When I walk on a beach, especially an Australian beach, I sometimes find myself thinking, ‘Gee there’s an awful lot of sand on this little beach – in fact there’s so many sand particles on this gorgeous little beach, I’d never be able to count up the number of sand crystals in just one cubic metre even if I devoted a whole week to the task, let alone the whole beach headland to headland!.

A couple of years ago I heard something that a cosmologist said about beaches that staggered me. He said that ‘not so long ago, cosmologists like him had thought that there were in the universe hundreds of thousands of galaxies’ – shocking enough! But then he went on to say, ‘but recently with the new star-gazing technologies that had become available they were realising that their original estimates were hopelessly conservative, and that in all probability, there were as many galaxies in the universe as there were sand particles on all the beaches of our planet!’ I don’t think anything that I have heard in my life has so awed me, so utterly undone me.

For someone like me who has the audacity to believe in a loving supreme being, this new understanding flooded my reeling soul with what Rudolf Otto called ‘mysterium tremendum’, making me realise just how hopelessly inadequate my ideas about God were – if there is a God then this God is so unimaginably vast and mysterious that one can only bow one's head in silence.

On Tuesday, Americans went to the polls to elect their new president. A whole Jimmy Swaggert load of fundamentalist preachers from conservative churches in the US have been advising their congregations that the only Christian way to vote in the upcoming presidential election is to vote Republican - that the God of an infinite number of stupendously gigantic galaxies has told them to tell the people of America that a vote for John Kerry would be a vote for the devil.

It’s understandable to say such things if your God is small and vicious and tribal, but when your God is the one who proclaims through his son, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God” and “Love your enemies, pray for those that persecute you”, which are the sorts of thing you’d expect a vast and mysterious god to say, it is nothing short of heretical.