You may have heard that mediæval theologians seriously debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. As with many of these tall stories, common sense should warn you that no serious scholar would debate this - if the answer were to be a rational number, it would depend on how large the pinhead was - drawing pins could accommodate far more angels than embroidery pins, for instance.
In fact, the pinhead is a misquotation, and the original tall story (which comes from Isaac Disraeli, the Victorian politician's father) refers to the point of a needle. But even then, common sense should warn you that needles have only one point, points have no dimension and the question is unanswerable in theological terms.
So we should treat this kind of anecdote with scepticism (as we should treat much of what we are told about past times!). Yet mediæval theologians did seriously debate this kind of question - when angels moved from A to B, did they pass through the space in between, asked Aquinas, for example. ("No," was his answer, by the way!)
"What a waste of time," I hear you say. But in fact, Aquinas was looking at a very important question. How can a God of infinite dimensions, or of no dimensions at all, interact with a world of three dimensions (or four, if you include time)?
We meet this problem on the first day of Creation, in the account at the beginning of Genesis, where God creates light. In our own three-dimensional world, light always proceeds from a source. But what we normally consider to be the source of light, the sun, was not created until the fourth day, and even then only "as a sign", "to separate the light from the darkness".
On the sixth day, God creates humanity, male and female, "in our own image". But how can an infinite God have a three-dimensional image? How tall was this image? What colour eyes, what colour skin? Or is this the wrong question? Does it instead mean that we as people have the qualities of infinity?
If you are paying attention, you will see we are moving closer to the question of the angels and the needle. Angels carry God's messages, and messages also exist in a dimension, time. God is beyond space and time, but space and time are within God's control.
As human beings, we have great difficulty finding words to talk about the infinite. We know that "God's right hand" at which Jesus sits and God's "strong right arm" are simply metaphors of honour and might. Daniel's vision of the Old Man in the Sky is just that - a vision of something that cannot be described.
In Jesus, the infinite and the finite met. "The Word became flesh." Yet after his death, Jesus could "preach to the spirits in prison" (1 Pet 3:19), after his resurrection, he could come and stand inside a locked room (John 20:19), and after his ascension, he is present in the Eucharist - his flesh and his blood.
For us, it is almost a paradox that God can be somewhere, perhaps sitting and eating fish by the Sea of Galilee; or anywhere, perhaps sending an angel as a messenger; or everywhere, ready to be spoken to in prayer or to be localized in bread and wine. Yet it is only a paradox within a world restricted to fixed dimensions - a world where love or imagination do not exist. God is in command of time and space, but these are only one part of God's nature - the nature of the One whom time and space can never contain.
HD