From today’s Collect: “Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power about Christian unity, I imagined one worldwide church with all denominational lines blown away (an early glimpse of the Holy Spirit, perhaps?). I was confusing conformity of language, of belief, of ritual with unity in love. It was a naïve, childish dream; as Paul puts it in his first letter to the Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” (I Cor.13:11) May it be so for all of us.

As I matured and experienced God’s steadfast love and mercy personally and came to realize that it is available for each and all, I noticed that the differences between and among us were not as monumental as I had thought. God made us each unique, yet still in the divine image, the imago dei, full of self-giving love, whether we are aware of it or not. The Holy One calls us to love God, by whatever name we may know the Divine Presence, and our enemies, as well as our neighbors, friends, and families. That’s a calling none of us can do on our own; it is only with God’s grace transforming us day by day that we can come to accept others as children of God, as our sisters and brothers in the holy family of Love. As we look in the world around us, we see the separation that exists in every direction and our hearts are opened to accept the ministry of reconciliation God has entrusted to us. (II Cor.5:17-19) Freely we have received, and we are called to pass it on just as freely. (see Mt. 10:8b)

Reconciled to God and to one another around among all peoples . . .” When I was a child, whenever I heard the world, and not humanity alone, but with all creation throughout the cosmos, we can experience the Oneness of all in Divine Love, the Source and Essence of All. In Jesus’ high priestly prayer (found in John 17), he prays that “[we} may be one as [he and the Father] are one” . . . that “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us,”. . . “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” That is the unity that God wants us to experience, the Oneness in the Divine Flow between and among the Lover, the Beloved, in the fullness of Love, in the Holy Trinity.