Reflection
Separation is an illusion. Both religion and science confirm this truth; the experiences of the mystics, the teachings of ecology and physics, all the possible ways we can connect on the internet confirm this. The spiritual, emotional, and mental aspects of our beings interpenetrate and nourish each other. Everything is related to everything else. To accept this enables us to engage in a holistic vision of life and see things as a whole. It removes the artificial separations we accept: science vs. religion, male vs. female, humans vs. nature. These are arbitrary distinctions which set up barriers and disrupt the unity of all in the One.
Adapted from Spirituality and Practice
Prayer
May all creation dance for You within me.
Chinook Psalter
Action
Think of the world in which everything is linked to everything else. How can this affect your attitudes and the manner of your living?
Suggested Reading
I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one–as you are in me and I am in you.
John 17:21
Everything is connected. Concern for the environment thus needs to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society.
Pope Francis
Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.
Hildegard of Bingen
Everything is integral and interacts with everything else. This means that nothing is itself without everything else. There is a commonality, an integrity, an intimacy of the universe with itself.
Thomas Berry
If everything is connected to everything else, then everyone is ultimately responsible for everything. We can blame nothing on anyone else. The more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.
Laurence Kushner
As we become increasingly aware of our global interdependence as a species, we can also deepen awareness of our spiritual interconnectedness. We cannot live in total isolation. The crosscultural communion of awakened souls may be a key to cocreating a sustainable future and living in harmony with the earth.
Frances Vaughan
When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
John Muir
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
I can never be what I ought to be
until you are what you ought to be.
This is the interrelated structure of reality.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
We are a profoundly interconnected species, as the global economic and ecological crises reveal in vivid and frightening detail. We must embrace the simple fact that we are dependent on and accountable to one another.
Parker Palmer