Lord only knows where the tiny spider came from, but somehow it had fetched up in my front hair. Now it was happily spinning its way down past my left eye, finding a temporary berth just to the side of my nose. It tickled. Very distracting, when you're trying to read....

I freed myself by lifting its silk away from my face, and held the little thing out, watching it scuttle up its invisible but oh-so-sturdy line to my fingertip. I draped the silk over the knob of the pantry door, next to my chair, where I could watch the spider slide down its invisible line and scuttle back up. I like spiders, and this was a pretty one: a soft mouse-brown, neatly proportioned, its delicately banded legs so tiny they were transparent.

I wondered if, spinning its way down from my hair, it could it see my face. Probably not. It would be like trying to see the face of a mountain while you're rapelling down the the side of it. My middle-aged mug would be unimaginably large to this minute creature, my nose the length of a city block to it, the pores like good-sized potholes. My face would be mere ground to it, a solid surface, warmer than most; but incomprensible. If I moved my head, would it be able to tell? Probably not, anymore than I can tell the swing of this hemisphere around the sun.

What can a spider see, anyway? I don't know much about spider-vision; I do know that scorpions have even more eyes (twenty-some; spiders have eight) but are functionally blind and "see" with their feet. Even if spiders see better than scorpions, I doubt if they have colour vision; and of course their visual centres aren't going to be sophisticated, by mammalian standards at least. So I don't know what that little thing could have taken in about my face, except that it probably wasn't a whole lot. That spider's view of me would necessarily be partial and incomplete, and very likely just plain wrong. At least by our standards....

It would be easy for the spider to take in small parts of Hair, Forehead, Left Eyebrow, Left Eye, and Nose while entirely missing Right Eyebrow, Right Eye, Mouth, both Cheeks, and Chin, not to mention everything else about me. The spider's view, let's face it, is seriously incomplete. Not that this is a deficiency on the spider's part: it's partly the spider's own quite normal, natural limitations and partly the sheer difference in size.

And then I thought: the spider in my face is like me in the face of God. I can take in so very little, and so much of what I can take in is just plain wrong--not anyone's fault, just my own limitations as a being, and the sheer difference in size. God is to me, not as I am to the spider, but as the spider is to the earth. Or the universe. Or God, for that matter. God is simply unimaginably large and different in ways I cannot begin to imagine.

And yet so close.... Maybe if God sometimes seems far away or remote, it's simply because we cannot possibly take in the immediacy of God, the hugeness of God so up-close to us that we can't even begin to see it in its immensity--any more than the spider could see me. We go about our lives before the face of God, without even realizing that it is God's face, because God's face is so big that we can't see it, and so familiar that we treat it as part of the landscape. It's wallpaper.

But it's infinitely unfamiliar too. God's face is so completely foreign to what we know of life that we can't begin to take it in. God's face is not only huge to us; it blazes with a love that we cannot even begin to apprehend--whole leaping, flaring, fiery, sunspots of love, arching in deepest longing toward us, aching for us, begging us to respond, asking us just to look as best we can, and forgiving us for the littleness of the look we can give back in love.

And still that's all wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm only getting the tiniest impression of maybe a microfraction of one atom of God's left eyebrow, because God's love is also as cool and calm, as refreshing and fragrant as quiet flowering woodlands in moonlight after the softest of rains: God comes "all so still" to wherever we are, with such gentleness and such depth of understanding.

Or as the sea toppling mountains.

God is further from me than the whole known universe is from that spider, and at one and the same time, God is far nearer to me than my own skin. I know infinitely less of God than the spider did of the side of my nose. But God knows ever atom of me, from its origins in the furthest reaches of time to its final fate, whatever awaits at the end.

As God knows this spider... who, after I moved it, curled up briefly, probably feeling defensive (or the spiderly equivalent). Then, swiftly adapting to its new location, it swung a purposeful line from the cupboard doorknob to the toaster. Doing what its nature told it, it started to build, spinning industriously, neatly, competently (is there such a thing as an incompetent spider?) --as though it knew the whole meaning and purpose of life.

And on its own terms, perhaps it did. At least, enough for the life it has to live.