By Rev. Ellen Dionna, MSW, LCSW
I encourage you to become aware of the ten trillion cells within your human form, all working miraculously to make you who you are—ten trillion perfect photonic intelligences in delicate relationship and balance, each holding personal space of its essence of you. Allow your consciousness to enfold the reality that you, your unique and fabulous Self, is also in relationship to every other cell—every atom, every proton and electron in the universe. Ten trillion cells, ten trillion fragments of you dancing!—for that is what each cell is really doing—they’re not stagnant or rigidly stationary, they are humming, vibrating, dancing! All in mystical celebration of aliveness!
In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Jesus says, “Every nature, every modality of being, every creature exists with and in each other.” Somehow in his wisdom Jesus apprehended the totality of quantum understanding. There is nothing separate about us. We are inter and intra-connected through every molecule of our beings—to the All of It, and the All is connected to us.
The rapturous mystery of the universe we call God is not always a comfortable place to encounter or inhabit. Victor Frankl, Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust and gave us his profound book, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, said that to give light one must endure the burning. Rilke says, “let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.” And Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest asserts, “There are really only two paths to transformation: prayer and suffering. But because few of us just walk into a wonderful journey of surrendered prayer, you can really say there is only one path, which is suffering.” We are on a spiritual path together, and we celebrate this in community.
At some point in our lives we must move through choices that will assure our suffering, yet we must commit to that path, for only there can we find redemption and be resurrected into a larger, spiritually purposeful life of compassionate service. We need to both stand in the light of our shining souls and to become friends with our shadows to accomplish this. And we need the spaciousness of solitude, stillness, and silence.
Those ten trillion cells I asked you to consider? While you’ve been reading this, you’ve been breathing communion with essence of sycamore and spruce, of hawk and sparrow, of whale and wildebeast—and more than all the wonder of that!—of quarks and neutrinos and bosons and the whole expansive, ever dancing universe of which you are both fragment and the whole, both human and divine.
