by Janice Dolley
When our first daughter was just turned 2 years old my husband and I had the idea, unusual in those days, of a camping holiday in the South of France. We invested in a tent and set out on this adventure. As we drove up the Southern Alps and had just reached the top our small daughter gazed at the sparkling Mediterranean Sea below and exclaimed: “Oh look, what a lovely big puddle.”
She could only perceive its vastness in terms of what she already knew. How difficult then must it have been for Jesus to try to explain the vastness of the cosmos and the powerful love of the creator that sustains all people who only know a microcosm of this vast One Life. This was my first lesson in comprehending the love that ‘binds together the sun and all the stars’ as well as we ourselves.
My second lesson came later when this daughter was playing in our garden with her sisters and I found a quiet spot in which to meditate away from their games. In a moment I can never forget I experienced a shift of vision and saw, with both an inner and an outer eye, the dance of living energy through every blade of grass, every bush and every insect as well as through myself, and I knew with an inner certainty that this energy was Life itself and that it was totally loving and beneficent. An experience like that can sustain us for the rest of our life but it also brings with it a compulsion to explore further and communicate to others the depth of meaning that has been conveyed.
This meaning propels us to a deeper understanding of theological ideas such as the Trinity in which we perceive God the Father as the driving force behind creation, God the Son as the relational force of love behind all living things and the Holy Spirit as the intelligence of the One Life. How then could Jesus convey this to people 2000 years ago who knew only a few neighbouring villages but could, as the psalmist perceived, look up at the vastness of the night sky and ask “What is man that thou art mindful of him?”
Today science is providing us with the evidence that all life is an expression of one vast consciousness and that as Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin realised:
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity we shall harness for God the energies of love and then for the second time in the history of the world humanity will have discovered fire”.
The depth of this fire of love calls us from our burrows of separateness into a journey of discovery of the vast Oneness of all life, the universality of the messages and demonstrations of love that Jesus brought us and the subtle threads of love that are the relational links between all living things Whether we experience this love in the birth of a baby, a near death experience or by gazing at the dance of love between a bee and the blossoming flower, at this critical time of choice for us all on Planet Earth it is the immensity of this love that is propelling us to transcend any anxiety and give our all in whatever way we feel called, and to include the advice of the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan that “the first condition of being useful to humanity is to keep our heart open”.