The Fist That Holds the Sea and the Word That Caught the Sky

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The Sky That Would Not Stop Running

In the first hour the heavens went out like a breath and did not come back. They stretched. They kept stretching. One firmament pulled away from the next until five hundred years of travel lay between them, and still the far edge raced outward into the dark, hunting for a wall that was not there. Nothing in the making of the world could catch it. Distance answered only to more distance.

Then a voice went out across the widening dark. One word. God said, "Enough." The heavens heard it and stopped where they stood. Had that word stayed unspoken, the sky would be ballooning still, wider every hour, past any number a mouth could count. Two words had built the frame of everything. One to open it. One to shut it.

The Rider Asleep Inside a Tent of Fire

Inside that frame a rider woke each dawn in the east. The sun came forth crowned like a bridegroom stepping from his chamber, glad as a warrior to run his road, and it never rode naked across the sky. God had pitched a tent for it, a sheath against the heat of its own face. Before the sun set out, God led it first through a pool of water and cooled the fire in its cheeks, so that the thing meant to warm the world would not walk out and burn the world instead.

In summer its face blazed down. In winter the same face turned to ice, and only the fire buried in its heart kept the cold from killing every green thing under it. All day it crossed the vault behind its curtain. At dusk, at the western rim, it bowed low toward the One who lit it and said, "Master of the universe, I have done everything You asked." Then it went down, and the tent went down with it.

There will come a day when the upper firmament rolls back like a scroll and God lifts the tent off the sun for good. On that day nothing will stand between its bare face and the earth. For those who kept faith, God will raise a second tent, a shelter of shade against the naked heat, and gather them under it while the sun burns unhidden overhead.

The Fist That Closed Around Every Sea

The hand that pitched the tent was larger than the tent, larger than the frame, larger than the running sky it had caught. When that hand closed, all the water of the world lay in its hollow. Every sea. Every river feeding every sea. The whole weight of the deep sat cupped in a single fist and did not spill. And a fist is only part of a hand. From the size of the fist the size of the arm could be guessed, and from the arm the shoulder, on and on past any place a mind could follow.

One finger of that hand went out and measured the dust of the dry earth, grain by grain, the way a merchant levels a cup with the edge of one finger. If a finger could mete out every particle of soil, the rest lay beyond guessing. High above it all stood the throne of glory, and the heavens themselves, wide as they were, running as far as they had run before the word caught them, could not stretch far enough to hold that throne. The seat was greater than the room built for it.

The Warrior Wearing the World Like Armor

So where does such a One sit? A rider goes out to war on a great horse, and his armor and his cloak hang down over the animal on every side and cover it. A quick glance says the horse carries the man. A longer look tells the truth. The horse is only the thing beneath the rider. The rider does not belong to the horse. He hangs his whole weight and gear upon it and stays himself, and the horse holds only what it is given to hold.

The world is that horse. God is that rider. This is why one of His names is not a name at all but a place. Makom, the Place of the world. The world does not contain Him the way a room contains a lamp. He contains the world the way a fist contains the sea. Long ago it was sung, "Lord, You have been our dwelling place in every generation," and the singers meant it plainly, that the generations live inside Him and He inside nothing at all. The oceans sit in the hollow of the hand. The sky sits inside the word that stopped it. The throne sits above the heavens that cannot reach it. And all of it, sun and tent and pool and running firmament and cupped sea, sits inside the One that nothing at all sits outside of.

At the far western edge the sun finished its bow and dropped below the world. Behind it the sky held exactly where it had been told to hold, not one span wider, because the word still stood over it. And the hand that could have closed around the whole of it stayed open, holding, letting the small warmed world go on turning inside its grip.