Becoming One

Becoming One
A.Stephen Van Kuiken
Community Congregational U.C.C.
Pullman, WA
August 28, 2022

Ancient Witness: 1 John 4 (selected verses)

The famous scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, once told a story that in Hawaii there is a place there called the Pali, where the trade winds from the north come rushing through a great ridge of mountains.

One day, two policemen were driving up the Pali road when they saw, just beyond the railing that keeps the cars from rolling over, a young man preparing to jump. The police car stopped, and the policeman on the right jumped out to grab the man but caught him just as he jumped, and he was being pulled over when the second cop arrived in time and pulled the two of them back.

Campbell said, do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth?  Everything else in his life had dropped off—his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life—all of his wishes and hope for his lifetime had just disappeared.  He was about to die.

Later, a newspaper reporter asked him, “Why didn’t you let go?  You would have been killed.”  And his reported answer was, “I couldn’t let go.  If I had let that young man go, I couldn’t have lived another day of my life.”  How come?

Campbell’s answer is that such an internal crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and that other are one… Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.  (The Power of Myth, p, 110)

Today, I want to talk about this realization—this spiritual awareness—of our oneness with each other and the world.  Sometimes a crisis will awaken this primal memory within us, if only for an instant.

We are living in an age in which it is becoming obvious that, like it or not, for good or bad, we are connected.   To a virus, there is no such thing as borders, no separation of race, class, gender or religion.  And how we live and consume affects the whole human race and the planet through climate change.  Science seems to be confirming what the mystics and poets have been saying.  Hildegard of Bingen said,

Everything that in the heavens, on earth and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.

The Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, once wrote,

We are already one, and we imagine that we are not.  And what we need to recover is our original unity.

And so, it seems to me, we are gathered around this teaching—to remember and make manifest our original Oneness. As the Buddhist writer, Thich Nhat Hanh said, “We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.” We’re not just individuals living separate lives. We’re part of a bigger, interconnected reality like cells in a body, or like individual waves that are always part of the vast ocean.

There’s a wonderful quote of indigenous spiritual wisdom in a letter from Chief Seattle to President Polk:

This we know: The earth does not belong to the people, people belong to the earth.  All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.  People did not weave the web of life, they are merely a strand in it.  Whatever they do to the web, they do to themselves.

We are interdependent—connected. And what we do to the web of life, we do to ourselves.

William Sloane Coffin puts it like this:

Our sin is only and always that we put asunder what God has joined together.  Human unity is not something we are called on to create, only to recognize and make manifest.

So, one of my favorite ways of thinking of God is as this Oneness. That is, God is not everything, but God is the oneness of everything. We can think of God as the connectedness. As Paul wrote, “everything is held together by the One that existed before anything else.” (Col. 1:17)

Now in the Christian tradition, another image of God is love. “God is love,” says the First Letter of John. And what I want you to see is that Love and Oneness are simply different sides of the same coin. Love is realized oneness.

When we love someone deeply, their pain is our pain, their joy is our joy. We realize that we are one. Sometimes in our lives we experience moments of this with one person or maybe with a few people. And we are willing to sacrifice everything we have for them.

Jesus said that it is possible to see all people this way—even our enemies. And we can love them as we love ourselves because we are really the same thing. Love is realized oneness. As the Sufi mystic Rumi wrote:

When the soul lies down in the grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.

There is this interdependence and oneness—to families, to communities, to ecosystems, to the earth. As Paul wrote, everything else may come to an end, but love—this oneness—endures.

According the ancient myth of human origins, it says that “a man leaves his parents and clings to his wife, and they become one.” (Genesis 2:24) We have come to understand this reality for same-sex couples, as well. They become an expression of the oneness of all things, what Merton called the “hidden wholeness.” And this oneness of the couple can be a reflection of the deep human yearning and longing for oneness.

I’ll end with a story from the mystical Sufi tradition of Islam:

A young man was wandering from village to village, when he chanced upon the house of a young woman with whom he fell madly in love. He knocked on her door and from within the house her voice called out : “Who is it ?”
“It is I”, said the young man.
“Go away”, said the woman, “There is no room enough in this house for two of us”.
Devastated, the young man went away and did much prayer and meditation. Later he returned and knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” came the voice from inside the house.
“It is you”.
The door opened.

Friends, we are already one, and we only imagine that we are not. May we awaken from the illusion of separateness. May we come to realize our oneness with all people and things, that we may love our neighbor and our planet as if they were ourselves. Because they are. Amen.