At-One-Ment

I discovered life’s most profound truth in an obscure, outdated Latter-day Saint chapel built in the shadow of a beet sugar factory just east of Idaho Falls, Idaho. I was 18 at the time and was home for the weekend from college. My 19th birthday and the expectation of applying to serve a full-time mission were looming on the near horizon. Despite a somewhat misspent youth, the idea of serving a mission had always appealed to me. The prospect of giving myself to some cause greater than my overly-nourished ego seemed increasingly important. 

I had been raised in a devout family in a somewhat self-contained Latter-day Saint community. I had in theory accepted the ideas that I belonged to God’s true church and that my generation was foreordained to take the gospel to the ends of the earth in preparation for Christ’s return. But I knew I would need a serious change of heart to represent Christ and His Church without hypocrisy. Despite having occasionally recited the expected words of testimony during my youth, I had not lived a life of faith and had very little honest conviction of even the existence of God, let alone a testimony of the divinity of my native church. And those two facts began to weigh heavily on me as I finally faced the reality of serving a mission. 

I was home from college for the weekend and was in the midst of several days of fasting and prayer. As I took the sacramental bread in that little chapel, I began to feel a flood of love and deep acceptance enter my body, filling me with a joy and light I could never have imagined. My heart was ablaze with love and it seemed to flow out from me to the row of white-haired widows who sat in their accustomed pew in front of me. My ego dissolved in this moment and love seemed to fill that little chapel and flow out the open windows into the world outside. Nothing had prepared me for this new reality God had shown me. I had no language for it at the time. 

As I emerged from the church house after the meeting, the whole world seemed different. The trees and grass and sky seemed pulsating with life and I felt deeply connected to all of it. My family and neighbors, religious or not, seemed to be walking around unaware that they were in reality lit angels, each a unique expression of a light that animated them all.  The world no longer seemed divided to me. I could see clearly that we are in reality fundamentally connected, despite how our thoughts might seek to divide us.

The pull of the world, including habits of thought, can be strong. And over the subsequent days and weeks, the scales which had fallen from my eyes slowly formed again, and I unwittingly returned to my divided world. But not entirely. That epiphany, which has been confirmed to me in both powerful and subtle ways since that day, is one of the few things I know for sure, because I experienced it. The light of Christ IS in and through ALL THINGS. And that light is LOVE. 

I once heard Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen retell a Jewish creation story first told to her by her grandfather. 

In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. And then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand, thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident—and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness of the world, the light of the world, was scattered into a thousand, thousand fragments of light, and they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day.

Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. It's a very important story for our times. And this task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It's the restoration of the world.

We moderns are living too much in our heads—in our thoughts—and our hearts are failing us. The mind tends to divide; the heart tends to unite. Social media and cable news networks have perfected the very profitable science of training our brains to see outrage in the world and to confirm our biases. We unwittingly line up like pigs to be fed the daily slop served up at their troughs, trained to view the world through the lens of what Jonathan Haidt calls the “righteous mind.” We are a “thousand, thousand scattered fragments of light,” living too much out of fear and suspicion of “the other.”

The lovely young Bulgarian writer Maria Popova wrote:

All human lives are too various and alive with contradiction to be neatly classed into the categories in which we try to contain the chaos of life, and yet we spend so much of our unclassifiable lives classing the lives of others. One measure of kindness might be the unwillingness to crush complexity into category, the refusal to lash others with our labels.

It is a beautiful impulse—to contain the infinite in the finite, to restore order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.

Yet according to the Genesis story, the Gods themselves set this world in motion by naming things, by creating distinctions (light/darkness, day/night, land/sea, man/woman, the various flora and fauna). God even invites Adam to join in the process of naming. In doing so, I like to think God is teaching Adam to see variety as beauty. But, as Maria Popova points out, there is a downside risk to sorting the world into categories.  The Indian sage Jiddu Krishnamurti once said that once a child learns the word “bird,” that child may never see a bird again in the same way.

The impulse to “name” people—to sort them into categories—is powerful. Upon moving to Midway, Utah eight years ago, I sat as the newest member of my ward’s Elder Quorum. I listened to a lively discussion and tried to get a sense of the character of my new quorum. I remember one of the senior members of the quorum making a comment that seemed to betray a rather rigid worldview. My first thought was, “We’re probably not going to become good friends if that’s how he looks at the world.” But near the end of our meeting, when volunteers were sought for an assignment at the church cannery, this brother’s arm shot up. I sensed an opportunity and quickly raised my hand to snag the third and last slot. 

In the hours we spent driving to the cannery and working our shift together, a funny thing happened. We became fast friends and forever brothers—even though we continue to view and experience the world rather differently. We created a one-ness through being and serving together that transcends the distinctions our minds try to serve up to us.

The same applies to our relationship to the natural world. To our ancient ancestors, creation was alive. They were aware of and sustained by the deep, unifying networks that comprise the natural world in which they were immersed.  Moderns have set about to dissect the world into its constituent parts in service of scientific analysis and commercial exploitation. The result, of course, has been an explosion of discovery and technology—with its accompanying comforts and material prosperity. But in this headlong rush to improve our way of living, modern society largely lost sight of a fundamental connectedness and unity of all things; and we are now paying a price for that myopia in the form of extreme environmental degradation, the ever-present potential of nuclear annihilation and deep social division. 

But we may be seeing a new day dawning. It’s interesting that the same scientific enterprise that has been instrumental in creating both the blessings and curses of modernity may be showing us a path back to unity. We are learning surprising things about the deep intelligence and connectedness of the macro world (like forests and other ecosystems); and we’re learning about perhaps even more surprising connections at the level of subatomic particles (discoveries like quantum entanglement). The secular age may be yielding to a recognition of an almost mystical reality—a fundamental connectedness of all things.

Our faith has always pointed to this deep intrinsic unity of all things and to the eventual Restoration of that unity. That, to me, is the essence of the Gathering project in which we are engaged—recognizing the brotherhood and sisterhood of every person who has ever lived on this earth, sharing the universal gospel of Jesus Christ, and eventually sealing all of humanity together. Jesus’ great intercessory prayer expressed his vision and desire “that they may be one, even as we are one.” This is Christ’s project of At-one-ment. 

We can’t really be Christ’s partners in this work until we allow ourselves to feel deep in our hearts the fundamental unity of all creation, in all its blessed variety. We will have to do the soul-searching work required to transcend the distinctions our minds and culture seem determined to impose upon us. We will need to come to see these differences as part of the variety and beauty of this world. Each of us will need to actively seek to transcend racial, political, religious, national and other boundaries in order to gather these shards of light into one great whole. We will need to let our hearts train our minds to scan the world to see difference as beauty and unity rather than division.

As an 18-year-old in that little church house, my first powerful experience of divine love was something like a profound reverence for all things. Over time, I have come to see love not only as a sense of deep connection, but as a desire to actively support the growth and flourishing of others, without expectation of result, and with a deep respect for the uniqueness of our paths. One-ness was never meant to be same-ness.

I’ve come to see At-one-ment as the process of understanding, and helping each other understand, that every creature, every human being, is animated by the Spirit of Christ and is therefore deeply interconnected. Only by realizing and living this fundamental truth can we mend a fractured reality and heal our wounding divisions. It is the great project of Restoration. 

Bill Turnbull did his undergraduate and graduate studies at BYU, after which he began an entrepreneurial and consulting career. In 2016 he co-founded Faith Matters Foundation (www.faithmatters.org), whose mission is to “explore an expansive view of the Restored Gospel.” He and his wife Suzy have six children and 24 grandchildren and live in Midway, Utah.

Art by Kenneth Noland.

This essay appears in No Division Among You: Creating Unity in a Diverse Church, edited by Richard Eyre.