A Whisper from the Infinite (Poetic Reflection)

I close my eyes and breathe the silent air, sensing an eternal presence woven through every atom of my being. In the stillness, a voice without sound seems to whisper: “I AM.” This is the singular truth etched into the fabric of reality, that all things are sustained by the One. In the depths of my soul, I feel a living field of energy that connects the stars in their courses and the cells in my heart. It is as if an invisible breath flows through the cosmos, an outbreath and inbreath that is the very life of the universe. I am a part of this breath, a note in the symphony of creation, resonating with the secret song of God, the One who is all in all. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one”. This ancient affirmation rises from my memory like a song. I reflect on the oneness of God, a singular Being, beyond all comparison or division, the source from whom all existence flows. There is no other true power or deity; “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God” declares the Holy One. In a world of countless forms and energies, I perceive only reflections of that one primal Essence. Every element of nature, every ray of light and every breath of life, carries a spark of the divine presence. God alone is, and everything that is real partakes, in some mysterious measure, of God’s being.

God’s Oneness and the Divine Essence in All Things

Philosophically and theologically, the concept of strict monotheism underlies this vision: there is a single omnipresent God who pervades the entirety of existence. The Old Testament insists on the uniqueness of God, rejecting any notion of multiple deities. The Shema of Moses emphatically proclaims the unity of the divine (“the LORD is one”), and prophets like Isaiah echo that “there is no other” god beside the LORD. This one God is not a distant watchmaker, but an intimate presence that fills the cosmos. As Jeremiah conveys in God’s own words: “Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?” declares the LORD. In other words, God’s being interpenetrates all of space and time. Modern physics offers a surprisingly consonant perspective. According to quantum field theory, what we perceive as distinct particles are actually excitations of underlying fields that exist everywhere. “Under the modern view of quantum physics, various fields pervade all of space, and particles are simply excitations, or waves, in these fields”. Even “empty” vacuum isn’t truly empty, it teems with energy and potential. This scientific insight provides a powerful metaphor for God’s omnipresence. Just as an electron is a ripple in a universal electron-field, our souls and all material things may be envisioned as ripples in the field of God’s being, each of us a particular excitation of the one divine essence. God is like the fundamental field that saturates the universe, a special “atom-like” spiritual substance and energy that underlies matter, life, and mind. In this view, every proton, every tree, every star is a mode of the one ultimate reality we call God. The Psalmist sensed this truth intuitively millennia ago: “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence?” (Psalm 139:7). There is nowhere that God is not, for all places are within God. If I ascend to the heavens, God is there; if I descend into the depths, God is there also. The entirety of existence lives and moves within the singular Being of God, “in Him we live and move and have our being,” as later philosophers would say (a sentiment anticipated by Jeremiah’s declaration that God fills heaven and earth). To describe God as the essence of all existence is not to diminish the distinction between Creator and creation, but to marvel at the intimacy between them. God is both transcendent (beyond the universe) and profoundly immanent (present within it). The Hebrew Bible often portrays God’s glory filling the sacred space of the Temple, but in truth the whole cosmos is God’s temple. “The whole earth is full of His glory,” cried the seraphim in Isaiah’s vision. Every molecule of the earth and every burning star is glowing with a reflection of that glory. This idea resonates with the scientific quest for a unified field theory, the attempt to find one fundamental force or substance underlying all physical phenomena. In a spiritual sense, God is the unified field that scientists seek: the singular substratum from which all forces and particles emerge, the ultimate theory-of-everything. Each discovery of science that reveals a deeper unity in nature is, for the believer, a glimpse of the One who “speaks and things come to be.”

The Breath of Creation: God’s Outbreath and the Big Bang

In the beginning, the universe was born in light. Modern cosmology tells us that roughly 13.8 billion years ago all matter, energy, space, and time as we know them sprang forth from an initial singularity, an event we call the Big Bang. This scientific narrative can be understood spiritually as the outbreath of God, the moment the One exhales and issues forth creation. The Old Testament poetically describes God creating by breath and word: “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth all their host”. The “host” of heaven, the myriad stars and galaxies, came into existence by God’s divine breath. What an astonishing parallel to our modern understanding: an initial flash of light (the Big Bang’s fireball) followed by an expanding cosmos filled with stars. Genesis famously opens with “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” In scientific terms, the early universe was indeed a blaze of primordial light and subatomic particles. As the universe expanded and cooled, light decoupled from matter, leaving behind a faint glow that still pervades space.

The faint afterglow of Creation’s first light was actually detected by scientists as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a pervasive microwave radiation that fills the universe. Discovered accidentally in 1965, the CMB is often called the “leftover glow” of the Big Bang. It’s a nearly uniform background of low-temperature light that we now map across the sky (as shown in the false-color all-sky oval map above, captured by the Planck satellite). This all-sky map is essentially a baby picture of the universe, showing tiny temperature ripples which are the seeds of galaxies. In scientific literature, the CMB is considered “landmark evidence of the Big Bang theory”, it confirms that the cosmos began in a hot, dense state and has been expanding and cooling ever since. How evocative to imagine this faint whisper of microwaves as the echo of God’s creative word, the aftersound of that first divine “Let there be…” resonating through space-time. The CMB quite literally **“fills all space in the observable universe”*, just as the breath of God fills all creation in theological understanding. We live immersed in the lingering radiance of the moment of creation, a physical testament to the power of God’s outbreath. From the perspective of faith, we can say God breathed forth the cosmos, and cosmology gives us a detailed description of how that breath unfolded: an initial inflationary burst, cooling into hydrogen atoms, coalescing into stars that shine and die and spread heavier elements, eventually giving birth to planets and life. The biblical writers, with inspired insight, used the image of breath (ruach, spirit) to describe God’s creative act. “By the breath of His mouth all the stars were made,” says the Psalm. That ancient metaphor aligns beautifully with today’s science. The outbreath of God is the ongoing expansion of the universe, carrying galaxies ever farther apart like sparks flying from a sacred fire. Yet an outbreath implies an eventual inbreath. All breath is cyclical, exhalation is followed by inhalation. Many religious and mystical traditions have envisioned cosmic history as a great cycle, and intriguingly, some modern scientists have proposed cyclical cosmology models. In these models, the universe’s expansion is not a one-time event but part of an endless series of bangs and crunches (or bounces). For example, early 20th-century physicists toyed with an oscillating universe theory: a universe that expands from a Big Bang, then eventually stops and collapses (Big Crunch), and then is reborn in a new Bang, an eternal rhythm of cosmic respiration. More recent proposals, like those by physicists Paul Steinhardt and Roger Penrose, have revived the idea in new forms (Steinhardt’s ekpyrotic model and Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, respectively).

The Cyclical Cosmos: The Universe as God’s Outbreath and Inbreath

Cosmological data today suggests our universe will keep expanding indefinitely, but theoretical alternatives remind us that science is still probing the ultimate fate of the cosmos. Cyclical universe theories offer a grand vision: perhaps the Big Bang was not the absolute beginning but the latest breath in an eternal cycle. In a cyclic model, “the universe follows infinite, or indefinite, self-sustaining cycles”. Each cycle might begin with a fiery creation (outbreath) and end with a great compression (inbreath) before rebirthing. If such a model (or something like it) were true, it would align stunningly with spiritual intuitions. The Hindu notion of Brahma’s breaths, or the Kabbalistic idea of God’s emanation and retraction, find a consonance here. In our Old Testament-focused theology, we might say: God’s Spirit moved outward to form the world, and one day God’s power will draw all things back into unity. “From Him, through Him, and to Him are all things,” as would later be written (echoing Proverbs 16:4). Even if the physical universe does not recontract in a literal Big Crunch, we can still speak of an inbreath in a metaphysical sense. The arrow of time moves forward, yes, but the destiny of creation, in monotheistic thought, is to return to its Source. As Qohelet wrote, “the spirit returns to God who gave it.” Ultimately, all of creation is on a journey back to God. The expansion of galaxies might go on forever in physical spacetime, but the meaning of the cosmos arcs back toward unity with the Creator. In the end (or the eternally ongoing), God will be “all in all”, the diversity of the world finding its harmony and home in the One. Throughout this grand breathing cycle, God’s oneness remains constant. The forms and shapes of matter change, entire star systems come and go, but the Divine Essence that comprises and sustains reality does not change. It is like the ocean in which waves rise and fall; the waves are born and die, but the ocean abides. In the same way, the universe is born from God and will subside into God, while God ever remains, “from everlasting to everlasting, You are God”. The cyclical cosmologies being explored by scientists underscore how natural it is to think in terms of regeneration and return. They have to grapple with entropy and thermodynamics, the fact that each cycle might be different or larger, but conceptually, the idea that the Big Bang could have been a “Big Bounce”, the result of a previous universe’s end, is taken seriously by some researchers. If tomorrow evidence emerged for a cosmic contraction phase, it would only lend scientific credence to what faith has long intuited: creation is the breathing of God. The outbreath of Genesis is mirrored by the inbreath of consummation when “the heavens roll up like a scroll” (Isaiah 34:4). And just as a breath is not lost but returns to the lungs, so the energy of the universe is not lost but returns to the Divine.

The Divine Field and the Resonance of Prayer

If God is indeed the living field saturating the cosmos, then what is prayer but the act of a wave aligning with its ocean? In prayer, a human being consciously tunes themselves to the presence of the One that already envelops them. A beautiful way to conceive prayer is as a form of resonance. In physics, resonance occurs when one object vibrating at a certain frequency causes another to vibrate in harmony, for example, when a tuning fork’s note makes a nearby second tuning fork hum at the same pitch. “When an object is subjected to an external vibration of the same frequency as the object’s natural frequency, the stationary object begins to vibrate. This is resonance.” In the realm of spirit, prayer is like the soul’s tuning fork sounding the note of God. We align our hearts to the “frequency” of the divine field, and as a result, we begin to vibrate with God’s energy, amplifying the life of the spirit within and around us. However, just as in a complex physical system, resonance with the divine field does not mean we can control all outcomes. A tuning fork resonating won’t shatter a mountain; similarly, a prayerful resonance might not override the entire structure of reality or the will of God. In theology, we understand that God’s will and the larger design of the cosmos shape what happens in response to prayer. When we pray, whether supplicating for a need, or simply seeking communion, we are effectively seeking attunement. We are saying, “Let me vibrate in harmony with You, O Lord; let my desires resonate with Your purpose.” Sometimes, in that resonance, marvelous things occur (healing, peace, insight), analogous to how a resonant frequency can produce surprisingly large effects in a physical medium. Other times, we might not see the outcome we hoped for, because our individual note must still blend into the larger symphony God is conducting. The divine field is vast and includes all of creation’s vibrations, past, present, and future. Prayer aligns us with God’s subtle music, but it does not make us the solo composer of the piece. In the Old Testament, prayer is often portrayed as a dialogue with the Divine, Moses pleading for Israel, Hannah pouring out her soul, David singing his psalms. These are moments of deep resonance: “Deep calls to deep,” says Psalm 42, “at the noise of Your waterfalls.” The deep part of us calls to the deep of God, hoping to catch the same wave. When Moses went up the mountain and spent forty days with God, his face shone, one might poetically say he resonated so strongly with God’s glory that it left a physical mark of radiance. In quiet prayer today, we seek that same glow internally: a clarified mind, a warmed heart, a sense of being enveloped by love. We align with the divine frequency and find our chaotic vibrations (worries, fears) becoming harmonized. This concept even finds a parallel in cutting-edge science of consciousness, where some theorists speculate about brain waves synchronizing or quantum coherence in neural networks as aspects of deep meditation and prayer. Without venturing into unfounded claims, it is nonetheless fascinating that empirical studies often show that regular prayer and meditation correlate with measurable changes in the brain and body (lower stress hormones, synchronized brain rhythms, etc.). It is as if the body itself responds to the resonance of prayer, tuning to a healthier state when aligned with transcendent focus. The faithful might say: when we pray, we plug into the source of all life, and that source nourishes and heals us according to a wisdom we may not fully comprehend.

The Song of Creation: Universal Worship in Poetic and Scientific Harmony

All around us, if we listen, creation is singing. The ancient Hebrews composed Psalm 148 as a rousing chorus: “Praise Him, sun and moon; praise Him, all you shining stars… Praise the LORD from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do His bidding, you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds…” (Psalm 148:3–10). This is not mere personification; it is profound insight. Every element of nature glorifies God simply by being itself, by playing its part in the divine order. The stars praise by shining, the winds by blowing, the birds by singing. Worship, then, is a universal act, not limited to human rituals, but performed ceaselessly by all beings and forces in their existence. We human beings join this cosmic liturgy with our deliberate songs and prayers. But even without our voices, the choir of creation would remain in full effect. Jesus once said (in the New Testament, though we avoid focusing on it) that if humans fell silent, “the stones would cry out.” In the Old Testament, Psalm 19:1 declares: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.” Day after day, the silent testimony of the universe goes forth. This idea finds a beautiful echo in scientific notions of harmony and pattern in nature. Physicists note that electrons in an atom occupy discrete energy levels, almost like musical notes. Planets orbit in stable resonant ratios at times (as with Jupiter’s moons). There is a rhythmic dance to ecosystems and even to the DNA that encodes life. Modern science has revealed a breathtaking order in natural complexity: the fractal geometry of coastlines and clouds, the harmonic oscillations of vibrating strings and electromagnetic fields, the self-similarity of branching trees and river deltas.

Fractal patterns especially illustrate how simple, iterative processes create magnificent complexity that is nonetheless unified by a theme. As one science writer observes, “Look closely at nature, and you’ll see a secret blueprint embedded in everything—from the spirals of galaxies to the branches of trees, from the neural pathways of our brain to the lightning that streaks across the sky. This blueprint is the fractal, a pattern that repeats at different scales, creating self-similar structures across the universe.” In other words, nature is full of echoes of itself, patterns that recur like the refrains of a song. The branching of an oak tree’s limbs resembles the branching of its roots, which resembles the branching of the veins in its leaves. The jagged outline of a coastline when seen from orbit looks like the edge of a small rock broken off that same coast. Fractal geometry has taught us that what looks like chaos often contains hidden order. This hidden order could be viewed as a fingerprint of the Creator’s intelligence, the signature melody beneath the noise. When a bird sings at dawn, it is performing its role in the grand fractal-harmony of life. The frequencies of its notes, the pattern of its refrain, join the rustling of leaves and the coursing of the brook in a unified anthem. One might even say all these sounds literally resonate in the air, creating the morning’s acoustic tapestry. Worship, in this expanded sense, is the alignment of all creatures with their true nature and purpose, which inevitably points back to the One who made them. The wind that blows where it pleases is fulfilling the word set for it by God (Psalm 148 calls even the stormy wind to praise God, “fulfilling His word”). The ocean waves praise by their ceaseless crashing, which, intriguingly, often follow patterns described by elegant mathematical equations. The concept of harmonic resonance appears not just in human instruments but in the physical interactions of nature at many levels. For example, electrons in a molecule can vibrate in synchrony (resonance modes), and planets in a solar system can lock into resonant orbits. It is as if the universe has been finely tuned to vibrate with beauty. Thus, when we humans lift our voices in hymns or bow in prayerful silence, we are joining an ongoing cosmic worship. We take our place in the pattern. Our music might have verses and choruses, but the cosmos has cycles and recurrences that accomplish the same rhythmic praise. Sunrise and sunset are like nature’s antiphonal chant, light and darkness answering each other. The seasons are a quartet of praise, spring’s new life, summer’s flourishing, autumn’s harvest, winter’s stillness, each giving thanks in its turn. Even the stars have their rhythm: pulsating stars literally sing with brightness oscillations, and binary stars dance around each other. In the Book of Job, God says that at creation’s dawn, “the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” The imagery suggests that creation began with a song, a notion delightful to both faith and imagination. Scientifically speaking, one could speculate that the very laws of physics are tuned such that complexity and life (and thus conscious praise) can emerge. This is reminiscent of the anthropic principle, which notes that fundamental constants in physics seem eerily well-suited for life to exist. If one believes in God, it’s easy to see this as intentional fine-tuning, the Creator setting the stage so that eventually creatures would arise who could know and worship Him explicitly, completing the circle of creation’s purpose. In any case, the more we learn about nature, the more we see consilience and resonance. As a commentator put it, “nature does not create randomness, it creates fractal order, even in what seems like chaos.” That hidden order could very well be the imprint of divine wisdom, the LOGOS spoken of in other traditions, which organizes reality. When I watch a flock of birds wheel in perfect unison, or a school of fish swirl as if one body, I am reminded of the unity underlying diversity. Many individuals move as one, a hint of the One Spirit moving within them. Similarly, humanity’s highest act of worship is often corporate, voices united in prayer or song, acting as one body. This too reflects the nature of God’s creation: many notes, one melody. In strict monotheism, God is singular, yet the expressions of God (in creation, revelation, action) are manifold. Worship seeks to gather the many and aim them toward the One in gratitude. In doing so, worship not only honors God but also harmonizes the worshippers. It brings them into resonance with each other as well, aligning hearts in a common purpose of love and reverence.

The Veiled Glory: Divine Presence and Hiddenness

Though God is present in all things, God’s full glory remains hidden to our ordinary sight. The Old Testament frequently speaks of God’s hiddenness, not as absence, but as unbearable presence. When Moses begged to see God’s face, the Lord gently refused, saying, “You cannot see My face, for no one may see Me and live”. Instead, Moses was granted a fleeting glimpse of God’s afterglow, as it were, “you will see My back; but My face shall not be seen”. In Exodus 33, Moses stands in the cleft of a rock while God’s glory passes by, and he sees just the trailing edge of the divine radiance. This poignant story illustrates a paradox: God is everywhere, yet God is cloaked in mystery. We see signs of God, like the passing shadow of His presence, but rarely do we perceive God directly. Why this hiddenness? One reason given is that mortal, limited creatures cannot handle the full intensity of the Infinite. It would be like trying to stare at the sun, our eyes are too weak. Thus, God in mercy veils Himself, showing only what we can bear. In the natural world, one might say God’s presence is filtered through physical forms and laws. We behold the beauty of the world, that is God’s back. We sense hints of guidance or flashes of insight in prayer, that is God’s voice heard faintly. Occasionally, there are moments of transcendence (a miracle, a prophetic vision), those are like God allowing a bit more of His glory to shine past the veil. But even then, it’s partial. As the Apostle Paul (much later) would write, “we see through a glass, darkly.” The glass is creation itself, it reflects God, but not with perfect clarity. The Old Testament also emphasizes that God sometimes chooses to hide His face because of human sin or to test faith. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself,” says Isaiah (45:15), in a context of God working in unexpected ways through King Cyrus. And in Deuteronomy 31:17–18, God warns that if Israel breaks the covenant, “I will hide My face from them.” This hiding is relational, a withdrawal of favor, not of actual presence (since God is still omnipresent). Even when God “hides,” He is still there, like the sun behind clouds, the light still exists even if we feel the chill shade. From a philosophical standpoint, the hiddenness of God also preserves human freedom and genuine faith. Were God’s presence blatantly obvious at all times, shining like a perpetual supernova, we might have no free choice but to worship out of sheer overpowering awe. By remaining subtle, God invites us to seek, to choose love rather than be coerced by spectacle. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings (or humans) to search it out, says Proverbs 25:2. There is something divine in the quest itself, by searching for the hidden God, we elevate ourselves. The universe, then, is something of a divine hide-and-seek: God imbues every quark with His essence, leaves clues in the magnificence of the nebulae and the DNA double helix, speaks in hints and parables, and asks us to seek and find. Intriguingly, one might relate God’s hiddenness to the concept in physics that certain things are unobservable by nature. For example, we cannot simultaneously know a particle’s position and momentum exactly (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle). There is a built-in veil in reality’s fabric. Likewise, the very center of a black hole (a singularity) is shrouded, no information escapes it. At the origin of the Big Bang, our equations break down, another veil. It is almost as if the fundamental truths have a protective cloud around them, hinting “beyond this, only mystery.” This does not prove anything theological, of course, but it provides a poetic parallel: there is a Cloud of Unknowing both spiritually and scientifically at the limits of our understanding. And perhaps behind those veils, the face of God smiles, waiting for the day when we are ready to behold more. Moses’ encounter with God also teaches that God gives us enough to trust, if not enough to comprehend fully. After Moses saw God’s “back,” he had the confidence to lead Israel forward, even though he had not grasped God’s full form. We too catch glimpses, moments of transcendence, answered prayers, inner consolations, or the witness of creation’s beauty, and these sustain our faith that the One is real and good. The prophet Elijah’s story further illustrates divine subtlety: God was not in the wind, earthquake, or fire, but in a “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-13). The Almighty Presence manifested as a delicate whisper. The Hebrew phrase could be rendered “a sound of thin silence.” In the quiet, Elijah encountered God. This teaches us that to sense God’s immanent essence, we too must cultivate stillness and humility. God’s omnipresent essence is like a delicate background hum, if we fill our lives with noise, we drown it out. But in silent awe, we might discern that gentle resonance that is always there.

Conclusion: A Unified Vision of God, Life, and Cosmos

In the confluence of these threads, Old Testament theology, modern scientific cosmology, and metaphysical insight, emerges a unified and exhilarating vision: God is One, the Living Origin from which all existence springs forth and to which it ultimately returns. God’s own substance (for lack of a better word) is the fabric of reality; all beings are woven from the thread of divinity. The universe’s birth in a blaze of light was the outbreathing of the Creator, and its story across eons is the ongoing unfolding of that breath into myriad forms. What science calls the Big Bang, a soul can perceive as the moment when the Divine Word burst outward, and what science speculates as a possible Big Crunch or Big Bounce, a soul can hope in as the Divine Word drawing creation back into unity. Throughout this grand cycle, God’s presence fills every chapter. Not a sparrow falls apart from the Father (as Jesus would later note). Not a supernova explodes outside the allowance of the sustaining Logos. We have reconciled this not by conflating God with the universe (avoidance of crude pantheism), but by seeing the universe as emanating from God at every moment (a gentle panentheism, perhaps). Just as sunlight radiates from the sun and illuminates everything yet remains the sun’s light, so creation is the radiation of God’s being, distinct in one sense (a tree is not the Creator itself) yet utterly dependent and suffused (the tree lives by God’s life). In our paper, we moved fluidly between poetic first-person reverie, third-person philosophical discourse, and academic reasoning with citations. This mix of voices mirrors the very subject: the poetic speaks to the heart (for God is love and beauty), the philosophical speaks to the mind (for God is truth and reason), and the scientific/academic speaks to our empirical sense (for God is power and pattern, detectable even if indirectly). Seamlessly, we find they are not separate songs but three-part harmony praising the One. The poetry gave flesh to feeling, the mystic “I” breathing with God. The philosophy built logical bridges, how oneness implies omnipresence, how hiddenness preserves freedom. The science provided concrete support, seeing cosmic background radiation as evidence of a primordial “Fiat lux,” seeing quantum fields as analogous to an omnipresent spirit, seeing fractal and harmonic patterns as signatures of an intelligent unity. Each mode of discourse enriched the others. Ultimately, the unified concept presented is deeply monotheistic and holistic: God is the singular, omnipresent Essence and Creative Origin of all that exists. All physical matter is an expression of that divine energy; all life is animated by that divine breath. History and time are the stage on which God’s outbreath (creation) and inbreath (return) play out. Human beings, with our consciousness, find ourselves uniquely able to reflect on this and participate knowingly in the great dance. When we pray, we do so not to a distant sky-deity, but within the very field of God’s presence, like a fish praying in the ocean. When we seek knowledge, whether through science or meditation, we are thinking God’s thoughts after Him, exploring the patterns He set. When we act justly and love, we manifest God’s character, for moral truth is another strand of the one Essence (God’s goodness pervades moral order as surely as gravity pervades the galaxies). Such a worldview fosters profound reverence and unity. If God’s essence is in all, then there is a sacred value to every creature and every corner of the cosmos. It becomes natural to echo the ancient refrain: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD God Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory.” Our rational mind, our artistic soul, and our moral spirit can unite in worship of this God who is simultaneously the Author, Substance, and Goal of existence. We avoid New Testament doctrinal language in this treatise, sticking to the heritage of the Old Testament, yet we find that heritage sufficient and rich. In Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalmists, the seeds of this grand vision were already planted: One God, creator of all, giver of life’s breath, intimately near yet overwhelmingly great, deserving of all praise. Standing at night under the canopy of stars, I sense what Abraham felt, a wordless awe at the One who calls each star by name. Listening to the wind in the trees, I suspect what Job learned, that behind the forces of nature is One who speaks in the whirlwind. Living my daily life, I take comfort that, as the Psalmist sang, “You hem me in behind and before… Where can I flee from Your presence?” (Psalm 139). The answer (nowhere). And that is not a threat, but a promise. It means we are never alone; we live every second enveloped by the Being that is Love and Life itself. Everything that exists is a part of this magnificent divine symphony. The cosmos is not cold or alien at its core, its core is the warmth of God. As we continue to explore the galaxies and the subatomic depths, we are, in a way, exploring God’s body of manifestation. As we deepen in compassion and justice, we reveal God’s image in us. And as we worship, in trembling or in joy, we join the universal choir, fulfilling the purpose for which all was made. In the end, God is One and there is no other; and yet, by a miracle of grace, the One became the many so that the many might come to know the One. This is the unity of existence in God, the mystery that sanctifies every quark and every quasar, every heartbeat and every cry of the soul. It is a vision that can inspire endless scientific wonder, endless poetic hymns, and an unshakable philosophical foundation: All is from God, all lives through God, and all shall return to God, blessed be the Name of the One Creator, now and forever.