Look around you. If you’re inside, examine the walls that surround you, whatever surface you are sitting on, the tile or rug on the floor, and the glass in the windows that allow you see the larger world outside. Consider the grass, the trees, and the garbage can at the end of your driveway. What do all of these things have in common?
Things you might find around a home? Yes, but look deeper. There is something much richer and more vital that unites these things.
Each of the items I mentioned is held together by an invisible, unidentified and impossible to recreate force. We all learned about how atoms interact with other atoms to form matter in elementary school. Did you know that the greatest physicists in the world have yet to explain why or how that happens? That they are still in search of the “God particle” that explains why the elements of the periodic table that we all learned about in chemistry behave as they do?
While looking outside did you see a pigeon, a sparrow, a squirrel, an ant, or your neighbor? What do all of these creatures have in common?
Well, yes, they are all creatures, that is one answer. Yes, they too are “held together” by an invisible, unidentified and impossible to recreate force. But look deeper.
Each of these creatures appeared in this animated by an unseen, unquantifiable life force that sprang forth from life itself; connected to generation after generation of evolution and replication that came before as well as the seed for generation after generation of evolution and replication that will come after.
Each of the animate creatures I named, along with every other creature that inhabits the Earth all possess that same life force – an energy that has persisted as long as there has been life. The energy that animates a squirrel is the same energy that animates a slug. Invisible, impossible to identify, isolate or replicate, but none-the-less present.
So what is my point here? I’ll use the words of Emmet Fox here: “in deed and truth, we are all one, component parts of the living garment of God.” There is no need to look beyond ourselves when we realize that every single thing we see or engage with is a component part of the living garment of God. Every. Single. One.
This for me is humility. There is no question for me that the suffering of others impacts me, because the suffering of others impacts the larger system of which I am a part. The individual cells that make up my toenails are very different than the individual cells that comprise the lens of my eye. While very different in look and function, these two cells are connected in a system where an infection in one group of cells can threaten or extinguish the life of others.
For me the gift of humility is the paradoxical understanding that we are all different while being the same. We each bring unique characteristics that serve a role in the greater whole of which we are all but component parts.
Emmet Fox, The Sermon on the Mount, The Key to Success in Life, Buccaneer Books, Cutchogue, NY, 1934
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