The central teaching of Jesus was oneness. This idea’s time has surely come. All humans are becoming increasingly tied together in a fragile web with each other and nature. In this time of climate change, worldwide trading, television, and the Internet, we are learning that what affects other humans and the natural world affects all of us.
Yet lingering ideas of separateness continue to kill us. To the extent we think we are separate from nature, we continue to decimate rainforests, overfish oceans, and pollute everything, believing it won’t impact us. To the extent we think we are separate from other people “out there,” we will continue to wage war on them, believing we can do so with impunity.
In Spanish, the devil is “el diablo” and we speak of an evil plot as “diabolical.” The “di” at the beginning of these words means “two.” Evil then divides what is one into two, dividing or separating oneness.
In the mythological Garden of Eden, the devil, disguised as a serpent, tempted Adam and Eve to eat from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, so they started the endless process of dividing everything up into good and bad. Before that, they were innocent, everything existed in harmony, and they “walked with God in the garden” (Genesis 3:8). No friction existed between them and God, man and woman, or humans and nature. All was one.
Right after eating the fruit which God forbade, they hid (separated themselves) from God, came into conflict with each other (Adam blamed Eve) and were alienated from nature (driven out of a natural paradise).
Jesus came to teach oneness and put everything back together. He prayed for his disciples and all people “that they may be one, as you God are in me, and I am in you, that they may also be one in us” (John 17: 21-23). He saw himself as one with the lowliest person on Earth: “As you do to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you do it to me” (Matthew 25:40).
Jesus was against how society was divided up according to status and privilege. So, he welcomed those of no account in his day: children, women, prostitutes, the sick and the handicapped. His directive to “love your enemies” was all about reconciliation, community, and oneness. Jesus felt so close to God that he said, “God and I are one” (John 10:30).
If we felt our oneness with nature, we would treat it as part of us. If we felt we were one with other people, we would treat everyone better, particularly our spouses. As it says in Genesis, when a man and woman marry, “the two become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). If we really believed in this oneness, we would realize that whatever we do to our spouses, we do to ourselves. We would “do unto others as we would have them do unto us” (Luke 6:31). In other words, we would obey the Golden Rule.
If we believed God saw us as united with him, we would trust that God would never punish us because it would be God’s self-punishment. We would have no fear of hell, which is basically separation from God. We would constantly sense God’s presence. We would affirm with St. Paul that “God is in, over, and through us” (Ephesians 4:6) and “I live, yet not I, but God lives within me” (Galatians 2:20). We would treat everyone, regardless of age, gender, nationality, or religion, with the utmost respect, like the temple of the divine they are.
The church and all of humanity need to focus on this core teaching of Jesus — oneness. We will only survive if we understand that we are all in this together with God, other people, and nature. This sense of oneness is the key to addressing what ails us.
Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com
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