The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis is a story that is strikingly true of humankind. No, it’s not history or biography. But it’s an ancient story that must have been told around tribal fires, and it is as true today as it was then. Those early Semitic people recognized that their inner nature included feelings that had the potential for both good and bad for them as individuals and as a tribe. It is still a basic part of our being human even today.
We now know that we humans are part of a 13.7 billion year creation story that is still evolving, and that each of us still has many of the strong survival instincts within each of us that we share with all other life. Who has not felt that rush to strike out when threatened? Maybe we use words to hurt, but the news is filled with more physical reactions – we even kill. Sexual abuse is more widespread than usually reported. Those animal instincts within us are strong indeed. They come from those early evolved sections of our brains that we still share with reptiles and early mammals.
But our human brain evolved with frontal lobes (located right behind our eyes and forehead), significantly developed only in humans. One can say that it is the frontal lobes that make us human. Consciousness and self-awareness arise there. It is in the frontal lobes that we choose among the competing drives of our mammalian and reptilian sections of our brain to override and control their animal instincts. It is there that we create ideas, construct plans, make complex decisions. It is in the frontal lobes that we understand the difference between good and evil and make choices accordingly. Those early Semitic people recognized that the potential for evil is a universal imperfection within themselves, with resulting estrangement from God. This is the truth in the Adam and Eve story with its poetic apple. Our new creation story of cosmic evolution is simply an updating of that old story. And it’s no less sacred.
Listen to a more recent poet, Carl Sandburg:
Wilderness
There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood . I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me, and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and look and double-cross.
There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun. I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue watergates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis.
There is a baboon in me . . .clambering-clawed . . .dog-faced . . . yawping a goloot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blond and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting. I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.
There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chatanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes. And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.
O, I got a menagerie, under my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart – and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where. For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.
Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers (1918)
Loren Bullock
August 23, 2014
Note: Long ago, I had a recording of Carl Sandburg reading one of his poems. He read very deliberately, pronouncing each word distinctly, hissing a final “s,” stretching out a final “o ” or an “m.” He used pauses which I think are the meaning of the ellipses above (the . . .). So I hear that strong baritone voice when I read his poem. Maybe you can too.
I am approaching my 90th birthday. I am only now beginning to realize that my spiritual journey is a lifetime process of learning and experiencing and becoming. I am still learning how to articulate to myself how I am a part of this awesome universe of constant creation of stars and galaxies and the astounding and continuing evolution of life that includes even me. And it is only in these recent years that I am experiencing a coming together of answers to my searching and studying. But even now, such answers are still only a glimpse into the marvelous mystery of who we are.
When I was 42, my daughter, Susan, died suddenly at age 16. Amidst the grief, I remember a real feeling of “belonging to humanity,” that I was a part of a universal human experience. And a year later, I felt compelled to put my feeling into words. That little essay is attached below.
As I reread it today, I am struck at the simplicity of those words and how they pointed even then to my current understanding. But I remember my feeling some uncertainty at the time about the singleness of the concept of love as the answer. Yet those were the words I wrote then. They helped assuage my grief, but I don’t think I fully accepted them. Yet now I read those words and say, “Yes!”
But that has been typical of my spiritual journey. It’s been a “slowly dawning recognition,” My early doubts and questions have had many tentative answers through the years. For me it has taken a lifetime to reach what to me is a understandable and meaningful way of relating to the world.
A turning point for me was some years ago when I saw John 14:20 as a summary statement for me of my relationship to God: “Know that I am in my Father, and you in me and I in you.” The love that I experience in me and around me is my inward experience of God. I also experience God as the living presence in the world around me. I experience God in my oneness with the continuing creativity throughout the universe. I am part of something grand and glorious. Yet there is still a mystery in the wonder of it all.
That makes all the difference in how I live my life in relationship with all other life and with the world itself. But the key word in the mystery is Love.
Loren Bullock
July 12, 2014
SUSAN DIANE BULLOCK
She was born February 18, 1950, Bloomington, Indiana. She died April 12, 1966, Lexington, Massachusetts. Age 16.
We took her so for granted day by day. We worried with her about her rebuffs and failures, and we rejoiced in her accomplishments and successes. So we wonder why. We wonder about a life that ends so quickly after sixteen years.
She had struggles to overcome which we never had. Yet she still developed. Through it all, her personality grew, her sensitivity to others deepened, and her understanding of those around her increased. She was on the threshold of breaking through to adulthood. Yet it was not to be. All the reaching and the stretching, all the growing and the learning. What was it for? Why was she here?
The answer is simple. She was here to love and be loved. She gave her love to each of us and to those around her. And she knew that she was loved. So her life was complete after all. Our dismay at its shortness cannot diminish its fullness.
Her life was love. Can anyone’s life be more?
M. Loren Bullock
April 12, 1967
This was written on the first anniversary of Susan’s death. She had physical coordination and speech problems that were very possibly the beginnings of the same muscular dystrophy that was later diagnosed in her mother, Polly Kidder Bullock (1922-1989).
“You did not choose me. . . I chose you.” John 15:16
That single verse makes all the difference. During Jesus’ lifetime, those first disciples were drawn to Jesus, and then each one chose to follow him. But after the resurrection experience, Jesus was seen with new understanding. The disciples and then others saw that in Jesus they were seeing God. So John, writing sixty or seventy years later, has Jesus say to his disciples, “You did not choose me; I chose you.” John is writing to those “followers of the way” of his time, reminding them that God was really doing the choosing, even though at the time the disciples thought it was all their own choosing.
And so it is today. The good news is that God has chosen each one of us. God is life. Each newborn baby is God’s choosing. That’s what baptism celebrates. How thrilling it is to be alive – to be chosen by God.
Knowing that makes all the difference!
Loren Bullock
December 30, 2011
As a Docent at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, I have had the opportunity to observe many visitors as they first enter and begin to look at some of the exhibits. Interestingly, more than a few come down the escalator into the main exhibit atrium and immediately turn left into the museum store. But of those who come into the large atrium, some will walk through the exhibits without stopping to look at any exhibit in particular. Others will stop and start to read the descriptive legends about each item. This is quite normal behavior. Some people like the detail and others want a more general overview. In fact I find myself using both approaches in a new museum – wanting a general overview first and then a more detailed exploration of some parts that seem more interesting to me.
But I have been particularly interested in watching how people approach one exhibit at the Postal Museum. It is the re-creation of a very short segment of the 1673 Indian trail that went from New York to Boston, becoming our first Post Road for carrying the mail. At first for a horse and rider, the trail was soon widened to a wagon road, then for stage coaches, and later paved for trucks. In fact the New York to Boston road today is US Route 1, but street signs in many southern Connecticut towns and cities still say Post Road.
The exhibit entry looks like a dark tunnel to one’s left that draws people in. There is a pinkish wall to its right with descriptions of how it was all started in 1673 by the Royal Governor of New York City when he sent a rider to blaze a trail to his counterpart in Boston. As a Docent in the Museum, I am sitting at a table in the center of the atrium where I often greet visitors and point them to the Post Road entrance as an exhibit to start with. My observation is that by far the majority of visitors will walk right past the wording without so much as a glance. Often my last words to them are, “Read the description on the pinkish wall.” Not more than 1 in 10 (my estimate) will stop to read the description,
There is no right or wrong in this. It is just the way people approach things. But it makes me wonder if this may be reflecting a change in the way people learn nowadays. When I was growing up, books were our source of information. We read books and newspapers and looked things up in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Today we get our news and watch history on TV, smart phones, and computer tablets. Most of it is visual and aural. Are museum visitors perhaps walking past the written descriptions because more people in our culture today tend to ignore reading as a means of imparting knowledge?
Just a thought.
Loren Bullock
May 6, 2014
When we do something bad, we get punished for it That is a lesson most of us learn as children. We also learn that sometimes when we do something bad, we get away with it although that may only be temporary. But our society is built with a system of justice that metes out punishment. So it is not surprising that early societies explained disasters as punishment from the gods. When the early Hebrews who worshiped their God in the temple in Jerusalem saw their temple destroyed and were themselves carried off to Babylon, they saw that as punishment from God for their unfaithfulness. Even today we still seem to think that our God of love and justice is also a God of punishment.
But we’ve learned a lot about how nature works. For example, we know how hurricanes are formed with wind and rain and floods. We know how earthquakes and volcanoes function. We’ve also learned that as humans, we have evolved very gradually over many millions of years from earlier life forms. Each unit of life – a rose bush, a tree, a bacterium, a bird, a bear, a human – each has a birth and a death, and exists with risk of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Death is always a companion of life. Natural disasters in which people get killed are not punishments from God. For in nature there is no punishment, only consequences.
As humans, we also learn very early that our behavior can have consequences. A crying baby gets fed. When we fall down, we get hurt. When we cut ourselves, we bleed. When we go outside in winter, we get cold. And we learn to adjust our behavior accordingly. We learn about consequences. We learn as young children even to use our behavior to attain desired consequences.
But we humans also learn that the consequence of bad behavior is punishment. Punishment imposed by a higher authority such as a parent, a teacher, a political entity such as a city, a state, or a nation – all because of “rules” set by that higher authority. This is not nature, but humans imposing punishment on other humans. And we humans generally accept such punishment as part of belonging to a family or a society. Up to a point. We humans – and our societies – can very easily carry punishment to excess, even to extreme. It can become arbitrary, cruel, vindictive, even deadly. We’ll call it deserved, and label it retribution. We’ll label it just and call it war. We humans have become very skilled at this. History is full of examples, Hitler and the holocaust being one of the more recent, the Inquisition in the name of the Church being so tragic.
This is because we humans share with all of life in a struggle for survival. It’s in our DNA. Protection mechanisms have developed such as fear of strangers and tribal instincts. These animal instincts are very strong in humans for we have evolved only recently in life’s time scale. In addition, especially in humans, with our amazingly evolved brain, we have a highly-developed sense of self, a self-awareness, a sense of being “me” And with that brain we also have an imagination that can create images of the past and even of the future. We are aware that we will die. All of this engenders insecurity in a world where bad things happen. We let our imaginations coupled with our selfish animal instincts take over all too easily, and we become cruel, vindictive, belligerent, and we even kill. And whether as an individual, as a parent or stranger, as a judge or president, as a nation or a religion, we choose to let our animal instincts take control of our thoughts and actions. It is a choice made by humans, a choice that has consequences that always affect more than a single individual. They can affect a family, a society, a nation! The source of much misery and hurt in the world is us.
But it need not be. For we humans with our sense of self awareness can also experience something “more” in our relation to others and in our relation to all other life. We have evolved with a capacity to love. We can rise above our animal instincts and begin to develop relationships based on mutual respect for each other and on love for each other. Is not this what Nelson Mandella demonstrated to us? Is not this what Jesus showed and continues to show to us? We have the capacity to become more fully human, to rise above those feelings of anger and hate and vengeance. We must make the choice.
So I say, “No!” God does not inflict punishment on us. We humans do it to ourselves and to each other. Our goal – as an individual, as a society, and as a nation – must be to live each day letting that spark, that gift of love, that spirit of God within each of us control our actions and thoughts. Only then can we begin to reach our potential of what it means to be fully human. And isn’t that the vision that Jesus gave us when he talked about the Kingdom of God on earth?
Loren Bullock
February 7, 2014
Jesus was born many years ago, and many of our Christmas carols tell of the manger and shepherds and wise men. But Christmas is not something long ago. Christmas is an event that happens every year in the present. It is happening now. And the carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem speaks to us so beautifully of what Christmas is. It is written in the present tense. Read the words aloud. Hear the angels sing. Let your heart accept the Christmas gift of Christ being born in you.
O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie;
above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light;
the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
For Christ is born of Mary, and gathered all above,
while mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.
O morning stars together proclaim the holy birth,
and praises sing to God the King, and peace to all on earth.
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given;
so God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin,
where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.
O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emanuel!
Loren Bullock
December 24, 2013
When we are little, we have to learn to walk, to learn the alphabet and to read and write, to ride a bicycle. We have to learn to be social, to share toys, to take turns. We have to learn to play games, to cooperate. We even have to learn to love. For our animal instincts that have evolved within us are very powerful. In common with all of life our survival instinct creates our self-interest, our selfishness that creates so many of the problems for ourselves and our societies. That includes the sexual instinct – especially in the male – for our selfishness can too often dominate that too. We have to learn to live beyond our animal instincts, to learn to live for others, to live outside of ourselves. Growing up is one long learning process.
But I am observing that growing old is in itself a learning process. Learning to adapt, learning more patience, learning new attitudes and behaviors . Somehow, I guess I thought that old people had learned it all and wouldn’t have to learn any more. But I am discovering that learning must be a continuous process that we dare not stop. In growing old, we have to learn to let go. We have to learn to accept change. We have to learn and accept that others will be making decisions for us. We have to learn to accept dependence on others. We have to learn balance between “I can do it myself” and “Thank you for helping me.”
It’s not easy. For it is not easy to give up our independence. In fact we should never let it be easy, to give in to dependence too quickly. We need to rebel against it, to strive to keep our individuality, our pride of self. But we discover that other people really do want to help. So we need to learn how to accept that help and be gracious about it.
But part of the learning is that growing old is very personal. There is a sense of aloneness to it. That it is something that is actually happening to me. But that is really nothing new. It’s just that our busy lives surrounded by family or coworkers didn’t always give us time to be alone with ourselves, and now we are learning that we must do that too. But that’s also an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to continue learning about the world, but more importantly to learn about yourself – that special being you have been growing up with all these years.
Loren Bullock
December 14, 2013
Nowadays I am always somewhat surprised when I look at that old man in the mirror looking back at me. The features are familiar. I have watched his hair thin out and turn to gray over the years. I remember him loooking back at me when I first started to shave. He was fifteen or so then at Mount Hermon School in the Connecticut River valley of Massachusetts. He looked back at me in his Navy Ensign’s uniform in World War II. I’ve watched him age, but I never seemed to feel the same corresponding change in me. In so many ways, I am the same me of that little boy of five, or that shiny new Ensign aboard my first ship in a convoy to Europe, or as a young Assistant Professor of Physics at Hamilton College, or as a Branch Manager of the IBM office in Dayton, Ohio. I am still the me that is curious about everything, fascinated by the stories of history, and in awe of the complexity and wonder of life itself.
I recognize that the old man in the mirror has been all those things too, but I always think that I am standing up straighter, striding out with my head up, standing at military attention at the playing of the National Anthem – until I see him in the reflection of a store window. So although we are good friends and know each other pretty well, there is still a disconnect.
So when you see him on the street walking with a cane, please recognize that there is really a different person inside, a person who is very much alive and interested in all the people around him, and who is grateful to be a part of this amazing thing called life with its gift of love. I accept each day to be enjoyed, but also to be used. I am still struggling to be a better human being each day.
So I salute you my friend in the mirror, as he salutes me back. .
Loren Bullock
September 24, 2013
Praise can be an active response for the many gifts that we receive every day if we but open our eyes to them. Gifts of love, gifts of life, gifts from the world around us. But let these exquisite words of the poet express what our heart can feel:
Praise What Comes
surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved
of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise.
talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books:
that are your food and your hunger, nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps
you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,
finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another
ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?
– From The Light of Invisible Bodies, by Jeanne Lohmann
[Suggestion: read it aloud, paying attention to the punctuation]
Loren Bullock
August 23, 2013
[Evolution describes the development of life as a process of continuous creation that moves from simple cells to clusters of cells to incredible varieties of complex life forms. Following is a short description of some of the amazing detail of that process. It is excerpted from Journey of the Universe, by Brian Swimme and Mary Tucker, 2011, pp. 60-63. ]
Learning
The ongoing deepening of life’s complexity happens because life is able to adapt to a vast variety of conditions and to remember these adaptions, sometimes for billions of years. Nearly everything of fundamental importance in life depends upon the power of adaptation and of memory. Consider foods. Grains, for example, are composed of many different sorts of complex organic molecules. When we eat them, they need to be carefully broken down and then woven together in a new way if they are to become part of our bodies. This complicated physiological process was worked out by trial and error hundreds of millions of years ago by cellular ancestors who are now long gone. But their accomplishments were not lost. They were remembered. As we eat, the grain is transformed into our skin, our muscles, and our organs only because life remembers its central achievements.
The grains we eat are transformed by many proteins where an essential player is known as cytochrome c. Cytochrome c was assembled for the first time billions of years ago and is inside our body now because the informatin for its construction is held in the genetic patterning of our DNA. Life did not hand down the actual molecule through the generations. Instead, life handed down its essence in the form of a pattern of nucleotides. Using this pattern, our bodies create these proteins anew, which then enables us to transform the grains of the fields into our flesh and blood. The grandeur of this event is easily missed because our consciousness is not instinctually aware of the processes involved or of the effort and energy that have been poured into these processes.
Life’s capacity to adapt depends upon the occurrence of random changes in the DNA molecule. Different patterns of nucleotides appear by chance, which lead to different proteins within the cell. Possibly millions of such proteins were generated in this way before one molecule, later named cytochrome c, enabled its possessor to survive, which led to the genetic patterns for cytochrome c spreading throughout the population. This two-step process – where a vast number of trials are conducted and where the successful models can be remembered genetically – is what enables us to calmly munch on a slice of bread and transform it into the tissue of our hearts.
Life’s creativity is a groping and sometimes chaotic process, but it is also a learning process. . . . We humans certainly had nothing to do with the construction of the physiological processes involved. . . . It was rather life’s whole process of adaption and memory that was responsible for this new ability. It is life as a whole that learned to digest its various foods.
When we today remember that the energy of our lives comes from the original flaring forth of the universe, and that the atoms of our bodies come from the explosion of ancient stars, and that the patterns of our lives come from many ancestors over billions of years, we begin to appreciate the intricate manner in which life remembers the past and brings it into fresh form today. Life adapts. Life remembers. Life learns. . . .
Seeing
We can begin to appreciate something of the changing nature of the universe when we realize that even our means for sensing the processes of the universe are part of these processes as well. The way we see, the way we hear, the way we feel – each of these senses have been drawn forth and deepened for hundreds of millions of years. We see only because the Earth has long been inventing the sense of sight. And the process is not yet done. . . .
Five hundred million years ago, the trilobites constructed an eye using the mineral calcite. Their visual organ was a bundle of calcite rods, each rod capable of passing light down its axis without refraction. Thus the trilobite was able to see in the direction of each of these rods, a primal form of seeing that proved so successful we find it even now in the compound eyes of flies and lobsters.
An entirely different form of seeing was developed independently by worms and by fish. This eye was formed not with a hard mineral but with water, and . . . because we humans share a common ancestry with fish, we have the same kind of eyes.
With the emergence of the various senses, life is groping forward in an effort to see and taste and touch the world. No matter how advanced the sensory organ, the universe is never done – for there is alway more to see, always more to hear. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr has estimated that complex eyes have been constructed, independently, at least forty times since life began. Nothing will stop life’s quest to absorb even more of the universe’s infinite depth.
We do not enter a finished universe. We do not enter with a completed form of seeing. Scientists have articulated the details of evolution, and because of this we can, using our imagination, begin to “see” back in time. . . . Once we are filled with such knowledge, our eyes can look at a honey bee not only as a small buzzing creature, but as a particular wave of life that includes the trilobites great dramas half a billion years ago.
These early eyeless worms lived in the sandy bottom of the shallow oceans for many millennia. But then they developed a way of entering a much larger world that included visual information from events hundreds of yards away from their small worlds.
Such is the nature of our moment now. Humans have lived in various civilizations such as Imperial Rome or Han China, and in each case the citizens regarded their civilization as “the whole world.” But we have discovered a new kind of “eye.” With conscious self-awareness, we have developed a new kind of sight – insight into deep evolutionary time. Our vision now extends back through billions of years of evolution. With this new and powerful way of seeing, we find ourselves blinking in a thrilling and yet unsettling light. Rooted in the center of immensities, we open our eyes and see each thing ablaze with billions of year of creativity.
Loren Bullock
July 26, 2013
M Loren Bullock 