylinders and Crosses

The experience of God's massive and overwhelming nature is best found, for me, on sunny days or black nights. I'm not sure anything captures the beauty of the Creator any better than seeing His creation bathed in the light of His great lantern, and realizing that He is yet still bigger, yet still more shining. Or that anything captures His scope, His power and might, as well as staring into the void of space, and realizing that He is yet bigger, more massive, more infinite than the universe itself. When I apprehend the beautiful view of a landscape in the sun, or the void of space at night, I come closest to what I might call a healthy fear of God--"be still and know that I am God"--and that this God could crush me, that this God is more eldritch and big than the whole organism of the Earth and more consuming than the void, but that yet this God wants to know and to love me.

I don't understand.

Of course I can spend all the time I like chasing experiences that teach me the attributes of God by their massive yet massively imperfect analogy. But though nature comes close, there are, still, places and times in my life God can be found in yet more direct fashion. I speak, at least in part, of moments in time spent kneeling before and metal cylinders or crosses, housing something that looks like bread.