Moving Beyond Spiritual Comfort Zones - A Personal Response to Monica Grady’s Autumn Lecture

Considering the Vastness of Celestial Creation

By Paul Marley

The scale of Monica’s presentation was huge; exploring a celestial creation with more galaxies than all the grains of sand on the earth puts the problem in perspective. Add in time scales defined constantly in billions of years, and the vastness of what we were considering quickly moved us beyond any spiritual comfort zone we may have been enjoying.

Monica’s expertise in her own subject area is impressive and beyond question, and her capacity to bring it to a mixed audience with clarity and simplicity was both evident and appreciated. On her own admission, Monica was not a theologian, which made the Catholic framework, in which the evening was framed, give rise to more questions than it was perhaps reasonable to expect her to deal with.  

I regret that I had to leave the gathering shortly after the start of the plenary session; mine was the first question raised, and I asked it because I thought it encapsulated much of what the evening had been about. In the vast scale of time and space that Monica had explored, I wondered where the minuscule 4000 years of salvation history figured; how do we define its place, its significance and importance, against the background of the enormity of what we had been given by Monica’s talk?

The morning after, I still find the issue perplexing; food for a further exploration perhaps?

All in all, a challenging and instructive evening, for which I am grateful to CPW for making possible. Thank you.