Wednesday, May 13
Daniel Tammet wrote the New York Times Bestseller, Born on a Blue Day. It is his story of growing up in an Irish family as the eldest of eight kids with parents who loved them. That fact is fundamental to who he is. In addition to that, he is a high functioning, autistic savant with Asperger’s Syndrome and ADD. As a child, he had difficulty communicating, understanding concepts, and making friends. As an adult, he speaks eleven languages and is writing his own language. He learned Icelandic in one week. He recited the number “pi” up to the 22,514th digit. He experiences numbers and words as shapes, colors, textures and motions. He has since written three more books after the first. He said, “If I had to write an epitaph at this point in life, it would be about having respect for different minds.”
As I read Daniel’s story, I was in awe of the huge capability of our brains. The mind of every person is unique, filled with different experiences, skills, understandings, and creative abilities. We are lightyears away from knowing what our minds are capable of. But we get a glimpse of their limitless variability whenever we talk to another person – a child, a foreigner, a farmer, a scientist, a world traveler, or perhaps — our next-door neighbor. How big is the awareness that all the minds in the world, past, present, and future encompass?
If we look in any direction, we are overwhelmed with the immense diversity in our Universe. Did you know that a human being can detect at least a trillion different smells? Or that an eagle goes through a 150-day process in its of plucking out its beak and talons and old feathers in order to recreate itself for the next 30 years? How about a snail sleeping for 3 years? Or elephants that communicate with each other through vibrations given and received in their feet?
Pick any field of study in the world, and we could spend the rest of our lives trying to learn all there is to know about it. Want to study wildflowers? Microchips? Baking? Lungs? Physics? Fabric? Solar energy? Violin? Grass seed? Rocks? Words? Viruses?
God is so BIG! In the prayer below, God tell us “I am the eternal light amongst the billions and countless stars and galaxies, I hold them all within one palm”. God cannot be contained, and yet God is within everything that exists. God cannot be measured out into good and bad things or kept in any one culture or religion or thought process. God is the beginning…but not the end. God is the beginning and the everlasting. There is only life and transformation. God is in the all, and the many, and the one. God and I can never be separate because God is in every cell of my being.
If I hold that thought for one holy instant, all fear disappears.
2 Comments
Gretchen Rabjohns
After I listened to the reflection, I just sat with it, not wanting to “come back”. I really felt God’s presence
Colleen Fox-Salah
What a gorgeous entry, Rev. Mary. I could write an essay in response! But I’ll refrain:-)
I just want to say that that this post nicely dovetails today’s Gospel reading in which we are told that Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. There is such security in that, yet so much freedom, as well. Branches are everywhere and essential, and they are all different sizes, colors, shapes, textures. None are more valuable than any other, yet are distinct.
Your post reminds me, too, of the Law of Conservation of Mass, which states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and wood is often used as a way to exemplify this idea. The wood does not cease to exist when set ablaze, but transforms into ash. All is eternal. All is one.
Surely God is in every cell of every being expressing Herself in an infinite amount of forms, all crucial to existence, as She “holds them all within one palm.”
Thank you for this.
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