Perceiving & Oneing
Read excerpts from the next two chapters of Gracing, and join us for our final group discussion on Friday August 1
Chapter 13: Perceiving
I perceive the world with an astigmatism, both literally and figuratively. I’m a North American, five-foot-six, adequately fed, English-speaking, stay-at-home suburbanite who was raised LDS in a middle-class home. These parts of my perception will always constrain what portion of the whole I can perceive. But I don’t need to resign myself to complacency; by simply recognizing my limitations while also learning from people who perceive the world differently, my limited umwelt can expand. I can approach my neighbors with a kind of holy curiosity.
Take Jewish writers, for example, who often perceive law more generously than many Christians; with their unique vision they redeem the term. Law in its various forms—commandments, ordinances, rituals, and the like—transforms from rote routines and checklists to meaningful practices and duets. “The law, stiff with formality, is a cry for creativity,” writes Heschel, “a call for nobility concealed in the form of commandments. It is not designed to be a yoke, a curb, a strait jacket for human action. . . . All observance is training in the art of love.”
If my only picture of law is from the rigid hands of the specific group of Pharisees in Jesus’s time, I’ll miss the expansive Jewish thinking that also sees love as the heart of law. Before Christians existed, the Jews taught, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). And like Paul, the great advocate for grace, Jews explained that the purpose of law is for it to become written inwardly on our hearts, not merely for it to stagnate on tablets of stone (Jer. 31:33).
In Jason Olson’s memoir, cowritten with James Goldberg, Olson writes of holding both his Jewish and Latter-day Saint faith. He explains that “being a Jew meant hearing the beat of a divine drummer. The law, so often viewed with derision by Christians, brought a divine calibration to our people. It brought a sense of sacred order syncing our calendar and daily life with God’s heartbeat.” The law, then, is one way to attune ourselves to God’s heartbeat—to hear decibels outside our own umwelt.
Indigenous people often perceive other truths; they reveal the heartbeat of the earth. “When I close my eyes and wait for my heartbeat to match the drum,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, “I envision people recognizing, for perhaps the first time, the dazzling gifts of the world. . . . Blankets of moss, robes of feathers, baskets of corn, and vials of healing herbs. Silver salmon, agate beaches, sand dunes. Thunderbolts and snowdrifts, cords of wood and herds of elk. Tulips. Potatoes. Luna moths and snow geese. And berries.”
I imagine astute Indigenous hearers such as Kimmerer with a stethoscope against the earth, seas, and sky, listening to the verses of song created by not just humans, but the rest of the living world. Creation teems with music. To view our connection with God as detached from our plant and animal cousins is to miss the family reunion. As I learn more of what Indigenous people see from their vantage point, I approach my own life differently. Breaking through the sunbaked crust of my garden with a trowel, watching the fleeing ants and wriggling worms, I’m grateful. Paying attention, I squeeze a Concord grape from its slippery, purple peel, smell the ripened cherry tomato on the vine, and taste the sun-ripened sweetness of both in my mouth.
The heartbeat of the earth is then joined by another. Contemplatives from all religious backgrounds amplify the heartbeat of silence. What I once assumed was a retreat from the needs of the world is instead an immersion into a better understanding of it—into a different sort of air. Listening more closely, I feel the vibrations of my body when it is settled rather than frenzied, and I experience a breath that is cleansing, deep, centered, and large. The Sufi mystic Rumi wrote, “I have oft laid the ear of my soul at the window of the heart. I have heard much discourse, but I have seen no lips.” Paying attention, the silence in my heart speaks, and I hear the low, slow, deep tones—like whale songs.
These tones are joined by those who hear the heartbeat of justice. Often regardless of religious affiliation, these hearers occupy an umwelt wherein they respond to a call to repair broken and unjust systems. They refuse to perpetuate poverty, neglect the needy, imprison the innocent, gut the earth, and marginalize the other. In their critique of harmful behavior and systems, these hearers are unwilling to throw God under the bus because “God said so” or because “Jesus will come again and repair it.” They engage with suffering and, like Martin Luther King, Jr., perceive love as “the heartbeat of the moral cosmos.” Their love calls them to display injustice front and center so it can no longer be unheard. Paying attention, my umwelt expands further.
Immersed in the cacophony of all these sounds, this is what happens for me today. I sit here writing, and my dog walks up to me, her brown eyes imploring. She’s new to our home. Coincidentally, her name is Izzy, just like our previous dog who had died. We found Izzy Two in the classified ads—a seven-year-old mountain cur who hunted mountain lions and bears in her prime. After she was injured once too often, her owner sought a comfortable home where she could live out her days.
Gently, Izzy’s warm breath calls me back, and I pat the short-haired bristle of her caramel head as she arches upward, stretching the skin of her neck taut.
Sitting in this place, listening closely, I remember that the law tells me that the “righteous care for the needs of their animals” (Prov. 12:10, NIV); Indigenous teachings invite me to see Izzy not just as my property but also my cousin; contemplative teachings call attention to the way her nervous energy settles when I touch her, and also how mine does the same; and the heartbeat of the moral cosmos teaches me to care for the least of these. So, I take a short break, and we go for a walk.
This may be how God responds to the cacophony. Participating in reality with us, God perceives all and then responds in customized, creative ways. And as children of God, we can follow suit. Sometimes we are moved to bring all our compassion and intelligence in responding to a grieving friend; or to direct our ingenuity to address a work problem or right a wrong; or to glean from scripture, family history stories, and past interactions answers to our children’s questions. The more we have diligently gathered and the more expansive the borders of our umwelts, the more we have to offer. The more responsive we are to being moved, the more capable movers we become: “Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say; but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man” (D&C 84:85).
Jesus was a moved mover with the words of life at his disposal. Once, amid chaos—a throng of people pressing and crowding in on him—he showed what that meant. I imagine the narrow street—everyone pushing and shoving, people with their wares and animals en route to and from the marketplace, people trying to get to Jesus or someplace else. Jesus was also on his way to somewhere critically important: Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter was on the verge of death, desperately in need of care.
Yet despite that important errand and amid all the competition for his attention, Jesus perceived a touch on the hem of his garment. He described it as virtue, or power, going out of him. I picture it in the outermost periphery of his awareness, possibly as subtle as an air current created by a passing fly. But it was enough. Jesus could return all else to the blurry background and shift focus to the most needful thing: one imploring woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years. He reached her faithful reaching and responded: “Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace” (Luke 8:43–48).
Wholeness is created in this covenant, reciprocal reaching. Watchful and agile, God has the entirety of creation in view. And then God’s attention shifts to one focus, one person. In response to God’s reaching, a single individual joins with God—becoming whole, connected, and transformed. This object of God’s care, sustained by God, then reaches others. Those who, like God, are moved movers, who are connected and perceptive, become instruments in God’s hands. Eventually, through patience and an abundance of grace, we are made whole.
I visualize this movement from cacophony to wholeness by way of a unique population of fireflies. The phenomenon these lightning bugs exhibit has something to do with math—chaos theory, specifically, and how unpredictability acquires order. Also, though, I think it has something to do with theology.
Along the humid banks of a mangrove forest in Thailand, the fireflies wait. Dusk deepens, and a spontaneous flash lights up the leaf litter. A second later, a few feet away, another. Then another.
At first, the flashes seem disconnected and random. But gradually, as the fireflies become more aware of their neighbors, their sense of rhythm syncs. Two spontaneous flashes in the foliage occur simultaneously, then four. The small groups coalesce in the increasing nightfall. Eventually, as if led by a conductor’s baton, the whole forest pulses in tandem like a festive Christmas light show. The disparate internal and external beats merge. A web of isolated individuals joins together in a synchronous energy. In response to the light of others, each firefly becomes both moved and mover.
In gracing, our expanding perceptions reach beyond the umwelts that constrain us. Light moves us and we reply by displaying our light to others. Eventually, we tune in to the harmonious heartbeat of God and all creation. We see the light. Our increasing sense of interconnectedness calls us to expand our own slice of reality to perceive and incorporate, as much as possible, our neighbors’ umwelts.
We see the invisible and hear the inaudible. The deaf hear, the blind see, and the dead wake. In covenant relationship, we join God in becoming moved movers. Like God, we do not stay still: we inspire this heart, move this creature, light up this darkness.
REFLECT:
When did you interact with someone who saw a different piece of the whole than you did? How did that expand your own awareness?
Join us in our Substack chat on Friday at 12pm Mountain time to discuss—and if you can’t make it then, please feel welcome to share your thoughts and read the thoughts of others at any time.
Chapter 14: Oneing
Though it makes little logical sense, I believe we may be simultaneously distinct and one. Jesus demonstrated this possibility by likening himself to a vine and us to its branches. “Abide in me, and I in you,” he taught. “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me” (John 15:4).
Fruit borne from a vine reminds me of an apple tree in our backyard. It’s a four-in-one wherein each branch produces a different variety of apple: fuji, gala, yellow delicious, or red delicious. Before we purchased the tree, the four branches had been grafted onto a common rootstock. When our dog, Izzy, was in her chewing puppy stage, she got hold of one of the branches, peeling it roughly from the tree. Frustrated, my husband rescued the small branch and placed it in a cup of water to soak. A day or two later, he fitted the jagged edges of the tree and the branch together like a puzzle and then secured it all with duct tape.
After eight or nine years and another chewing attempt by Izzy, the branch, still not much more than a twig, still struggles. It has yet to bear fruit. But it lives. Every year it produces leaves, and one day it will surely be strong enough to support an apple.
Jesus is the apple tree, and He’s the vine. We are the branches. Dismembered, we wither and die—a languishing twig on the ground, whose green fragments will fade to brown. But bound up in Christ and receiving nourishment there, we live and produce our own unique variety of leaf and fruit.
That’s oneing. It’s grace.
Jesus has another example: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28–30).
When we roam the grasslands on solitary hills, isolated from Christ, our burdens are heavy. But with a weighty, wooden yoke binding us together at the neck, we become partners. Ironically, the weight is no longer crushing. Two distinct beings, bound by a yoke, we pull together as both separate and one. Like the theological concept of indwelling, wherein the divine presence resides within us, these yoked oxen call to mind one entity instead of two—that as Christ said, “you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20, NIV).
The bird in flight is also separate and one. On her own, she flaps and falls and lands on her rump. She’s a disconnected branch, no different from the solitary ox. But embraced in grace, she flies. She’s gloriously herself and at one with God, with whom she is dancing. She’s gracing.
Yet oneing is not solely confined to a relationship between us and God. Grace, I’m coming to believe, involves a oneing between us and other beings as well. As the mystics recognize, we are moved by others, welded to them, interdependent with them. The natural world exemplifies this.
Imagine the bird in flight joining her flock of friends. They are starlings and together form an enchanting murmuration. The individual birds move together in sync as if they are one super-organism, stretching and contracting, leading and following, all without physically touching. It’s a mesmerizing, choreographed dance, if you’ve ever witnessed one. Some scientists attribute this phenomenon not to avian telepathy, but to simple laws of physics—essentially mathematical representations of creation. Each bird seeks to minimize its distance from the flock by adjusting its position relative to the several birds closest to it, while at the same time leaving the maximum amount of space to prevent midair collisions. Thus, the birds are both separate and one.
Social insects, such as bees and ants, behave similarly. Rather than existing as separate beings, performing their separate little tasks, they behave more as individual cells within a single body. They each have their specific jobs whether that be nursing the young, cleaning or repairing the hive, impregnating the queen, or foraging for nectar. It’s reminiscent of separate individuals in the whole body of Christ.
The field of ecology, too, shows how each cog in creation's apparatus is inseparably bound up with the others. It’s all about relationships and interconnectedness. The sun becomes grass, the grass becomes an ox, the ox dies and becomes dirt, the dirt becomes a tree, the tree creates an apple which I pluck from a duct-taped twig, and the apple then becomes me.
Some up-and-coming companies expedite this interconnectedness by incorporating a deceased person’s ashes into a root ball for a tree or bush. I wouldn’t mind becoming a lilac one day. Or a peach. But even if I end up in a socially acceptable coffin, I hope the white satin lining isn’t the only thing in there with me. I’d like a warm, colorful quilt, because I dislike being cold. And something organic, like roses, because they’d improve the smell down there and provide a little oxygen. Eventually, though, I hope to give up my solitary ways. I’ll diffuse my way through the casket wall and concrete vault to fully incorporate with the vibrant web of life again. I’ll give back to the same earth that has given so much to me.
Our interconnectedness is on full display in creation, and it was also revealed by Joseph Smith. A prime subject of his theological reflections and teachings had to do with sealings, gatherings, and unity—or in Julian of Norwich’s terminology, oneing. “If ye are not one ye are not mine,” it says in the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C 38:27).
Jacob Baker, a doctoral student in theology, posits that Joseph Smith’s vision was one of “a grand, cosmological redemptive unification of the entire human family, indeed, the entire universe, sealed and welded together in one resplendent chain of Being.” Across time and space, on either side of the veil, the work of God is a great “welding together.”
As an analogy, welding is an interesting choice. Baker quotes the scholar and author Jared Hickman, who explains that “welding” is a better term than the usual “melting pot.” In welding, “individual units are intimately related to each other, bleeding into one another at the point where they are soldered together, even as they retain something of their integrity. Whereas the melting-pot . . . denotes a wholesale homogenization whereby individual units are broken down into a single mass.”
Welding, then, is not disappearing into an orange cloud. It’s not erasure at all but a fusing of distinct beings through unbreakable bonds—both separate and one. Baker says Joseph Smith was not interested in collapsing the world’s diversity into sameness, but in exploring “the expansive possibilities of human relatedness and integration at their most intense and sublime.” In other words, not a melting-pot soup but a welded-together work of art.
A major message of the restoration is that it’s not enough to cultivate our separate and distinct relationships with God. Our separateness is a mirage; “they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect” (D&C 128:15). We are in the process of building Zion, and when we inevitably clash and conflict with others, we’d do well to stop hitting ourselves in the face. Doing that makes as much sense as autoimmune disease, where the body turns its arsenal against itself. Other beings are our hands and eyes and knees in this shared body of Christ. For better or for worse, mortality is a group project. If we poison the community well to destroy our neighbor, we are also destroying ourselves.
When we step back, the big picture emerges. Many beings inhabit one living, breathing earth. Astronauts often speak of having an awed sense of global consciousness after viewing our tiny planet from afar. The space shuttle commander Jeff Ashby once explained, “Seeing how fragile the little layer is in which all of humankind exists, you can easily from space see the connection between someone on one side of the planet to someone on the other—and there are no borders evident. So it appears as just this one common layer that we all exist in.”
Just one perfect whole. In the Church we talk about Jesus being perfect and about us needing to be perfect. But perfection in the scriptures implies more an idea of wholeness and completeness rather than flawlessness. What if Jesus’s perfection lies in the idea that He is in perfect relationship with us? As the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr has said, “God loves things by becoming them.” God is incarnate in Jesus and incarnate in us and incarnate in all of creation. Jesus already came and is in all of it—from the “least of these” (Matt. 25:40) to the greatest. What if our perfection also lies in us becoming whole—not just in terms of our individual selves, but as in no longer separate from any other being?
Maybe we were wrong to think we’d pass through the pearly gates in isolation. When the dark glass through which we now see shatters, it may very well be that our world will generously reorient itself around us. The roads will shift into the sky and the houses peel off the pavement. The vague déjà vu will open into a resplendent reality.
We’ll wake up and approach the throne of God through the cloudy orange heaven as one family—bound, oned, and welded to each other through grasped hands. As the naturalist and environmental philosopher John Muir noted, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” We enter heaven with our dead not only because we bear responsibility for them, but also because they are hitched to us.
We’ll discover that all of us are air, water, and ash. We’re flocks of birds, bees, vines, and yokes of oxen. Like Jesus, we’ll bear not only the shame of the world, but also its glory. The metal of our sealed hands will merge with the flesh of our separate bodies—the bond and free, the Jew and Gentile, the lamb and the lion.
Oned in God.
All of us.
REFLECT
How would you approach your life differently if you believed mortality to be a group project?
Join us in our Substack chat on Friday at 12pm Mountain time to discuss—and if you can’t make it then, please feel welcome to share your thoughts and read the thoughts of others at any time. Thank you for joining our book club!