All things by immortal power.
Near or far, to each other linked are,
that thou canst not stir a flower
without troubling of a star.
~ by the poet and mystic, Francis Thompson
I first heard these lines from Fr. Gerard Decaesteker, my Philosophy professor. The truth of these lines and the insights that one can draw from them have so inspired me I have taken them as part of my personal philosophy.
Physics postulates that every electron pulses in sympathetic vibration with another electron somewhere else in the universe. Poets speak the truth when they see the universe in a grain of sand or are drowned by a thousand oceans by penetrating a single drop of water.
Drops of water fall as rain to form a stream which babbles along till it joins a river which always come home to the ocean and then to be taken into clouds to fall again as rain, and all the while sustaining and nourishing life wherever these water drops go. And so does God suffuse the entire creation with his grace.
Physicists, like Einstein and Hawking, have been searching a unified theory or a theory of everything that will explain why there is something instead of nothing. Poets have known it all along. The one and only law that governs existence is love.
It took billions of years for life to emerge. But emerge it did. And it is not at all by chance or accident. It is only the atheist who believes himself an accident. Even the smallest particles, electrons, know they were made for and with another electron to be paired with. And while their movements may seem random, they always pulsate with and seek out their partner.
Electrons were made (or exist), not for themselves alone but for another. That is love in its simplest and purest form. Stated in human language we can easily understand, here is how John expressed it for us:
Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.
kala q from senden q narinig, altho baka nga ‘descartes’.
tsaka sa version na “… you cannot touch a flower without the trembling of a star.” tnx.
Those were for me heady days of poetry, philosophy and progressive theology.
Beautiful!