When God is One

I am still reeling from Partner Church Sunday, and I believe that I am not alone. We all felt a sense of blessing and perhaps even pride in being the heirs to this special religious legacy. There was something about the service and Rev. Fred’s message that excited the imagination in a profound way. We got to consider our sense of connectedness across continents and across the stretches of time. We got to see, hear and in some cases taste and touch our relationship to all those who have undertook, and are undertaking now, this faithful journey we call Unitarian Universalism.

I found myself fixed in place like a deer in the headlights by the very simple refrain “God is One” that we heard over and over again. (And, I am willing to accept the possibility that maybe I’m the only one who heard it that way, as it bounced back and forth in my head). It had such a pure and resonant quality, both elegant and buoyant.  The phrase said so little but meant so much to me.

Egy Az Isten  “God is One.”

Maybe I was awestruck because it reminded me of my days in seminary when studying Hebrew Bible and I stumbled on the passage in the book Deuteronomy:

 שְׁמַע, יִשְׂרָאֵל:  יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ, יְהוָה אֶחָ.
 Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one.

The message occurs other time in the Christian New Testament (believe it or not Jesus says it in Mark’s Gospel, the oldest text in the Christian canon!) and we see it in the Koran as the essential article of faith:

لَا إِلَّهَ إِلَّا الله مُحَمَّدٌ رَسُولُ الله
There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God.

In Hinduism we hear intimations of it in the Upanishads in reference of Brahman as the substrate of existence. For me there is a universal quality to the refrain that says more about our yearning to apprehend the true nature of reality, than it does about any particular deity or cultural context.

But, even before I had the chance to study all of these ancient books with their similar messages, I had the innate capacity to hear and perceive what would become my deepest truth that indeed “God is one”.
So hearing the message “God is One” felt familiar to me on multiple levels.

You see growing up I was almost certainly a Christian Universalist like our partners in the Philippines, and most likely a Christian Unitarian, like our friends in Romania. Long before I knew what it took to be either one, I had an intuition that because God was one, no one could be separated from that “oneness”, it was inescapable and irresistible. As a kid I believed (and still do) that God could be encountered in holy scripture and in trees, grasses and bright sunny days. All people had access to the holy in their own way, even if I could not explain the precise mechanics of that access.

This of course was an impossible position to have growing up as a Pentecostal Christian, where we lived in a world delimited by a rigid brand of fundamentalism, and under constant threat of God’s imminent, final judgment of humanity. It was a world of winners (the saved) and losers (the eternally damned); and there was only one way to be a winner, as it were, and that was through accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Our focus as Pentecostals was the life hereafter, and actively rejecting life on Earth. I lived as someone who was constantly prepared to leave a place that was never his home in the first place.
But, one day, in the middle of a Sunday service, actually, I realized something that changed things for me--forever.

I realized that I couldn’t believe in a God who would damn anyone ever again. I couldn’t believe in a God who could exclude anyone. There had to be a way that everyone could be included in the divine plan, if were truly divine in the first place. Otherwise it was just scare tactics and politics masquerading as religion.
I couldn’t believe in a God, who wasn’t immanent in creation; who couldn’t be encountered everywhere and in various scriptures and religious traditions and even the sciences.

In essence I came to believe that when God is One, everything is one, linked in that network of mutuality that Martin Luther King spoke about that bejeweled garment that Indra once wore.

An entirely new world came into being from that moment on. And, it was a world I wanted to live on and make my home.

I hope we can all have moments of realization just like this. I hope that those moments find you here in our special community or somewhere in the world, encountering the holy wherever and whenever you can. I want all of us to have big, slippery thoughts that excite our holy imaginations and stop us in our tracks and invite us to reconnect with our deepest truths!


Be Blessed and see you in church. Daniel.