The Heretic Who Looked Up

It’s weird. I call myself an atheist, but it’s not the belief in God that bothers me. It’s the size of God people keep trying to hand me. The tiny, fragile, human-shaped thing they say created the universe but still needs you to bow just right, speak just right, follow the right rules, and read the right book or else you’re “lost.”

If there is a God — if there’s anything divine at all — it sure as hell isn’t small. It sure as hell isn’t needy. And it sure as hell isn’t hiding inside a box labeled “approved by committee.”

And I’m not the only one to ever feel this way.

Hundreds of years ago there was a monk — *Giordano Bruno.* A friar. A believer. A man of God. He did everything right, said all the prayers, followed all the rules… until he started doing the one thing religion has always been terrified of:

He looked up.

He stared at the night sky long enough to realize the universe didn’t care about our tiny ideas of heaven. He saw stars stretching endlessly, worlds beyond count, space so vast it made religion’s God look like a flickering candle beside a dying sun.

Then he had a dream — or a vision, depending on who you ask. He saw God, but not the God they told him about. Not the petty ruler with a throne and a list of who’s in and who’s out. He saw a God too big for doctrine. A God who didn’t need temples or priests or middle-men. A God woven into the fabric of the cosmos — infinite, wild, uncontainable.

And his faith didn’t shatter.

It exploded outward.

He came back with a bigger God — one filled with more love, more beauty, more power than any church could hold. He thought people would celebrate that. He thought he was bringing them a gift — a wider horizon, a deeper love, a God that didn’t need defending because the universe itself was the proof.

You already know what happened.

Ridicule first.

Then fear.

Then torture.

Then the stake.

They called him a heretic, but the truth is simpler:

his mind expanded faster than their ignorance could tolerate.

And that’s the exact contradiction we still live in today.

We’re taught that God is everywhere — in the trees, the oceans, the stars, the beating of a heart. Every religion says it: Christians, Muslims, Jews, all of them. “God is in everything,” they tell us.

But then they add the fine print.

To talk to this God-who-is-everywhere, you need permission.

You need rules.

You need the right building.

The right text.

The right holy man to translate.

You need to whisper when rivers roar and icebergs crack and stars explode across galaxies.

You need to speak softly to a universe that speaks in supernovas.

What kind of God is that?

A God that needs microphones and intermediaries?

A God that can create the cosmos but can’t hear you unless you kneel on the right carpet facing the right direction at the right time of day?

No.

That’s not God.

That’s management.

That’s people trying to shrink the infinite into something they can rent out by the hour.

If God is real — if the divine exists anywhere in this unbelievable universe — then it hears you without permission. It moves through you without a middle-manager. It doesn’t care about your posture or your vocabulary.

It hears you in your breath.

In your fear.

In your joy.

In your anger.

In the way you treat people who can’t give you anything in return.

If God is love, then maybe I know more about God than the people who mutter the same memorized prayers every week. Because I feel love bigger than rules. I give it downwards and sideways, the way it’s supposed to flow. To my students. My family. Strangers. People I don’t owe anything to.

I don’t need a book to tell me how love works.

I feel it in my chest.

I see it in other people.

I act it out every day.

If that’s not God, then what the hell is?

I don’t reject God.

I reject custody.

I reject the idea that the infinite needs gatekeepers.

I reject the idea that the universe requires permission slips.

I reject any version of God that is smaller than the stars.

So if that makes me a heretic, fine.

The heretics were always the ones who looked up

and refused to bow to anything smaller than the sky.