 Spiritual: February 28, 2007 Issue [#1577] |
  Spiritual
This week: Edited by: SophyBells  
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Hi, I'm SophyBells -- your Spiritual Newsletter Editor this week.
The Rev. Scotty McLennan, author of the book Finding Your Religion, compares humanity's innate need for spiritual searching to climbing a mountain. In his view, we are all endeavoring to climb the same figurative mountain as we seek the divine, we just take different paths to get there. In other words, "one God, many paths."
I honor whatever path or paths you have chosen to climb the mountain in your quest for the Sacred.  |
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Rabbi Terry Bookman tells a parable about a man in a boat out at sea who began to drill a hole under his seat. When fellow passengers grew alarmed and asked him what he was doing, he answered: “What do you care? I’m not drilling under your seat; I’m drilling under my own seat. So what’s it to you!?”
Whether we realize it or not, we are all connected to each other. We are connected to all of the residents of our local community as well as everyone around the world, to giant redwood trees and blue herons, to microscopic atoms and blue whales, to every part of creation. And because of that connection with the rest of the cosmos, everything we say and do has an impact on everything else, because ultimately we are all in the same boat.
The impact we have on others can be positive, negative, or neutral. Positively we can see that connection whenever a friend is suffering and we respond in compassionate and caring ways. When a plane crashed in a small town in Iowa in 1989, people lined the street for blocks to donate blood. When hurricanes ravaged the gulf coast during the summer of 2005, people from all over the world offered to help.
Local and global tragedies bring us together in remarkable ways, and remind us very powerfully of how connected we are to each other. But we can also impact the rest of creation in positive ways during the course of a regular day. When we recycle our bottles and cans, when we smile at a stranger, when we lower our speed while driving where children are playing – all of these seemingly trivial acts have an impact on the rest of creation.
Our actions can have a negative impact as well. When we drive aggressively because we are angry about something, we might cause an accident. When we yell and call someone names, we harm their soul. When a corporation dumps waste into a nearby river, the people downstream are at risk. Even seemingly neutral actions have consequences, though in most cases we won’t know what they may be. The parking place we take at the mall, the brand of soda we buy at the store – it all has an effect of some sort. Because separateness is an illusion; everything is interrelated, in time, space, and our very being.
Both religion and science reveal this truth. From the world of religion, 1 Corinthians 12 offers Paul’s understanding of our connectedness as being part of one body, through Christ, needing all of the other parts. The Buddhist and Hindu notion of Indra's Net also provides an allegory of this interdependent organization, as well as the "web of life" from pagan and Native American traditions. And from the world of science we have, among other things, the “butterfly effect,” which refers to the notion that even something as seemingly insignificant as the flapping of a butterfly's wings can create tiny changes in the atmosphere that might, thousands of miles and a few years away, spawn a tornado.
I think we need to be intentionally conscious of our connectedness more often than we are, to be aware of what we are putting out in the universe and how it may effect others. Modern humanity tends to compartmentalize our experiences, putting them into neat little boxes instead of seeing them as parts of a whole. The history of our world is plagued by dueling dualisms: mind vs. body, humans vs. nature, science vs. religion, male vs. female, Republican vs. Democrat. Paying attention to our connections instead of our differences can help erase such unnecessary distinctions and remind us that we are all part of the same whole.
In his book Invisible Lines of Connection, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner puts it best. “The more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.”
Until next time,
SophyBells |
Here are a few items I have enjoyed reading - some relate to the spiritual theme of "interconnectedness," and some do not. Or maybe they do. 
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| Since this is my first Spiritual Newsletter, there are no questions for me to answer. However, I'll be doing more Spiritual Newsletters in the next few months, so feel free to post questions or comments in the meantime, which I'll respond to in my next edition. |
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