“Awesome!” So say the young, and so often that the adults in the room join in. I like to add, “Totally,” which sometimes elicits a smile. Rarely if ever, though, are we really in awe of the supposedly awesome. But, truth be told, we rarely take to be a wonder that which prompts us to say “wonderful.” And why even mention that fellow who says “huge” to get our attention?

All of which takes us, by way of easy transition, to Greenland. With regard to wonder, it’s the real thing. The world’s largest island measures 836,330 square miles. Too big to buy, right? Let’s hope it’s not too big to steal. Talk about getting it, by hook or by crook, is intensifying interest in this autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. Nuuk, its capital, is undergoing a building boom. So many of the Inuit people from small villages are flocking there that homelessness is now a problem. Incredible? Over-urbanization is a pattern that even the cold doesn’t freeze.

Perhaps, though, a theological foray gives us more insight into Greenland than its rising geopolitical star. How so? “Greenland” designates, in political fashion, a chunk of a planet in a solar system within a universe that God created and sustains in existence. That Greenland is intelligible to us, that we can study it from a thousand vantage points, is a consequence of its being creatively thought by the Creator.

We need to think, as best we can, about the Creator’s creative thought. Here are a few starting points. The Creator is One with this creative thought. The Creator is independent of Creation. Unlike Creation, which is limited, the Creator is infinite. It’s this third point that I’d like to develop a bit.

That God our Creator is infinite, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, reflects His “immensity.” Never mind “huge.” The huge is limited; God’s immensity is not. God is everywhere and simultaneously so. Note that God is wholly God everywhere. It’s not a question of God having outposts everywhere, like trading posts in the Arctic. Nor is it a question of God being “spread out” over Creation, like plastic wrap over a platform of planets.

Well, then, how is it that God is everywhere? Thomas identifies two ways that God is everywhere. First, God is omnipresent in things as the cause of their being and of all their operations. Second, as with things, so also with places like Greenland—and, gentle reader, wherever you are, wherever you’ve been, and wherever you will go. Thus Thomas writes, “By the very fact that He gives being to the things that fill every place, He Himself fills every place” (ST I, q. 8, a. 3). Thomas adds an intriguing analogy: “As the soul is whole in every part of the body, so is God whole in all things and in each one” (ST I, q. 8, a. 3, ad 3).

Could this really be? Here’s a test case. In the Apostles’ Creed we say that after death Christ “descended into Hell.” Or, depending on the translation, “went down to the dead.” And why? To save the souls of those who have not heard the Gospel. Indeed, St. Peter writes “For this is why the Gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God” (1 Peter 4:6). But doesn’t this language suggest what seems obvious: God is not in Hell. Or, wait, does it?

Thomas makes a careful distinction. Insofar as anything exists, it is good. Is it good that there is a hell with its demons? Thomas writes, “In the demons there is their nature which is from God, and also the deformity of sin which is not from Him” (ST I, q. 8, a.1). Of course, it was to bring the Good News not to demons but to those who had not heard it that Jesus, in His human nature, “went down to the dead.”

A last consideration for this theological foray: Pantheists, we might suppose, want a God that is close at hand. But they domesticate their God by identifying the Divine with everything that is. Such a God, however, is reduced to immanence and exiled from transcendence. Such a God is no God but rather an artefact of a limited and limiting human desire. Our God, however, made us a people when we were no people; He abides with us in the immensity of His presence. Awesome, and absolutely so.