We are One of One

How would you draw God if you had to?

I was sitting on the counter in my kitchen back in high school, talking with a friend when this question came up.

Would you draw him as a person? Wait, would it be a him? Wait, would it even be a person? If not a person, then…what?

My mind jumped quickly to the way the Bible refers to us all as the body of Christ and I imagined thousands, no…millions of people swarming into the form of a giant lumbering human. Yikes. That felt more like a scene of a supervillain materializing in a movie than it felt like God. That can’t be it, I thought.

Then, really without my effort, I saw something that was more like a shape and even more than a shape, a…movement, a motion. It was something like rays of light expanding out it every direction into a void. Something like this:

Only, it was…growing, like, continuing to expand.

And then the image was gone. But, wow…I felt it.

It made sense to me. And it made sense of things. And it has continued to make sense as I have experienced more of life, learned more from scientists and spiritual teachers from across time and places.

This particular image is of a neuron in the retina. This also makes sense to me. This shape/motion seems to repeat like a fractal at every scale in our universe.

Does it intuitively make sense to you? Does this image/shape/motion of God resonate with you? If this is a new idea to you, I encourage you to sit with a while and see how it works or doesn’t work for you.

One of the things I love most about this image of God/us is how freeing it is. I have found it so liberating to see myself as one “ray” of the whole. So I am connected to the whole and I am also individuated—both are equally true. If this shape of God/us is real, that means, kind of by definition, my truest path is into the unknown. (Sing it, Elsa.) If I am, if each of us, are following our inner compass, it is pointing us each in a different direction. (Sing it, Ms. Musgraves.) There seem to be some things we can all be unified in about the way we go—with faith, hope, love, joy, kindness, etc—but where exactly we take that is meant to be expansive. Therefore, it’s not our job to tell others what to do but to empower them to do it. Holding space for ourselves and for each other to follow our rays, wandering as they may be, is love.

To me, love is both the gravitational force holding us all together and at the same time nurturing, protecting, and sending us out as extensions of that love. Love brings us together and love liberates.