Augustine, TARDIS, and Other Things that are Bigger on the Inside

Fans of the BBC series Dr. Who know that the standard response of those who enter into the TARDIS is an amazed exclamation, "It's bigger on the inside!" For those of you unfamiliar with Dr. Who, let me explain: the TARDIS is the Doctor's time-machine, and he travels around through time and space in it. The Doctor himself is the last of a race known as "time-lords," and his TARDIS is in the shape of a small police call box. However, being an advanced race, the time-lords can manipulate physics so that inside the seemingly small TARDIS, a whole labyrinth of corridors and rooms are present. It's bigger on the inside.

The TARDIS analogy popped into my mind early in my reading of Book I of Augustine's Confessions. Meditating on God's mercy, Augustine writes:

The house of my soul is too small for you to come to it. May it be enlarged by you (6).

This is striking, because a few pages earlier, Augustine muses about the presence—indeed the inescapability—of God, saying:

How shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord? Surely when I call on him, I am calling on him to come into me. But what place is there where my God can enter into me? . . . Lord my God, is there any room in me which can contain you? Can heaven and earth, which you have made and in which you have made me, contain you? Without you, whatever exists would not exist. Then can what exists contain you? I also have being. So why do I request you to come to me when, unless you were within me, I would have no being at all? . . . Accordingly, my God, I would have no being, I would not have any existence, unless you were in me. Or rather, I would have no being if I were not in you "of whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things" (Rom 11:36). . . . How can I call on you to come if I am already in you? Or where can you come from so as to be in me? Can I move outside heaven and earth so that my God may come to me from there? For God has said "I fill heaven and earth (Jer 23:24) (3-4).

I'm not sure I follow Augustine, and perhaps that's the point. I think Augustine finds himself at a loss for words to describe the ineffable. But I am struck by the language that he does find to use here. Simultaneously, Augustine says he is too small for God to enter into him, yet he acknowledges that somehow God is already present in him because he has existence. Seems Augustine's must be bigger on the inside too.

And that caused me to think that perhaps we're all bigger on the inside. Bigger not in the sense of "potential" (e.g., John Mayer's "I'm Bigger Than My Body"), but bigger in the sense of "capacity to love." If, in our frail, little bodies, the vastness God does dwell, then how much bigger are we than our frailties might suggest? We are not simply the sum of our parts. And the good news is that our brokennesses do not have the final say in who we are because we are filled with the Spirit with God, "or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God" (1 Cor 6:19). And because we have the Holy Spirit and because we have a community, we can be formed so that we have the very mind of Christ, who:

though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross (Phil 2:6-8).

In such a kenotic mindset, we can embrace humility and love, even to the point of death. Thus, when our bigger insides are filled with the vastness of God's presence and love, we can choose to love those who would harm us instead of harming them in return. Surely that's bigger than any of us could be on our own.