Humility is one option here – the urge to kneel, or to sit very quietly, conscious of your microscopic brevity in relation to what is visiting you. Another option is resentment, at this impervious immortal thing that is immune to our mortality. (And doesn’t even exist, the bastard.) But humiliation – the sensation of being forcibly reduced or pressed down by power – doesn’t seem to come into it. It doesn’t seem to be in the nature of the presence you’re feeling that it should make you feel crushed or abject. It has no designs on your dignity, perhaps because of the way in which the power of the God of everything differs from all the other manifestations of power you’ll ever meet. This power is not exercised from the top of any hierarchy. It does not radiate from any local point within the universe at all. It works entirely through presence. Kings and caliphs, emperors and popes, televangelists and household bullies have all wanted to claim that their authority is a licensed copy of its universal reach, but their claim must always be incomplete at best. In the end, their power and His are unlike. Their power is rivalrous, in the economic sense. It is big because others’ power is small. It needs to be extracted from the submission of other apes like themselves. But His power needs nothing, competes with nothing, compels nothing, exists at nothing’s expense. You could no more be humiliated by Him (Her, It) than you could by the height of the Himalayas or the depth of the Atlantic or the number of oxygen atoms in the air. It may make sense to compare Him to a king, if a king is your best local image of unparalleled majesty, but even if He is like a king, kings are not like Him. He is more than any king. He is as common as the air. He is the ordinary ground. And yet a presence. And yet a person.