No Distance Between Us
by Rev. Nina Clark, USCR Board Secretary
The modern-day mystic Cynthia Bourgeault wrote that Jesus taught “inter-abiding: I in you, you in me, all in God, God in all.”
To me this means that each and every single one of us on the whole of planet Earth, all 7.9 billion of us is an expression of the divine. Our misconceptions, our fears, our prejudices, our judgments about ourselves and each other can’t negate this Truth: we are each holy, we are each sacred, we are each precious.
Every single one of us.
Stop and take that in. I invite you to wrap your head around 7.9 billion people, each and every one an expression of the divine.
And if any kind of objection arises within you about the divinity of all 7.9 billion of us, know that that objection originates from a belief in separateness. If an objection rises within you that says, “Well, not that group of people, or not that kind of person,” I invite you to pause, and step behind that protest back into a knowingness of oneness, and from there see again that each of us has to be an individuation of the Everywhere Present Presence, and thus are holy.
Jesus told us, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Bourgeault writes that Jesus didn’t mean we should love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves, or even that we have to love ourselves first before we can love our neighbor. He meant as ourselves. As a continuation of our own being because we are one.
If we loved our neighbor in this way, as Yeshua Ben Yoseph taught, then the countless many who have been killed because of a hate born of a belief in separateness could never have happened.
We grieve that it has cost so many lives—that the forgetting of our oneness has been, and continues to be, so devastating. But grief itself is love with nowhere to go. And so, we let it point us back—back toward love, back toward a world where no one is excluded from the circle of the sacred.
And even though we’re not there yet, I continue to hold faith that the day is coming where our collective belief in separation will dissolve in the Light of Wisdom and Love, for as the young poet Amanda Gorman shared with her heart full of both wisdom and love, “The new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only were brave enough to be it.”
Let us recommit to being that Light and truly loving our neighbors as ourselves. That love shows up not only in grand gestures, but in the ordinary moments—in the patience we offer a stranger, in the grace we extend across a difference of opinion, in the choice to see the sacred in the face before us, whoever they may be. Each of those moments is an act of remembrance: a return to the truth of our oneness.
