Julian of Norwich looked at a hazelnut lying in the palm of her hand, and saw in it a revelation of God’s unconditional love for all creation.
Poet William Blake wrote: “To see a World in a grain of sand/ And a Heaven in a wild flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour.”
Mystical experiences seem to have something to do with ordinary things that somehow open up like a lotus blossom, to reveal a previously unsuspected depth and beauty.
Physicist Frithof Capra described such an experience, in The Tao of Physics: “I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon… when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance. Being a physicist, I knew that the sand, rocks, water, and air around me were made of vibrating molecules and atoms, and that these consisted of particles which interacted with one another by creating and destroying other particles…But until that moment I had only experienced it through graphs, diagrams, and mathematical theories. As I sat on that beach, I ‘saw’…the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy….”
Others have described Capra as experiencing “the dance of Shiva”—the Hindu god of destruction and reconstruction.
For me, such a moment of revelation came through a Mandarin orange.
A group of us had been sitting together around a table discussing the implications of evolution for traditional Christian theology. When we broke for coffee and snacks, I picked up an orange from a bowl.
And suddenly, unaccountably, I saw that simple orange as the culmination of 14 billion years of evolution.
Everything that made up that orange—its colour, its scent, its taste—came into being with the universe itself. Every cell, every molecule, every atom, every quark and meson and gluon and boson, emerged from that initial eruption of something out of nothing.
Before that beginning, there was nothing; after that beginning, there was everything. Nothing has been added since then, nothing removed.
Fourteen billion years gathered together into a humble orange.
As it rested in the palm of my hand, it seemed to glow with the inner fire that flamed into being 14 billion years ago.
It felt like a miracle.
And I became aware that if an orange is a miracle, so are we all. For the elements of that initial flaming still burn in us, too. We too are the culminating achievement—but not the final product—of the cosmos. Everything that has gone before has made this moment possible. Whatever is, only is because the components of the universe have been arranging and re-arranging themselves for 14 billion years. And will continue to do so.
And so I am related to the trees and insects. To the great whales and the invisible plankton, to the cowering field mouse and the thundering lion, to Julian’s hazelnut and Blake’s grain of sand. They are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.
We are bound together by an evolving universe. Hallelujah!
