A curious novel encouraged me last fall on this topic: Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan. A fantasy-like novel set in contemporary San Francisco. An obscure guy, once web designer now bookstore clerk, uncovers a secret hidden by a 16th century typeface designer, a secret that Google with all their computing power had failed to find.
Maybe totally unrealistic, but the story touched me. I am convinced that each of us knows things that Google or Apple or Amazon do not know, that the media and politics do not know, and that these things matter to God. I could make a joke of this (altered from a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln): "God must love details. He made so many of them." But I think it is true, not just a joke.
Along these lines, I think of the liturgy C. S. Lewis imagined at the end of Perelandra. A few snippets of it:
Each thing was made for Him. He is the centre. Because we are with Him, each of us is at the centre. ...God knows, God hears, something whispers to me, and I believe it. I feel joy, and think I can be calm, I can listen, I don't have to prove myself.
In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock ...
All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. ... There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre. Blessed be He.
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