I have been stewing over an idea for a very long time. It is an image that has been building over the years. The past few days has brought it to the surface again.

I have to start by saying that images from nature and concepts from science have always been powerful sources of metaphor for me. In addition to being intrinsically wonderful and true all by themselves, they have always contained, at least for me, seeds of insight about creation, human nature, and the divine. Sometimes even the most mundane or ridiculous images…well read for yourself.

A little over 20 years ago, a friend wondered aloud if perhaps gravity was love, or love was gravity. What would that mean? Do heavier objects have more love? Does weight – the pull between two objects – indicate more love? Do atoms have less love than Jupiter and Saturn? It was a fun thought experiment for non-scientists and we took it to extremes. There was something more to it for me, though, just the tiniest idea that love might be the invisible force between things. The thing you can’t see, but which causes everything you see to happen.

Then, more recently – but not too – I was with my son at a summer camp. All week, the boys had been studying space exploration and using those ideas as themes for all their activities. As a volunteer for his group of campers, I headed over to a slip-and-slide and nearly tripped over a basketball labeled SUN. As the boys splashed, I stepped back and saw something about 12 yards away – a stick with a white card on it. When I got closer, I saw a miniscule poppy seed and the word MERCURY. I was in the middle of a scale model of the Solar System.

Another 10 yards away was VENUS, and EARTH 10 yards past that. Each no bigger than the head of a pin. A tiny speck 3 inches from EARTH was the MOON. Sixteen yards from EARTH was MARS, then an asteroid belt.

The scouts were ready for another activity and so we walked through the camp. It was another half hour before I saw a small ball labeled JUPITER. It was more than a football field away from EARTH. As the day progressed, I saw SATURN and URANUS but there was no room for the rest – we were at the edge of the property. URANUS was a third of a mile from the basketball sun and the size of a large marble. This model solar system would not have fit inside a university football stadium.

Standing there in the camp, it was hard to imagine that the basketball more than two football fields away could have an effect on the specks and marbles I had passed. I couldn’t even see the sun at the end point. I began to wonder how things that are so far apart – and some of them nearly invisible – could be related to each other. How could they hang together? And yet they did.

It was at this point in the Solar System stroll that the long-ago conversation about gravity surfaced – the invisible force keeping planets in their orbits, causing tides to rise and fall, and keeping my feet on the ground. For someone like me who believes God is love, the idea of this invisible force is analogous to love, the force that holds everything together…well that seems to be the kind of thing so utterly true it could only be expressed through metaphor. It is the only way I have of grasping the Divine. Or Love.

I don’t know about you, but a lot of the time, I feel like I am as small as the tiny seed representing MERCURY. (Sometimes as small as an asteroid.) There are times I feel as isolated and distant as JUPITER. How can anything I do or say affect those other beings out there? How does any of it matter? In real life, all the space between the planets and the sun looks empty, but it isn’t. Just like the space between people, between nations, between even the electrons in atoms – what looks empty is filled with force. The force of words and actions, the force of compassion, of shared vision, of shared orientation around…a sun? A source of light.

Shared humanity and created-ness is a force of connection. For humans, a lack of love – of gravity – sends us spinning off into darkness. But knowing that you are connected, however invisibly, to those other parts of creation can be enough to help you act on that connection, to honor the pull of gravity and love.