The really, really big setting for our existence—the outermost shell as it were—is a place devoid of meaning: a random, indifferent maelstrom where Paradox reigns supreme. The really, really tiny building blocks of existence are similarly beyond purpose and blend into a veil of pure Paradox.

True to their nature, these two bounds for our being defy the scrutiny of analysis: the disputant can ever pose a coherent alternative, only for Paradox to leapfrog it. If God is omnipotent, he can create a place beyond his reach.

But between that grandest setting and the smallest there exist pockets of apparent meaning that come and go. These are the places where the currents gather for a time and seem to be going in some direction. In the grand scheme, there is no meaning to that direction; but if one is swept up in these currents, direction and purpose seem manifest.

Where these waters gather together into rivers bent on good and noble purpose, that is where I recognize a holy or sacred place. And I have found a religious home that seems to share this definition: Unitarian Universalism.

Granted it is wrong to limit the Unitarian Universalist movement to any one definitive theological position; however in my experience, the broad majority of members seem to share some form of a relativist theology wherein there is a bounded sacred space surrounded by a wider realm of something distinctly less certain and/or less sacred—they may call the latter by many names: “unknowability”, a Godless hostile realm, or simply a place that doesn’t matter very much to our daily lives.

How large is the sacred space? How small is it? The answers are legion. But I have embraced the UU church as a community bent on carving such a sacred space for itself: the congregation seems to be that space most fundamentally defined—a place that confidently and supportively holds back the darkness, whether it seeps up from an abyss within or encroaches from beyond our borders.

And here is where my own sensibilities choose to define the sacred space: our entire observable Universe lies within it, from the grandest to the tiniest scales! I choose thusly because the laws and constants of physics that govern our reality are exquisitely tuned and balanced out of an infinity of possibilities, so that the “choice” seems inspired or directed from beyond its borders. Who or what chose them? It must have been accomplished as a gathering of currents on some truly magnificent scale beyond the veil of the Big Bang. A message or a design somehow survived the birth of our Universe. Like a living thing, the Universe was born directed by some pre-existing “DNA”. And peering backward in “time” from that birth the imagination soars—there are few constraints.

Also like all living things, some day our Universe will die: whether through a collapse or a flying apart, or through the simple consumption of all the hydrogen and helium fuel within it. But will its “message” die with it? Or will some Word of it transcend? Does the “DNA” reproduce itself? Are we, as prayer-capable conscious seeking beings—beings that were designed into the message, and beings therein granted the gift of choice—are we to be party to that transcendence? Are we, as shapers of the currents for a time, co-designers of the “DNA” that will be passed to the next Cycle?