Outside of Nothing ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
September 14, 2025
This past Monday, I was invited to a friend’s home with a group of colleagues to participate in a retreat. It was a beautiful day, spent largely outdoors, with an ideal blend of social time, catching up on ministries and kids and grandkids, great food, and activities conducted in silence.
As we have done in the past, we silently constructed a mandala. We were each invited to walk through my friend’s yard, and choose items that spoke to us. If we saw something we wanted to include in the mandala, we needed to collect eight of it – eight leaves, or eight raspberries, or eight green beans. The finished mandala is pictured on the cover of your order of service. We created this out of nothing, in silence. We didn’t consult with each other, we didn’t plan, and we didn’t move anything once it was in place. The mandala was added to, item by item, but nothing was ever taken away. And somehow – and this for me is always a mystery – we knew when it was finished. We simply, silently, stopped. Somehow, we achieved wholeness in our design, and somehow we connected with that sense of wholeness. We stood in silence, at one with our creation and with each other.
Mandalas are an ancient spiritual symbol. The word ‘mandala’ in Sanskit means circle, or sacred center. They are constructed as tools for meditation, as ways to seek balance and wholeness. Mandalas are present in many cultures. We associate them with Asian cultures: Buddhism and Hinduism, but also consider the medicine wheel in Native American spirituality, or a rose window in a Christian cathedral. Regardless of where they are found, mandalas represent the universe, and the interconnectedness of all forms of life. We humans everywhere seem drawn to the completeness and wholeness they offer.
Throughout history, mystics are the people who most readily sense that interconnectedness, who feel the oneness of everything.
John O’Donohue, the late Irish priest and poet, wrote this: “When you are in the eternal, you are outside of nothing. You are within everything…”. (Walking in Wonder, p. 170)
Outside of nothing. The mystics across all cultures and all time will tell us that we are all part of the whole, part of the universe, whatever our name for it, whether we call it Love, or God, or the Tao, or the One Direction. What do names matter, really?
The mystics tell us that no one, no creature, no tree or rock, is excluded. We are all part of the whole, part of the design, inside the circle. “Everything is waiting for you,” wrote our poet, David Whyte.
Recently I rediscovered a fun poem from one of the ancient Muslim mystics, known commonly as Hafiz.
“if God invited you to a party,” Hafiz wrote,
“and said,
‘Everyone in the ballroom tonight will be my special guest,’
How would you then treat them when you arrived?
Indeed, Indeed!
And Hafiz knows that there is no one in this world
Who is not standing upon God’s jeweled dance floor.” (Love Poems from God, Daniel Ladinsky, ed., p. 158.)
The late renowned Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, formulated the spiritual and philosophical condition that he named “Interbeing” to describe our deep interconnections with everything in life. He told us, “Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.” This is a concept that can be hard for us, at least those of us who do not identify as mystics, to comprehend. But as we think about it, after all, we are told that we are made out of stardust, from the Big Bang. And we are products of the same nutrients that create plants: proteins, and minerals, and of course, water. Given how much of our body weight consists of water, we could understand that we owe our existence to clouds, couldn’t we? And that our breath contributes to creating clouds?
The Master told the Apprentice in our story, “We are all just small stones and little flowers searching for our sun. What you have seen under words, behind many eyes, and beneath all cries is the one direction.”
The message is everywhere, all around us, from wholeness created in a suburban back yard to the words of the most enlightened people who live among us. As we Unitarian Universalists note in our seventh principle, we are all part of the interdependent web of all existence. One of our new core values is Interdependence. We learn this with our heads, and intellectually we can accept this oneness. A moment ago, I relied on science to explain the concept of Interbeing. But so often, we struggle to feel it in our hearts and in our souls. What does it mean to us emotionally to be told that we are, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, part of “the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One?” (Emerson, The Oversoul)
Emerson goes on to tell us that when this sense of Oneness flows through our affections, as he put it, it is Love.
In those silent moments in my friend’s yard, as we stood contemplating our mandala, I was filled with love: for my friends, for the moment itself, and for all the small pieces of plant life, some perfect, some eaten by insects, some turning colors as we approach fall. Each tiny petal and blossom was contributing; to have removed any one thing would have diminished the whole. It was easy to feel love in that moment, as we experienced being part of the whole.
Sadly, in today’s political climate, that sense of loving connection feels rare, and fleeting. We are in an era filled with noise, clamor, and anger, when such moments are unusual. Those moments of oneness, when we glimpse the whole behind our voices and our eyes, as the young apprentice did in our story, are fleeting.
What we have to face today is that we are living in a time when wholeness is not understood, is not prized, is not seen as a goal to be attained. To the contrary, it seems as though almost daily we see increasing division here in the United States, and it seems that division is the goal.
This week saw multiple episodes of gun violence, including a shooting at a Colorado high school. And a polarizing political figure was shot and killed while speaking during a public appearance in Utah, on a college campus. And we have been unable, so far, anyway, to reach any sort of consensus on why these incidents take place, or who should be blamed. Accusations, of course, have been flying in all directions, overheated rhetoric spewing from everywhere, including from the President of the United States. Violent events instantly create a wider wedge between us. Tragedies that once might have united us seem to only push us further into our own corners.
Two weeks ago we honored the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall on the Gulf Coast. We remember the nationwide response of ordinary people who travelled to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the months and years that followed, first to help rescue complete strangers, and then to rebuild. This was love in action: a recognition that what had damaged one region was damaging us all.
“No man is an island,” wrote John Donne back in 1624. He continued,
“Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind…”
This past week also saw the 24th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Each year we vow to never forget. But how many of us are pausing to remember who we were as a country on September 12: the sense of unity we felt, the love for our country, the admiration for the first responders that we shared in the days and weeks that followed the attacks? Love was present in those days, despite the horror and the anger at what had been done to us. We saw love in action as police and firefighters raced to save people. We experienced vigils, public gatherings, and an international outpouring of sympathy and shared grief. We felt the loss as one people.
Where has that love gone?
Today the loudest voices are those that will try to divide us, and diminish us. The messages of the mystics, that nothing and no one is outside the circle, that the universe is held in a force of love, appear to mean nothing to people in power today. They appear captured by the concept of the zero sum game: that if I lose, you win. And winning seems to be the only thing that matters – winning ever more billions, ever more votes, and of course, most importantly, winning ever more power. There is no room for perceived weakness, for empathy, or for compassion. There is no time for recognizing the humanity of each other, remembering that, as Hafiz wrote, “there is no one in this world
Who is not standing upon God’s jeweled dance floor.”
But the message of the mystics is that love is stronger than hate, that wholeness is the natural way of the world, the Tao, stronger than all the forces that work to gain power by dividing us. We remember Martin Luther King Jr. saying that ‘hate cannot drive out hatred, only love can do that.’ (sermon, “Loving Your Enemies”)
My friends, the times are hard. We don’t quite recognize our country these days; nor should we. We must not become accustomed to the hatred, the divisiveness that surges around us today. Instead, we must have faith in the way of love, that we all exist within this great circle of love, within the wholeness, the oneness of the creation, where we are outside of nothing. And may we each strengthen the circle by offering our love, our compassion, and our welcome, to all those whose lives touch ours.
