Connected
“There
can be no giver without a receiver, and one cannot receive without
something being given. Nothing is separate, except for the 'sense' of
separateness, a feeling which is readily disproved. Indeed, if we
were separated from the source of life at any moment, we could not
exist.”
Rabbi
David A. Cooper (God Is A Verb)
In
his book, God is a Verb, Rabbi Cooper makes a very good case
for the ongoing inseparability of creator and creation. Scientists
may be correct in their theory that everything in the known universe came
from one incident, the Big Bang, but the Jewish mystics of the
Kabbalah believe that creation existed before and has been ongoing
ever since. Physics actually bears this up, since neither matter nor
energy can be created or destroyed.
My
friend, Susan, sent me a funny, interesting commentary given by Aaron
Freeman on NPR in 2005, about why you may not want to invite a
physicist to give the eulogy at a funeral. He cites the 1st
Law of Thermodynamics as proof that “all your energy, every
vibration, every BTU of heat, every wave of every particle that was
ever you [or your departed loved one] remains in this world.” In
other words, when your body dies, the source of life that animated
you does not. You may not be physically here, but neither are you
gone; you are simply less organized. Now, that either keeps us awake
at night, or gives us comfort. For me, it is the latter.
If
we know nothing else as human beings, let us come to understand this: we are not separate—not from each other, not from the source of
creation, not from those who have gone before, or those who have yet
to be born, not from the animal kingdom, nor the plant kingdom, nor
sky, nor earth. Here's how it was summed up in Romans 8:38-39 two
thousand years ago:
“For
I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor
any
other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of
God...”
It's
still true today.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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