During the Christmas season, as small children, we often wondered how Santa Claus could manage to deliver his gifts to every child all over the world within one single night only, didn’t we?
We also thought of how he handled to understand the wishes of every single child in the world. If you are fond of science fiction, you even thought of the children on the other planets. Can Santa Claus do his interstellar travel to take care of the extra-terrestrial children?
Some cartoon images show many clone figures of Santa Claus working in the delivery center-like facility around the North Pole. Can we get satisfied with such a twenty-first-century image?
I don’t think there are many clone figures of Santa Claus to manage the overwhelming wishes from the children worldwide, even in the entire universe. Only one Santa Claus (existentially alone) should handle all the gifts. I believe this should be the right image of our Santa Claus. If so, how can he manage all of his seemingly impossible tasks?
Santa Claus is omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience for his gift delivery mission. He can do anything, present everywhere, and know everything to deliver his gifts to the children all over the entire universe. At least, that should be the proper image of Santa Claus.
How about us, grown-ups? We no longer believe in Santa Claus naively. But we respect the children’s belief in him. It is a sense of awe with anyone who believes in anything beyond one’s comprehension. Consciously or unconsciously, we all adults are aware of our inherent ignorance in the universe. In this regard, we adults are not so different from the naive children who believe in Santa Claus. That doesn’t mean that we are as superstitious as children’s irrational minds. Unlike toddlers (and unlike premodern, tribal sorceries and beliefs), we are no longer afraid of darkness irrationally. From our grown-up eyes, Santa Claus is no longer different from other cartoon characters kids love.
Nevertheless, our inherent ignorance is not different yet from these infant mentalities. We are all ignorant about the knowledge beyond our comprehension of the physical spacetime universe.
When we pray, we don’t imagine how many clones of God are taking care of our wishes and problems in the call center-like facility to handle all of them for 24 hours and 365 days. Likewise, when we meditate on Emptiness, we don’t think of the substantial physical object in the data center-like facility to keep the servers active.
Is God Jesus called his father around two thousand years ago younger than the God we pray for today? I don’t think so. He is ageless and timeless. Suppose you are on an unknown planet twenty light years away from the earth. Do you think God (in our civilizations) needs twenty years to get your prayer message? I don’t think so. He is everywhere simultaneously.
Moreover, as the mystic devotions often tell us, God knows what we pray for before we even start praying. He is closer to us than we are to ourselves.
Like we thought of Santa Claus in our childhood days, God is indeed omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. Moreover, He is beyond the spacetime physical universe. He is spaceless and timeless. That’s why often we use a signifier like Emptiness. If He is everywhere simultaneously, that implies no-where and now-here. His location doesn’t matter anymore. If He is all times, even beyond the age of the universe, His available time doesn’t matter anymore.
Spacetime is an illusion from God’s eye. It is our illusion that we struggle with and suffer from during our temporary life period and location. We can be available only in a single point of the possibility of a particular space and time. That is our life on earth. In heaven, however, like the block universe, even beyond it, all possibilities are as they are without “possibilities” but with actualities.
For with God nothing shall be impossible.
Luke 1:37
Image by Albrecht Fietz
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