Our collect for today speaks of the Unity of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In our thinking and analyzing, we so often separate God into those three Persons rather than accepting the unity that God is One. As the Hebrew shema affirms: "Shema Israel, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echod." (Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is one.)

Take some time to picture the earth from space, the image of the little blue marble on the dark background that NASA astronauts have provided us. There we are, a tiny speck on the far edge of our Milky Way Galaxy which is only one of the myriad galaxies in the whole cosmos of God's creation, "this fragile earth our island home." (BCP, p.370) Then focus your attention on the earth, see the blue become the oceans, recognize the landmass, notice the swirling clouds encompassing the globe. Let the unity of all creation speak to you

The Holy One reveals Godself to us in and through creation, animal, vegetable, mineral. As Paul told the Romans (1: 20): "Ever since the creation of the world, God's eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things God has made." In the same vein, Meister Eckhart in the 13th century recognized that "every creature is a word of God." For just one example of creation illustrating unity, Saint Patrick chose the three-pronged leaf of the shamrock in Ireland to image the unity of the Trinity. In modern times Francis Thompson attempts to show the unity of God's creation from the smallest to the grandest realms in saying: "Thou canst not stir a flower, without troubling of a star," what we have come to call the butterfly effect. We are each and all mutually interdependent, part and parcel of the unity of our One creating, redeeming, sustaining God. God's unity is not rational, only experiential.