The Thinking Reed of Clermont

On the night of November 23, 1654, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal had an encounter with God so overwhelming that he sewed a written record of it into the lining of his coat and carried it against his chest for the rest of his life. The note began simply: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars."

Pascal had spent years mapping the geometry of the cosmos, calculating atmospheric pressure on the peak of Puy de Dome near his hometown of Clermont, measuring forces that could crush a man like an insect. He understood, perhaps better than anyone in seventeenth-century France, how vast the universe was and how fragile human beings were within it. He famously wrote that a human is only "a reed, the weakest thing in nature." A single vapor, a drop of water, is enough to kill him.

But then Pascal added the line that echoes the psalmist across three thousand years: "But he is a thinking reed." The universe may crush a man, yet the man remains nobler than what kills him, because the man knows — and the universe knows nothing.

This is the mystery that stopped David in his tracks beneath the Judean sky. The God who flung the stars into their courses stooped down to crown one fragile species with glory and honor. The Almighty, who needs nothing, chose to be mindful of us.