We should not be afraid to embrace our questions and doubts about who we are and why we are here. Our human capability to think and reason and to be aware of an inner self is a remarkable gift of our evolutionary heritage. With this gift we can question earlier answers – even those that have been handed down to us as authoritative and iconic. This is summarized as a challenge in a poem written by Tor Littmark, a Lutheran pastor in Sweden in 2004 shortly before his death and quoted by John Shelby Spong in one of his weekly essays on his web site.
Dare to question, dare to test things,
Dare to seek, search unconfined.
God’s embodied in your question.
Already God has you in mind.
Dare to question, dare to feel doubt,
Dare to take the path you chose.
God is already deep inside you,
Closer than you dare suppose.
Dare to question, dare to say no to
Far too simple, glib replies.
Dare to wait, and dare to waver.
God will still be at your side.
Dare to question, bold and fearless.
God will still believe in you.
Life in you is God’s own purpose.
Already God has you in view.
Dare to question, doubt and wonder.
You are loved, by God retrieved.
You are longed for, seen, discovered,
Free to live and to believe.
Loren Bullock
July 1, 2009
My early years were as a research physicist and then as a Physics teacher, before my 32 years with IBM in the early days of the computer. So I appreciate the scientist’s passion in the search for new knowledge. But as I have grown older, I increasingly feel a sense of awe and wonder at the life we are a part of in this amazing universe. So words of George Weigal, written a few years ago in the Washington Post* are most meaningful to me.
“The created world, rightly understood
is a mystery to be loved,
not a puzzle to be solved.”
Loren Bullock
November 28, 2006
*Washington Post, September 3, 2000
“. . . know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”
John 14:20
We now understand that none of the four Gospels were written as biography or history, but were written forty to sixty years after Jesus’ death to give meaning to the life-changing experiences that the early Jewish and gentile followers of The Way could only explain as still experiencing Christ as a presence in their lives. And those words written so long ago have continued to touch people and change their lives for the past two thousand years and continue to do so today.
For me, the quotation from John above has become the kernel of my understanding of who I am. It has become my “Bible verse” that has opened up to me who God is. I gave up long ago attempts to “explain” God. One cannot use words to describe what is beyond words, beyond space and time, but can only be experienced. And that experience is within myself! God is in me!
I am not one who has gone around quoting Bible verses. A few years ago when I was sitting in church during a lenten meditation service, I picked up a pew Bible and (uncharacteristically, I should add) opened it randomly toward the end of the book and my finger landed on the above verse. I read it and reread it, and in a slowly dawning recognition, I recognized the simplicity as well as the wide implications of those words for me. It summarized years of reading and studying with one short statement. And so it has become like a mantra for me, a reminder of who I am. To me it says it all. It is my creed, my statement of belief.
But it is also a mystery. It does not explain. It only allows me to glimpse the wonder of life and realize that I am a part of it. I can only stand in awe. And join with thousands of others who have also experienced that mystery!.
At first I read that verse as “God is in me,” and marveled at what that meant. But then I came across a quote from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, “When you love, you should not say, ‘God is in my heart,’ but rather, ‘I am in the heart of God.’”
“Know that I am in my Father, and I in you, and you in me.”
Loren Bullock
August 30, 2009
In trying to describe God we are forced to use words and language to describe experiences that are really beyond words. No wonder that our explanations, our creedal statements all fall short. We even try to locate God in space and time. The early stories had God in heaven, up there above the stars, occasionally walking around on Earth talking to people. But this three-tiered cosmology with a heaven above where the gods live, the earth where the humans and animals live and a nether world for the dead is no longer credible. With our new cosmology of galaxies and incredible distances of space, God must be beyond both space and time. With our post-Darwin understanding of how life has evolved, we can no longer accept that human beings were once perfect but became imperfect and needed to be rescued or saved.
We now know that we humans have recently evolved in a long and gradual process from earlier forms of life. Each of us therefore are beings who share with our animal forebears most of our body structures and traits and instincts. And since the basic trait of all life is survival, we share many of the animal survival instincts such as fear of strangers and resulting tribal instincts. But something unique seems to have evolved in our human brains – the development of imagination together with the development of symbolic thinking, including language. This means that we humans can picture and communicate images of the past and even describe images of the future that are not even real. Moreover, we have developed a sense of self, an awareness of an inner self, a “me”. Plus an awareness of the inner self within others. It is this self awareness that is the source of our religions as well as our anxieties and fears. Our religions in many ways give us security in an insecure world. And our imaginations and self-awareness give us the ability to create art and music, and tools and technology that so enrich our lives. But most significantly we also have the ability – even the need – to develop relationships with other human beings that we know as love. And we discover that the “me” inside me, the love that is inside me, is much more than a collection of animal instincts. But we are only at the beginning of becoming fully human. We have a long way to go, for our strong animal instincts keep getting us into trouble.
That ancient story of the fall of Adam and Eve was an attempt to explain the evil in the world. Today we recognize that it is our evolved animal instincts that create so many of our problems as we interact with each other. We react with suspicion and distrust, anger and hate, and even violence. We go to war. It is only as we push ourselves to overcome our animal instincts and reach out to heal and support – to love – that we can become more fully human. It is that spark inside us, the “me” that is inside me, that can override those powerful inborn instincts.
That “me” within me has a constancy in my life even though my body is forever changing, all the time renewing itself with new cells. Meister Echert, the 14th Century mystic, said, “My me is God.” Yes, that is where I find God. He is not up there or out there. God is within me. The author of John’s Gospel has Jesus say, “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” The God that was in Jesus is in me! Bishop John Shelby Spong writes, “The power of love flows through all forms of life, but it ceases to be instinctual and comes to self consciousness only in human beings. That power of love is also a part of who God is for me. That means that the more deeply I am able to love, the more God becomes a part of me.”
Loren Bullock
June 30, 2012
“I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” ( John 14:20)
“Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
my part is not knowing,
but looking and touching and loving.” (Mary Oliver: Why I Wake Early, 2010)
An Anthropologist’s View, Ian Tattersall
from Masters of the Planet: The Search for our Human Origins, by Ian Tattersall 2012, pp 62-63.
In the very broadest of meanings, every organism has a sense of itself versus the other. From the simplest unicellular creature on, all living things have mechanisms that allow them to detect and react to entities and events that are beyond their own boundaries. As a result, every animal may be said to be self-aware at some level, however rudimentary its responsiveness to stimuli from outside might appear. On the other hand, human self-awareness is a highly particular possession of our own species. We human beings experience ourselves in a very specific kind of way – a way that is, as far as we know, unique in the living world. We are each, as it were, able to conceptualize and characterize ourselves as objects distinct from the rest of Nature – and from the rest of our species. We consciously know that we – and others of our kind – have interior lives. The intellectual resource that allows us to posses such knowledge is our symbolic cognitive style. This is a shorthand term for our ability to mentally dissect the world around us into a huge vocabulary of intangible symbols. These we can recombine in our minds, according to rules that allow an unlimited number of visions to be formulated from a finite set of elements. Using this vocabulary and these rules we are able to generate alternative versions or explanations of the world – and of ourselves. It is this unique symbolic ability that underwrites the internalized self-representation expressed in the peculiarly human sense of self.
April 18, 2012
Ian Tattersall, PhD, is a curator emeritus in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he co-curated the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins.
We are used to hearing about the deity of God, the “wholly other”, the all-powerfulness of God. But when we try to describe what he is like, we use personal and human terms such as a compassionate God, a loving God, a God of justice, even an angry God, and of a God who speaks to us, who hears, sees, and touches us – words that we associate with the best that we experience in our human relationships. And that is natural, because our language is a human creation, and those are the only words we have to describe the highest of relationships – our relationship with God.
But we also are told that we are created in the image of God! That suggests that those highest human characteristics must belong to God as well. If God has these human characteristics – only more so – is it not appropriate to speak of “the humanity of God”, that part of God which includes the best and highest characteristics that we see in our own humanity?
And isn’t that what we see in Jesus – a human so full of concern for others, so quick to speak out for justice, so close to God that he called him Father – that we glimpse what it means to become fully human. And the only way we know to describe that is to say that God was in Jesus. We humans are still very early in our own evolutionary development. There is much in each of us from our evolutionary ancestors. Our animal instincts of hunger and survival are still very much embedded in our humanity. We have a long way to go to become fully human. Yet the God that we see in Jesus is also in each of us! Yes, those strong animal instincts often crowd him out – but that is our challenge. To strive to become fully human.
“So roll up your sleeves and put yourself in gear. . . Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. . . As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, ‘I am holy; you are holy.’ You call out to God for help, and he helps – he’s a good Father that way. But don’t forget, he’s a responsible Father and won’t let you get by with sloppy living.”1 Peter 1:13-17 (Peterson)
“Trust steadily in God.
Hope unswervingly.
Love extravagantly.”
1 Corinthians 13:13 (Peterson)
“Know that I am in my Father,
and you in me,
and I in you.”
John 14:20 (NRSV)
Loren Bullock
November 18, 2011
I am a human being, a unique unit of life at a particular moment in time and in a particular place in space. I am one of billions and billions of other units of life living at this moment – other humans, as well as dogs, mosquitos, ants, fish, and even maple trees and rose bushes – each one a living entity. Each was created at an earlier moment from other life, having evolved to our present forms as a result of successive creations over millions and millions of years. Each is a part of a vast family of living things that we call life. I stand in awe to be a part of it.
A basic characteristic of life seems to be a drive for survival. Over the millennia, in spite of catastrophes that have destroyed individual lives, life itself has never been snuffed out but has continued to evolve. In addition, each unit of life seems to have a drive for individual survival, whether is it a plant or a bacterium or a bear or a human. Very rudimentary forms of awareness or consciousness have developed even in the “lower” forms of life that help provide protection or assist in providing nutrients, both needed for survival of the individual. But eventually each individual dies – but life continues.
As a human, I too have all the drives for survival that other life has. But something more has evolved in me. I not only have a consciousness or awareness of my surroundings, but I also have a self-awareness – an awareness of me! That is an astounding development. To be able to think about myself as an individual in space-time, to even ask the question, “Who am I?” To be able even to begin to comprehend the universe and my place in it!
Is not this the beginning of the experience of that “something more” that we have named, “GOD”?
Loren Bullock
March 3, 2009
Excerpts from What Does It Mean To Be Human? By Richard Potts and Christopher Sloan
Published by the National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 2010
Companion book to the Hall of Human Origins exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum
OUR BRAIN
The primary center of our “humanness” is in our evolved brain with its intricate wiring and especially with the development of the frontal lobes which play such a significant role in emotional responses, memory, and motor skills, including the ability to control small, complex movements of the hands, fingers, and facial muscles. Moreover, a well-defined area is associated with expressive language, and, in addition , the frontal lobes are associated with awareness of our surroundings and the ability to plan.
Much of what we consider the core of our individuality – our self-consciousness, our memories, our ability to interact with others, even our ability to get a joke – depends on the functioning of our brain. Indeed the whole universe of human cultural phenomena – our belief and value systems, our complex social lives, the myriad complex calculations in the economic and scientific realms, the flourishing of creativity in the realm of art and imagination, all astonishing and uniquely human characteristics – would not exist were it not for the brain. [p. 102 – 103]
OUR SOCIAL BRAIN
Chimpanzees and other great apes pass on learned traditions across generations, leading to behaviors unique to particular social groups – sometimes called great ape cultures. Humans, however, are by far the most reliant on cultural inheritance which rapidly generates and communicates existing and new ideas and behaviors, all mediated by the brain. Our cultural abilities are often contrasted to our genetic inheritance, but the two are closely intertwined. Genetic inheritance acts on the storehouse of biological variation, of which only a small subset can be coded in the DNA inherited by any one individual. Since this kind of inheritance can be passed on only from parent to offspring, genetic responses to survival challenges usually require many generations to catch hold.
During human evolution, though, our genetic inheritance has encoded the capacity to grow a large, adaptable, rapidly working brain that can instantly spawn new behavioral and mental possibilities. Our genetic inheritance includes the capacity for language, which is itself a complex code for generating almost limitless communications at short notice compared with the timetable of genes.
Opportunities for meeting the world in new and diverse ways grew exponentially when these two forms of inheritance, genetic and cultural, joined forces. The human brain became intensely social. The activities and thoughts of one brain became unavoidably entangled with many others. The brain is thus much more that a structure contained inside the skull. Our brains belong to the people around us as much as to ourselves. [pp. 110 – 111]
HUMAN INNOVATION
The persistence over time of early human ways of life and technologies is mind-boggling when compared with pace of change today. The evolution of our capacity to accumulate innovations laid the groundwork for building technologies far beyond a basic toolkit, and for diversifying the possibilities for our species beyond the habits of handaxe makers.
Two basic patterns of toolmaking – the Oldowan and Acheulean traditions – endured from 2.6 million to 500,000 years ago, with hardly anything new added, except for handaxes and other large cutting tools around 1.6 million years ago. These technologies were defined by elementary procedures of flaking stone, which served our hominin ancestors well for a very long time. Then, intriguingly, variety and innovation began to blossom, with a particularly rapid expansion in creativity within the past 100,000 years.
As the handaxe tradition met its demise, technology started to become defined by careful preparation of stone, a wider variety of raw materials, and a smaller and more diverse toolkit. Specialized implements and equipment allowed human ancestors to prepare pigments, process wild grains, store food, and capture fast and dangerous prey. The pace of innovations multiplied exponentially. Rather than lasting for a million years, newer technologies endured for tens of thousands and then thousands of years. Today rapid obsolescence is assumed. We have become entirely dependent on technology for survival, whether we are getting our energy from nuclear reactors or a campfire. Human innovation and reliance on technology are hallmarks of being human. [p. 117]
When anthropologists talk about modern human behavior and its origins, they are concerned with four dimensions: technological, social, ecological, and cognitive. Regarding technology, modern human behavior involves innovation and the ability to respond to the surroundings in a variety of ways, which are responsible for the diversity of cultures, technologies, and styles of making things. Socially, it involves the ability to form networks of individuals and groups that can exchange information, ideas, and resources. Ecologically, modern human behavior refers to the capacity to use and alter the immediate surroundings, enabling people to disburse to new regions and to use and alter a wider swath of habitats. Each of these dimensions also implies a cognitive acuity that is greater in degree, if not kind, than that of earlier ancestors. [p. 118]
It is one thing to be inventive; it is another for the novelty to spread and to persist for any length of time. There are several factors necessary for such spread. Population density must be large enough and a strong network of social contacts is essential. But environmental change can also affect the momentum for change. About 360,000 years ago in East Africa began a long period of about 300,000 years of strong variations between dry and wet climate affecting landscapes and resources. It was during these times of stress that the early indications of human innovation were first expressed. The unchanging all-purpose handaxe was supplanted by a smaller more mobile technology. Wider social networks and group exchange occurred on occasion, and we see the expression of complex symbolic behavior. Mobility, planning, new types of tools, and contact between groups could help reduce risks and heighten the chances of survival in the most difficult times. [p. 124]
But repeated droughts in Africa between about 140,000 and 70,000 years ago may even have reduced population density below a threshold required for the spread of innovations, and prior innovations may even had disappeared. But when the northern ice sheets grew to their greatest extent, beginning around 33,000 years ago, migrating groups of our own species had already become so competent at surviving difficult times that the population didn’t crash. Instead, these early colonists crowded into the most favorable foraging grounds, as reflected by a great number of archeological sites. As population density rose, ideal conditions were created for the spread and accumulation of innovations. And a “creative explosion” in Europe [e.g, cave paintings, adornment practices, and burial rituals] was indicative of the dual factors of environment and population that helped fuel the accumulation of innovations.
Eventually, the basic toolkit of ancient hominins gave way to the myriad toolkits and cultural variety of H. sapiens as it spread into new environments. Dependence on technology was but one part of a package that made human beings so successful at this time. Yet no element was more important than our imagination, which gave us the ability to contemplate our role in the universe and to plan for the future. [p. 125]
THE ROOTS OF IMAGINATION
Symbols, the stuff of art, music, language, and ritual, are so integral to our lives that it is hard to imagine life without them. Daily routines like selecting clothing and jewelry to wear, reading the newspaper, chatting with friends, and going to school or work would not exist in a world without symbols. It is with symbols that we communicate complex ideas and with symbols that we know what is happening beyond the range of our own vision or hearing.
The most powerful symbols of all are those of language. Every human group uses arbitrary symbols and a language for transmitting information and learned behaviors among individuals and across generations. Language enables humans to think about the past and the future, to imagine distant places, and to describe things, such as ideas, that we cannot see. Language is the essential medium through which we share vision, knowledge, meaning, and identity.
With symbolic language in place, our ancestors were able to communicate in new ways. Not only could they now reach across time and space but they could also share the secrets of their minds – their hopes, dreams, and memories. They could also delve into abstractions, such as efforts to explain the ways of the world and their very existence. Symbolic communication lies at the root of imagination. [pp. 126 -128]
Language and symbolic behavior added an entirely new dimension to our ancestors existence. Symbolic thought allowed us to harness the power of consciousness – one of humanity’s most prominent defining qualities. Language provides a way of processing mental images and assigning meaning to objects, events, and abstractions that need not be visible. An amazing aspect of language is its ability to process sensations about the mind itself and to locate mental activity where it actually occurs, inside each one of us. We can symbolically identify and distinguish our own mental life and personal experiences from those of others. We can imagine and talk about “my mind” and “your thoughts.” We can think about thinking and our own identities. Thinking, emotions, and the whole spectrum of mental experiences can be understood and used as tools that serve our own concerns and those of others, conferring an immense survival benefit. [p. 131]
A SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE
The music we play, the language we use, and the art we make, now as then, are all symbolic behaviors that help establish group identity. Using symbols to communicate social status and group identity was probably one of the original purposes of personal adornment. Without saying a word, one can communicate simple ideas such as “I’m already married,” “I’m the chief,” or “We’re a team.”
In contrast to the first major dispersal of Homo, typically ascribed to Homo erectus, symbolic behavior was critical to the success of the dispersal of Homo sapiens within and beyond Africa. The ability of people to create and reinforce group identity permitted humans to diversify culturally and to adapt their ways of life – and their identities – to the new conditions they encountered. Humans had developed a means of creating a cultural, symbolic universe that reflected survival conditions in the immediate present but was also full of other possibilities. We are a species ready to apply its gifts for imagining and innovating, which united us in the human condition and allowed our dispersal to all corners of the planet. [p. 137]
Loren Bullock
May 10, 2011
Over the centuries, this statement has usually been in question form, asked by the Church, meaning, “What do you believe about Jesus?” And the Church struggled over the years to provide specific answers. The early church actually developed many answers as they tried to understand who Jesus was in life, and how to explain his resurrection as first experienced by his disciples and later by others. The first “Christians” were Jewish and still worshiped in synagogues. So the earliest answers were related to their Jewish history, retelling their Jewish stories but now relating them to Jesus. That is why there are so many parallels to Old Testament stories in the Gospels. But by the second century, the Christian church was separated from its Jewish roots, and the church began to write new answers, often in the more philosophical terms of the Greek world, and there were many such attempts. An early and familiar one to us is known as the “Apostles Creed.” By the third and fourth centuries, the Church officially and formally created a statement of belief to replace the various prior ones, and we often repeat it as the “Nicene Creed.” And so people were told by the church what to believe about Jesus. And many people today still ask the question as, “What am I supposed to believe?”
But the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation changed the way people thought. People again began to ask questions. And many new creeds were written. Some of the more recent ones are also in the back of our hymnal. Several Protestant churches still require a creedal assent for membership. In that sense, the Methodist church is not creedal, for we encourage each person to discover and experience God individually, using written creeds as helpful statements in forming our understanding. We are even encouraged to write our own creeds.
But ultimately words and explanations about God are inadequate to explain the unexplainable. God cannot be contained in words. God is to be experienced within us. God is to be lived within us and in the relationships we have with other people. To some of us, God comes as a sudden blinding experience like that of Paul. To many others, there is a “slowly dawning recognition” of the presence of God in our lives and a realization of his steadfast love for each of us. In either case, our response is to accept that love and live our lives in service of others. As a follower of Jesus, our role is to be that of a servant.
So what I believe is not so much in what I say, but in how I live my life.
Loren Bullock
February 26, 2007
M Loren Bullock 