We are all one

by Josie Smith.

I never quite believed the old illustration about the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil, thus starting a process which eventually leads to a tornado in Texas.    My mind couldn’t stretch enough to encompass the magnitude and nature of the idea.     And yet I try to live my life according to another idea, that of God, whose magnitude and nature has been stretching my mind for a very long time.  

I first encountered the challenge of non-separability in an article in the ‘face to faith’ bit of the Guardian on December 4th 2004 by Mike Purton, which made sense to me, though quantum physics / mechanics were way outside my scope.   I have kept the article, and have often read it again over the years.   Mike Purton, a writer, musician, music producer and one time BBC television producer, talks about what physicists call entanglement – the state of two or more particles which once they have interacted with each other will always be connected, whatever the subsequent distance between them.    He prefers the term ‘non-separability’ – a significant difference.     If all matter emerged from the Big Bang, at a fundamental level the particles it consists of can never be separated.

Purton goes on to suggest that what physicists now believe – and it was the hot topic in physics in the 1980s and had been suspected by scientists and philosophers for a long time – is possibly the biggest revelation of that century for theologians too.    ‘It seems to be too immense a concept, too remote from our everyday lives – until we view it from the spiritual perspective.’

It makes sense, doesn’t it?     I have never quite accepted that God, who is manifestly active in so many of the lives of people I know can be ‘the same yesterday, today and forever’ unless being ‘the same’ implies that dynamism which is energy and expansion and development and activity and movement.       It is inconceivable to think of ‘the same’ as implying ‘static’.

If we are all created by God, ‘in God’s image’ as we say, then we are all particles of the God-stuff (is there anything else?) and can never be separated from God or from other beings.   We are interdependent, and what we do as individuals has an effect on other beings, as they have on us, whether we are aware of it or not.     The Brazilian butterfly had no idea what she was starting!

The implications for loving our neighbour as ourselves are endless.  

At that sort of depth we are our neighbour, and we need to find and recognise the God-particle within each of us; including our limited selves.

And what are the implications for our treatment of our home, the Earth?

Our relationship with other animals?    Trees?    How does it affect our political judgement, the work we do, the way we spend our time and our money, as well as how we treat people, how we pray for people including those who want to harm us?     What does it say to us about our education system and our prison system, our attitude to paying tax, our loyalties to family, to peer group, to football team, to tradition, to nation? If we are essentially all one, dare we exclude anyone?

Teilhard de Chardin in The Future of Man (1959) quoted a version of Christ’s message as ‘Love one another, recognising in the heart of each of you the same God who is being born.’    Purton claims that in Christ’s own time a God of love would have been an alien concept.    Judgement Day could come at any moment and would see people eternally damned if they did not worship the wrathful God.     But Jesus spoke of – and was the embodiment of –love, and said ‘Be one, even as my Father and I are one.’ (cf John 17:21)

If we are indeed all one, all part of a single spirit, as I am increasingly believing as I approach the end of my earthly life, there is no separation between me and my neighbour, and it follows that loving my neighbour (as myself) becomes the only possible way to be completely alive.

I did say quantum mechanics / physics were beyond my mental capacity – but in the depths of my being I sense truth here somewhere.