In this revelation, the Lord showed me something else, a tiny thing no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of the hand and as round as a ball. I looked at it, puzzled, and thought, what is it?

The answer came. It is everything that is made. I wondered how it could survive.

Only young heretics, oh geez, will recognize that passage. If you know what it's from,

you've probably been with me a long time. That is the revelations of divine love by Mother

Julian of Norwich, the Christian Mystic, and this is a short and

sweet book that I thoroughly recommend. It's not what we're going to be talking about directly

today, but it is an appropriate introduction to our little digression on

Cosmology on the creation of the universe and what is said about it in science and in faith.

The passage that I just read to use from the first revelation that Julian saw

and it concerns the creation of the world, the holding of the world in God's head and the sustaining of all reality by God's love and the answer that she gets when she wonders how it could survive is that it exists the The whole universe exists this tiny little

nutshell exists because it is sustained by God's love and I wanted to bring that up

at the beginning here because I think it's time for us to take a little trippy detour

having done some stuff about the Cardinal Virtues. We're in the middle here of a kind of pause in

between two parts of our series on the virtues.

We did the classical virtues, the four cardinal virtues for many, many weeks before this.

And then I took some mailbag questions and later on we're going to move on into the Christian virtues.

But I wanted to take this opportunity

to maybe give us a little breather.

It's always nice to reflect on things

when you've been thinking about them for a long time,

maybe put them on the back burner, let them percolate or as my high school English teacher used to say let them

incubate in the subconscious and think about some other stuff and there's a lot

...