As I write, I am spending my first week of the new year in a way I wish everyone could: surrounded by dear friends and learning amazing and inspiring stuff in a gorgeous environment. Nice, huh?
It’s a particularly great respite in the midst of what feels like an insane world. The political and cultural environment feels chaotic, devolving into a world further and further from the kin-dom of God and closer and closer to us-vs.-them, fear-based isolationism. I have little room to judge as I, too, am scared and would prefer to hunker down with like-minded folks on a nice little island somewhere.
But I’m pretty sure Jesus doesn’t call us to isolationism. Yes, it’s important to spend some time in those islands, recharging one’s batteries, and Jesus was known to run off into the mountains for some rest. But mostly, he bravely ventured into communities that weren’t likely to be “his people,” and through his risky, radical notions of love, widened the net of who “his people” were.
As an introvert who hates conflict and who doesn’t feel particularly brave, this is a daunting call. It requires a lot of risk I don’t always feel prepared to take.
I’ve been finding some encouragement in my class readings about — of all things – physics. I am only just beginning to understand the science, but it already contains amazing lessons for cowardly folk. For instance, scientists have proven that electrons that have been “paired” (I’m not sure fully what that means, but some kind of relationship has been established) and then removed far from each other, somehow maintain a relationship with one another. When one is spins in a certain direction, the other, though very far away, will immediately spin in the opposite direction. We have no idea how, but they are somehow connected, somehow communicating with one another. It’s called “non-local causality,” and it suggests that there is, underneath all of what we know, some “unbroken whole,” an “invisible connectedness.”[i]
On some level we don’t yet grasp, we all are connected. This means that there is some possibility of reconciliation, even among the most separated of people, if we dig deeply enough within. People who have been long divided are still part of the same fabric on some intrinsic but invisible plane.
Other experiments show that this connectedness means that seemingly unrelated actions in one location can inspire actions in another location, and that multiple similar actions in many locations can inspire great change. This is excellent news for cowardly people! If I can do a small action of love here, and someone else a small action there, and on and on, it might actually change something. What might feel isolated or useless or powerless might actually be part of a cosmic wave of love that I can’t see!
This is giving me hope in this new year; small things can contribute to great results whether I can see the connections or not. Every smile I offer, every prayer I pray, every call I make to a politician, every hug, every laugh, every hopeful sentence… they all add to the well-being of the world’s fabric. And knowing this adds to my own well-being!
Jesus reminds us that to love God is to love both neighbor and self; this can be done in large and small ways. And now science assures us that it actually makes a difference to love!
So happy New Year, friends. Let’s love our way into this new space and time.
With a hopeful smile,
Rev. Rachel
[i] My primary source for this is a book on physics and leadership, called Leadership and the New Science by Margaret J. Wheatley, ©2006
Leave a Reply