Nothing Unconnected
Reverend Amy Zucker
April 27, 2003
Palo Alto, CA

The Avatamsaka Sutra, translated by Francis H. Cook:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning [artisan] in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the [artisan] has hung a single glittering jewel at the net's every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.

If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.

Albert Einstein:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about writing a sermon was not to make it about too many things. I was counseled that listeners, however attentive and interested, can only process so much in fifteen or twenty minutes; simplify, simplify. So what did I decide to talk about this morning, the very first time I address you? Everything. The entire cosmos, including the kitchen sink.

It can't be helped. As I offer the jewel node of myself to the jewel nodes that are each of you, as we begin to confirm whether we do indeed wish to weave our lives together, what I most want to say to you is that there is no such thing as just one thing. Separation is an illusion. The universe in all its infinite time and space is a package deal.

A young man named John Muir came to the mountains east of here in 1869 and wrote in his journal, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe" (My First Summer in the Sierra, entry of July 26). A century earlier, the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg had asserted, "Nothing unconnected ever occurs." In fact, the frequency with which this perception is voiced by the wise of many places and ages--from the sages of ancient Hindu and Buddhist India, to a Swedish mystic of the 18th century, to a Swiss-born theoretical physicist of the 20th, to a Scottish-American naturalist in the Sierras--the repetition of this perception itself symbolizes the vivid truth that we are all connected. More: we are all one body--and not just the narrow world of human beings, who find it hard enough to recognize their interconnectedness with each other, but everything on this planet and endlessly beyond. The awareness of interconnectedness is also itself the gossamer that connects many aspects of my life and ministry, so it seems a good entree to a portrait of these.

From my early childhood I had a sense that the membrane separating my feelings from those of other people's was thin at most. Certain vivid instances come to mind, like other girls' teasing of the misfit in my cabin one summer at camp. I felt her unhappiness almost as sharply as if her tormentors' needle words had been stuck into me. When I wasn't the outcast myself, I tended to befriend whoever was, because the connection that we call empathy tugged us so close that I felt it as a near-unity. In The Color Purple, Alice Walker's character Shug describes her discovery of God in similar words: "I believe God is everything . . . Everything that is or ever was or will be. . . . . One day . . . it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed." The perception of unity is the stuff of religion--and sure enough, it led me circuitously, eventually, into ministry.

I was also fascinated in childhood by the literal fact of connectedness. At some point I picked up the piece of information (or maybe it was misinformation) that with every breath, we take in molecules that once made up other people: each lungful representing x percent of all the people who have ever lived on earth. I no longer remember the number, nor who it was who so confidently calculated it, but the impression the idea made was indelible. Being the daughter of avid theatergoers, one of whom was a professor of English literature to boot, I seized on the electrifying notion that some of the nitrogen I breathed had once made up the cells of Shakespeare. Some of it would become my cells; Shakespeare and I were literally made of the same stuff.

Thich Nhat Hanh uses this idea to illustrates the Buddhist teaching that everything is interdependent. What we call being, he says, could more accurately be called "interbeing," for it makes no sense to separate the entity that is this paper from the tree that it once was, the logger who started the transformation by felling the tree, the wheat in the bread of the sandwich that fueled the logger's muscles, or the sun that made the wheat grow. Every one of these things and so many more are part of this piece of paper--in fact, there is nothing that is not somehow connected to it. Everything inter-is. As a child I had heard of neither Thich Nhat Hanh nor Buddhism nor the myth of Indra's Net, but the material fact of interconnection fired my imagination.

The truth of interconnection shaped my feelings as well, in ways that were unclear for many years. For one final example, I loved to garden when I was young. I liked the feel of sun-warmed soil under bare feet, and the companionship with my dad as we hoed and planted together. I found it satisfying to provide goodies for the family dinner table, even if, picky eater that I was, I didn't actually consume the squash and tomatoes that I had planted. But still greater than any of these pleasures was the undimmable amazement of seeing life emerge.

For a long time, if I had had words to explain this sense of wonder at all, they would have been that it seems a miraculous power that makes it possible for the hard, wrinkled little stone that is a bean seed to generate a loop of living stem, then two perfect tiny leaves, then (within only weeks) a bushy plant weighed down with actual edible beans. But now, reflecting on the reflections in Indra's infinite web, I think one source of the wonder was and is the knowledge that that same power moves in and through every one of us as well. The beans and Dad and I are all parts of one body, animated by an indefinable but undeniable spirit; we are all subject to the same awesome power.

The poet Dylan Thomas wrote of it:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age;
that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force is all one, and so the web is woven. Small wonder that when called into ministry, I conceived of it as web-weaving. So much of what we do in church is about building connections--or perhaps a better way to put it is that our task as people of faith is to become more aware of the connectedness that is always an essential truth of our existence, but which we often do not sense.

Social justice is driven by the conviction that, in the words of another beloved poet, "We live not for ourselves" (William Blake, The Book of Thel). Here in church, we strive to remember that all of our actions, and inactions, tug on the threads of the web. The soccer ball we buy for our children might have been made by a child who cannot go to school, cannot be with his family, cannot hope for freedom, because he is spending his childhood on the sewing of soccer balls. We can contribute to his exploitation or resist it, depending on what we do with our dollars--but one thing we cannot do is be separate from him or his fate.

The unawareness of such connections might have been termed "alienation" by Marx. To live as if one neither affects everyone else nor is affected by them is to live as an utter alien, a completely unrelated object floating by other objects. As Einstein said, it is also to imprison ourselves. And thus we take responsibility for one another by acting for justice.

Another way church illuminates interconnection is through ritual. The gathering in space that has become sacred; the solemn enactment of joyful rites of passage; words spoken or sung that remind us of the great, large body; bending our communal life to the rhythms of the earth--solstice and equinox, moon-growth and harvest--all of these things that make up church life have one deep purpose. And that is to open our eyes to the entire net, to widen the circle of compassion so that our hearts take in everything, if only in flashes of insight and joy.

And then there are all the other simple, obvious ways we weave the web through our shared life here. Everything that brings together two or three of us bears witness to the interconnected web. It may be a class, a covenant group, a committee--any gathering of those with a common interest or common hopes. Each one is another thread cast from node to node of the great net.

We are often unaware that we are reflecting one another's beauty in one interconnected web, perhaps because, as Dylan Thomas says, the connection when felt can be so profound as to render us incapable of summoning up adequate words. "I am dumb," he repeats at each stanza. "I am dumb." Another poet who tried to find the words was Wordsworth, who wrote a passage in his long poem The Excursion that speaks of the power such intimations of interconnection can have.

I have seen A curious child,
who dwelt upon a tract Of inland ground,
applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;
To which, in silence hushed,
his very soul Listened intensely--and his countenance soon Brightened with joy;
for from within were heard Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed Mysterious union with its native sea.
Even such a shell the universe itself Is to the ear of Faith.

Because everything is hitched to everything else, anything at all can reveal the whole cosmos to us if we only look and listen. Like the child who, dwelling inland, has never heard the ocean, we are at times locked into our narrow existences. But we can perceive what is far beyond our bodies, our experiences, our daily round--we can free ourselves from prison--if we hold the smooth-lipped shell up to our ear.

When I read this passage, I think of our spiritual community. So I will back up a bit, continue the passage, and for "the universe," substitute "our church."

Even such a shell [our church] itself Is to the ear of Faith;
rand there are times, I doubt not,
when to you it doth impart Authentic tidings of invisible things;
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation.
Here you stand, Adore, and worship, when you know it not.

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