We’re all one
Photograph by Pavel Boltov via Unsplash
Jim Huffman
Several years ago, I attended a reception at a home on Chicago’s north shore. The lawn was manicured, the furniture elegant, the art breathtaking. The people were welcoming and gracious. I had a wonderful time.
Then I came home to my neighborhood in the city, where the sidewalks were cluttered by litter, blinds sagged at windows, and people talked to each other in Spanish, Korean, and Bosnian. I thought: I like it better here.
My reaction to the difference would not always have been that way. For most of my life, I would have found the luxurious properties and gorgeous art more appealing. Now, they seemed lovely but uniform, almost boring.
My neighborhood was not without problems. National rivalries created tensions in my building. I complained to the landlords next door about their grassless, weed-choked front yard. I grumbled when neighbors parked directly in front of my garage door on the alley, keeping me from getting my car out.
But I loved this place even when it challenged me. What had happened to me? On one level, perhaps I simply had become an urbanite, in sync with Chicago’s restaurants, languages, ethnic festivals, even its clutter. The variety!
But something deeper, something theological, had happened. Living in America’s third largest city, listening to the sermons of my American Baptist minister, Bob Thompson, I had begun understanding in a new way the reality that all of us – all of us! – are one, that, as he put it in his book, “A Voluptuous God,” “We are all a part of each other.”[i]
I had come to believe that variety is what the Divine One created — and, thus, desires. That all of us, no matter our status, are part of the same whole. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said in 1968 to a group of Hindus in Calcutta, “My dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity.”[ii]
Both the Christian and the Jewish scriptures make it clear that God creates and permeates us all.
“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.” (Psalm 139:7-8 NKJV)
“From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth...” (Acts 17:26)
“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)
Then, there is that radical summary of the divine: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” (1 John 4:16 NIV)
The realization that everyone is a part of me and that I am a part of them brings me joy. It fills me with awe. It makes me feel embraced and full of hope. But it also challenges me to my core, knowing that I must throw everything into making oneness and wholeness a reality in my world.
The Divine One, in other words, is love and love alone: the one who embraces the Palestinian as much as the Israeli, the weak and the strong, the immigrant, documented or not.
Realizing this has been liberating, bringing fresh dimensions to my spiritual life. But it also has given me new burdens.
For one thing, the very act of writing about oneness makes me more than a little uncomfortable, because it has opened a new awareness that I speak from a position of white, male, Christian privilege that not only blinded me for decades to my connectedness to those who were unlike me but continues to make my talk about oneness feel shallow.
I grew up in a sundown county, unconcerned about the fact that Black people were not allowed to spend the night anywhere but in the local jail. Despite being a historian of Japan by profession, I dismissed Japanese thought patterns as inferior simply because they were different from my own for years.
When I recently wrote emails urging a “loving” response to people bent on turning Charlie Kirk into a martyr, an African American friend reminded me of how deeply Kirk’s hateful rhetoric had wounded people of color. My friend said that those pandering to the influencer’s followers enabled Kirk to “bully and gaslight us from the grave.”
Those comments reminded me of how glib my talk about oneness and love can be, how my middle-class whiteness keeps me from experiencing, and thus understanding, the daily realities with which people like my friend must grapple: police brutality, economic oppression, inferior medical facilities, food deserts, fear of abuse by ICE — things that would not exist in a fair, equitable society that practiced oneness.
The second burden is even heavier. If oneness is what God wills, I must strive to see that everyone has the life I want for myself. I have a responsibility to bring more than a warm feeling to my sisters and brothers. I must labor for justice. When I see a Palestinian or Jewish child hurting, I must act. When I learn that a politician has defamed a group of people, I must fight that defamation.
The responsibility to fight for change feels overwhelming, but it is the call of the God of Connectedness who asked how divine love could dwell in someone who “shuts up his heart” when seeing someone in need (1 John 3:17).
The realization that everyone is a part of me and that I am a part of them brings me joy. It fills me with awe. It makes me feel embraced and full of hope. But it also challenges me to my core, knowing that I must throw everything into making oneness and wholeness a reality in my world.
Jim Huffman spent his career teaching East Asian history at Wittenberg University, then moved to Chicago. Since retirement, he has been a board member of Chicago Area Peace Action and a member of Lake Street Church in Evanston, Illinois.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] Robert V. Thompson, A Voluptuous God: A Christian Heretic Speaks (Kelowna, BC, Canada: Wood Lake Publishing, 1998), p. 213.
[ii] Henry Gray, ed., We are already one: Thomas Merton’s message of hope: reflections in honor of his centenary (1915-2015) (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2014), p. 188.
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