“Shammah, Israel: Adonai aleyhenu, Adonai echod.” “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” As Christians, we make the assumption that this Hebrew prayer testifies to the oneness of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and it does. Yet there is more. It speaks to the oneness of all creation that came forth from the Source and Essence of all, animal, vegetable and mineral. From the tiniest quark to the most massive mountain on earth, from the center of our galaxy to the most far flung one in our universe and all the universes that may be beyond, God indwells and enfolds us all with the reality of Divine Love.

Such oneness is hard for us to get our mind around. From our earliest days, as soon as we realized that we were not one with our mother, we have been noticing and identifying our separateness, what makes us different, special. Science, however, has come a long way beyond our self-centered egos to show us just how interdependent we all are with all creation. Take, for example, “The Butterfly Effect” which came to light in the middle of the last century. It posits that the butterfly flapping from flower to flower in my garden can have an effect on the formation of a tornado in the future many states away or even on a typhoon forming off the shores of the Philippines. Francis Thompson, a poet and not a scientist, knew the truth of that interdependence when, early in the last century, he wrote in his mystical poem, “The Mistress of Vision”: “ All things by immortal power, near or far, hiddenly to each other linked are, that thou canst not touch a flower without troubling a star.”

The little things we say and do here and now resound around the world with unforeseen consequences we can’t begin to imagine. Ponder that as you reflect on the Oneness of all creation.