You may remember the "Miss Peach" cartoon by Mell Lazarus about a teacher's observations of her small but precocious students. Two of them are talking. One says: "Hi, Shirley! Are you still into that metaphysical stuff?" To which Shirley replies: "No. I used to be one with the universe, but now we've decided to go our separate ways."[1]
That cartoon came to mind as I contemplated the words of Don Elder Camara, the Brazilian Roman Catholic Archbishop - words that have intrigued me since I first read them: "In a fabulous necklace I had to admire the anonymous string by which the whole thing was held together." What is that necklace? What is the whole thing? Humanity? The earth? The church? And the anonymous string - what of that? Nature? Cosmos? God?
The French poet Gerard de Nerval, in "Lines in Gold" reminds us of our connection with all that is. He begins with the words of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, "Why not! Everything feels!"
"Man, do you think yours is the only soul?
Look around you. Everything that you see
Quivers with being. Though your thoughts are free,
One thing you do not think about, the whole.
"Beasts have a mind. Respect it. Flowers too.
Look at one. Nature brought forth each petal.
There is a mystery that sleeps in metal.
'Everything feels!' and has power over you.
"Be careful. The blind wall is spying on us.
All matter is connected to a word . . .
Do not make it serve some unholy purpose.
"A god in darkness often walks obscured.
As eyelids of a new-born infant open
A spirit wakes and gazes in stone."
Connection. Connectedness. How are things connected? How are we connected? From time to time we speak of that "interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part" - from our Unitarian Universalist covenant. I like the image of the web, and the strings which comprise that web, as a symbol of connectedness.
The web of existence is not a new image. There is an ancient myth of how Spider Woman created the world. Long before there was a universe, Spider Woman went wandering up and down, looking for something. She was lonely and so she went up on a high mountain and sat down to think. Suddenly she had an idea. Spider Woman was the Weaver. And so she set up her loom on top of the mountain, took up her shuttle and began to weave.
As she wove, something amazing happened. Every time one thread crossed another, a star appeared, and before long she had woven thousands and thousands of stars into her weaving, and each one was tied to every other one in the web. Then she stopped and looked at it. It shone and sparkled and was beautiful, but it was not quite what she wanted, so she decided that she would do a little more with this web of stars.
She chose one star that happened to have some planets circling around it. And she chose one of those planets that had bright blue oceans and sparkling white clouds, and set up her loom again, right there on that planet. And she began to weave again.
This time as she wove, whenever one thread crossed another, a living thing appeared. She wove roses and pansies and carnations into this world. She wove fruit trees and nut trees and great redwoods. She wove all manner of birds and fish and insects into her web. She wove deer and buffalo and coyotes into it and all of the animals. And every one of these living things was connected to each other thing in her weaving. Then she stopped weaving to look at it. It was very beautiful and very full. Yet it was still not finished. There was still something missing, so she started to weave yet a third time.
This time the crossing threads created human beings, men and women and children. And each human being that she wove into her Great Web was connected to every other thing, to the other animals, to the plants and trees and flowers, to the mountains and seas and deserts, even to the distant stars. Every human being - and indeed everything that Spider Woman wove into her Great Web - is connected to every other thing. Spider Woman must still be weaving.
This interconnectedness of things appears not only in myth, but in science as well. Take the increasing interest in Superstring theory by theoretical physicists. Albert Einstein spent a lifetime in search of what is called a "unified field theory," one concept that would explain the ultimate nature of reality. He never found it. Now some scientists have suggested that reality is composed of one-dimensional "string-like" objects rather than dimensionless points in space-time. The strings vibrate, and each different mode of vibration corresponds to a different particle.
These strings are part of what is called - one cannot help think of the theological connotations - "the strong force" and is in ten dimensions instead of the usual three. I don't pretend to understand even the rudiments of superstring theory but I am intrigued at the convergence of myth and science in this idea that everything connects. We are part of one web of reality.[2] That gives fresh meaning to the word "unitarian" - there is a cosmic unity of which we are a part.
That idea that everything is connected to everything else was put poetically by the 19th century English poet Frances Thompson: "Thou can'st not pluck a flower without the trembling of a star."
Even time can be understood as part of a string. It is like a necklace of beads - the beads are moments or events, the inner thread of the necklace, the unimaginable continuum, is time itself.[3] We live, then, somewhere in the necklace held together by an anonymous string that is space and time. What is this anonymous string? We may give it many names. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that "(God) is the binding element in the world."[4]
A few years ago the American poet Louis Simpson traveled to Australia as writer-in-residence at a college in sheep and cattle raising country. He wrote a poem about what happened there. At night he would go outside at night and, with the aid of a map, try to find the positions of the southern constellations. One day Simpson was invited by a friend to travel with him and his girlfriend to a party. They were to stay the night. The poem continues:
"We arrived. I was introduced,
And they made up a bed for me
on the porch at the back.
Then the party began to arrive:
Australians, lean and athletic.
They put a tape on the stereo,
turned it up full blast,
and danced or stood and shouted
to each other above the noise.
"I danced with two or three women and tried shouting. Then I went
and sat on the bed on the porch.
There was nowhere to go, no door
I could close to shut out the noise.
"So I went for a walk
in the dark, away from the sound.
There were gum trees, wind rustling
the leaves. Or was it snakes?
"There are several venomous kinds.
The taipan. There's a story
about a child who was sitting
on a log and fell backward
onto a taipan. It struck him
twenty-three times.
"There's the tiger snake and the brown.
When they have finished telling you
about snakes, they start on spiders.
You don't need these - you have only to walk
into the bush. There are stories
about campers who did, and were lost
and never seen again.
"All this was on my mind.
I stepped carefully, keeping the lights
of the house behind me in sight.
And when I saw a clearing
in the trees, I walked to it.
"I stood in the middle of the clearing
looking at the sky. It was glittering
with unknown constellations.
Everything I had ever known
seemed to have disappeared.
"And who was I, standing there
in the middle of Australia
at night? I had ceased to exist.
There was only whatever it was
that was looking at the sky
and listening to the wind.
"After a while I broke away
and went back to the light and the party.
A month later I left Australia.
But ever since, to this day,
there has been a place in my mind,
a clearing in the shadows,
and above it, stars and constellations
so bright and thick they seem to rustle.
And beyond them . . . infinite space,
eternity, you name it.
"There's nothing that stands between me
and it, whatever it is."[5]
Whatever it is. Space! Time! Nature! Cosmos! God! Ralph Waldo Emerson rhetorically asked: "Why should we not have an original relation to the universe? . . . . As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins." Emerson said he became "a transparent eyeball. . . the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."[6]
The late Deane Starr, a ministerial colleague once described his experience of The Great Living System, feeling intensely part of an Ultimate Environment. On a trip west he wanted to pay homage to the General Sherman Tree in the Sequoia National Forest in the High Sierra. The tree is at least 2,500 years old, perhaps the oldest living organism on the earth. "Two thousand, five hundred years! It boggles the mind!" exclaimed Starr. "Five hundred years before the time of Jesus! Two thousand years before the time of Columbus! Two thousand, four hundred and twenty-three years before the time of Deane Starr!"
He sat in awe in the presence of the tree bathing himself in its grandeur. It is 272 feet tall, about 25 feet in girth at the base. "The trunk is scarred and blackened, the brands of countless forest fires that it has endured and survived. It is almost perpendicular to the earth, and all the way to the top, it is a mass of scars. Great branches, easily four feet in diameter, have been broken off, leaving jagged and painful edges, stumps of limbs without prostheses. Here and there as the tree lifts to the sky, tender new shoots of branches and leaves, thirsting, and throbbing with green life, cling to the giant trunk, while straining toward the light."
"I am in communion with this tree. It does not speak English, and I do not speak Sequoia. But no matter. Our communion is not a communion of common language, nor of common experience, nor of common consciousness. It is much deeper than these. It is a communion of common being, of common participation in Life, of the infusion of eternal energy into eternal matter, an infusion that has formed two separate discrete organisms which are still, in their essences, one. The tree and I are not only infused with this common Life: we are this common Life, the Life that was, and is. and is to be, world without end!"[7]
Herman Melville, the Unitarian novelist, wrote about the anonymous string, not as our connection to God but to our fellow human beings: "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us. . . . And among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects. On a daily basis, we affect the web of all existence, just as we are affected by it."[8]
I couldn't help think of that at our Union Thanksgiving Service Thursday across the street at Temple Beth El. A Muslim gave the call to prayer in a rising and falling voice that pierced the ear - and yes, perhaps the heart. Lively Jewish chants from the cantor were juxtaposed around readings from the Jewish prayer book - a rather incredible sight when you stop to think of the tensions in our community because of what is happening in the Middle East. And the, a Unitarian Universalist sermon, so different from what had gone before, yet somehow testifying to that anonymous thread that holds together all people despite their differences of religion and politics. We are all more human than otherwise.
We are a community of memory and hope. That anonymous string that binds us together stretches back in time to the early heretics - Akhenaten and Socrates, Isaiah and Jesus - through the heresies of Arius and John Hus - through the unorthodoxy of Benjamin Rush and Margaret Fuller - through the wisdom and compassion of Jane Addams and Susan B. Anthony - at last resting in our timid hearts.
There is a tug not only from our past, but from a time to come. For us history is a human project whose outcome is not guaranteed by any cosmic life guards. It is what we will make of it - a thought to sober the soul. Our belief that history is radically open-ended and subject to human control likewise rests in our trembling hands. We are part of the anonymous string of history.
We are held together by an invisible link with the earth on which we live and move and have our being.
We are part of a mystic oneness with all who have gone before, of prophets and poets, fathers and mothers, saints and sages.
We are members, one of another, in religious community, sharing our joys and sorrows, victories and defeats.
We are citizens of humanity, nestled together to strive for the common good.
We are actors on the stage of history, bound to one another by a common destiny of weal and woe.
We are sparks of divinity, glowing in a cosmos whose origin and destiny we do not know, but whose mystery we celebrate.
We rejoice in that which binds us to one another, to the world of nature, to the cosmic mysteries.
Behold the beauty of the necklace, no bead like any other
Yet each part of the pattern.
And behold the anonymous string no longer without name -
We call it faith;
We call it hope;
We call it love.
Kenneth Boulding puts it in unsurpassed poetry.
"Can I, imprisoned, body-bound, touch
The starry robe of God, and from my soul,
My tiny Part, reach forth to his great Whole,
And spread my Little to the infinite Much,
When Truth forever slips from out my clutch,
And what I take indeed, I do but dole
In cupfuls from a rimless ocean-bowl
That holds a million million such?
And yet, some Thing that moves among the stars,
And holds the cosmos in a web of law,
Moves too in me: a hunger, a quick thaw
Of soul that liquefies the ancient bars,
As I, a member of creation, sing
The burning oneness binding everything."
return to main page