Small Immensities

“The processes involved in sauce making are hardly as dramatic as the driving of great engines, but they testify no less to the brooding of the Spirit upon the face of creation, to the endless speaking of the Word Who mightily and sweetly orders all things. Unfortunately, we live in an age which is too little impressed by the small and too easily intimidated by the great. It is the stock in trade of atheists and other knockers of the wonder of being to insist that the magnitude of the universe makes all man’s musings insignificant. How, they ask, can we seriously think we are of much account in a universe where light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and it takes a hundred light years to go from one galaxy to the next? Looking into my saucepan as the stock thickens, I find a counterfoil to such astronomical terrorism. Creation is vast in every direction. It is as hugely small as it is large. The number of water-filled interstices in my three tablespoonfuls of flour runs the interstellar distances a fair second; the appeal to size is a self-canceling argument. Plying my whisk, I know that what goes on here is neither less mysterious nor less marvelous than what happens there. We may not have settled the question of whether I am mad to think I matter, but we have definitely eliminated the numbers game as a method of proof. I will listen to any man who wants to argue me down, but, saucepan in hand, I refuse to be snowed” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 101).