HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
Charting a New Reformation
Part XXXVII – Thesis #11, Life After Death (continued), Survival is the Essence of Life
It was in the Amazon rain forest that I first discovered just how deeply survival dominates every living thing. Sunlight and water are the prizes which guarantee the survival of plant life. So in that rain forest I saw vines that would snake across the forest floor until they came to the darkest part of the forest, which these vines seemed to know (to use anthropomorphic language) was the location of the tallest trees. They would then attach themselves to these trees and climb them until they reached the life-giving sunshine of their uppermost branches. The vines that accomplished this survived. Those that did not perished. I also saw trees that seemed able to grow a new root out of their trunks that would move them to a spot where sunlight was more available. Survival drove these trees.
On another trip I also became aware of what are called “the sacrificial leaves” of the mangrove tree. The mangrove tree is a fresh water plant, but those growing in the northern Queensland region of Australia on the shores of a tidal river into which the salt water of the ocean flowed in great abundance, had to deal with the issue of salt water if they were to survive. The mangrove tree did this in two ways. First it developed a complicated rootage system, which acted as a salt filter, removing great amounts of salt from the water before that salt could enter and ultimately kill the plant. Still too much salt was taken in so the mangrove tree, through some internal means, directed the excess salt to particular leaves that were designated to receive it. These leaves then turned orange and fell off. As we sailed down the river, we could see orange leaves floating on top of the water, but these leaves did not reflect the color or time of fall foliage. When I inquired about these leaves, I learned that they were called “sacrificial leaves.” They died so that the tree could live. Survival was and is the driving force of all living things.
Back in the Amazon rainforest, we turned from vines and roots to observe the lives of insects. That was when we became aware of an alliance between wasps and ants that was so sophisticated that we suspected that Henry Kissinger himself might have actually negotiated it as a mutual security treaty! In almost every tree where there was a wasps’ nest in the higher branches, there was an ants’ nest lower down. It all had to do with survival! The primary enemy of the wasps was another species of ants called “army ants.” These “army ants” would climb the tree and devour the larvae of the wasps thus destroying their hope for survival into the next generation. The wasps were almost helpless against these army ants for their only weapon of defense was their stinger, which was totally ineffective against a creature as small as an army ant. Among the laws of nature, however, which are largely unknown to human beings, these army ants would not go past a nest of regular ants. So an ants’ nest lower in the tree made the wasps’ nest higher in the tree almost impenetrable and therefore aided greatly in the struggle for survival.
At the same time, the natural enemy of the regular ants was another animal of the forest known as the anteater. This creature could and would climb the tree and consume the entire ant colony as an hors d’oeuvre. This intruder, however, would be attacked and driven off by the wasps that could easily plant their stingers into the body of this larger creature. So the wasps drove off the anteater, while the army ants would not cross the nest of the regular ants to attack the wasps. A mutual defense treaty in the war for survival was achieved. Survival, one learns everywhere one turns, drives every living thing.
Moving from plants and insects to birds for a moment. I became fascinated by the parakeets we discovered in the rain forest. That rain forest is the native habitat to literally thousands of them. The food that keeps the parakeets alive is primarily the fruits of the forest. The nutrients needed for survival, however, are located in the seeds of these fruits. There is a problem with these seeds, however, because they are toxic. The nutrients of the seeds keep the parakeets alive, but the toxicity of the seeds will also kill them. Some adaptation had to be developed for survival. It was not until relatively recently that human beings would become aware of this process. Throughout the rain forest we visited areas called “clay licks,” where the soil is filled with antitoxins. Daily thousands or even tens of thousands of parakeets descend upon these clay licks and in a very systematic way, the parakeets avail themselves of the antitoxins of this soil. In the process, they absorb sufficient antitoxins to allow them to go forth happily to eat the toxic seeds of the forest fruits with no ill effects. It is like parakeets taking Alka-Seltzer before breakfast! The world of nature is so beautifully and so powerfully organized in the service of survival. The single most driving force in the world of nature is the survival instinct. It is built into every living thing. To be alive in this universe is to be survival oriented.
One last illustration comes from our visit to Kruger Park, the largest wild animal preserve in the world. It is located within the boundaries of the Republic of South Africa. Daily the herds of such animals as the wildebeests, the various species of deer such as the springbok and the impala, as well as the zebra, are called upon to feed the predators, the carnivorous animals such as the tigers and the panthers of the game preserve. It is almost a ritual dance that goes on before our eyes. The predator appears, the flock runs and the predator pursues. Finally, the predator cuts its prey out from the herd and a one on one chase ensues. When the potential victim can flee no more, it turns to face its mortal enemy. Using its inadequate defense system, its teeth, its hissing noises and its hooves, the victim battles for every moment of life until the kill occurs. The herd now aware that the predator is fed for the day, stops its flight and begins to graze again as if nothing had happened. The local people believe that these various flocks of animals actually organize themselves by putting the older and less productive members of the flock out on the edges of the herd, where they will more likely become the victims, thus helping the flock itself to survive. Animals flee in order to survive; animals fight in order to survive. The goal of all animal behavior is to survive. The apparent and universal conclusion is that survival is the motivating factor in every living thing — every plant, every insect, every reptile and every mammal. A study of life reveals that “to be alive is to be survival oriented and survival driven.”
Survival is not a conscious thing in the sub-human world, but an instinctual motive in all living things. It is a “given,” a reality that cannot be denied. In effect, nature has planted the drive to survive into every living thing. It is a motivating force as natural to life as breathing. All living things reflect this aspect of life. Only in the self-conscious life of a human being, however, does this survival instinct become conscious. We human beings make conscious decisions as to how much risk we will take on, whether to fight or to flee. Most of our human prejudices are born as a result of this biological reality. This means that we do not feel secure among those we define as “different,” whether that difference is based on racial identity, diet and eating habits, worship practices or even sexual orientation. Differences are translated as threats to our survival. We examined these possibilities earlier when I suggested that what the Christian Church once defined as “original sin,” is finally nothing more than the conscious realization that survival has been universally installed into our biology and that we, therefore, by making our survival our highest value, are inevitably and biologically self-centered. Historically, this universal, human self-centeredness was interpreted as a flaw in our nature and it was understood as having happened to us in a “fall” from some presumed original perfection into a state of inescapable, i.e., ontological “sinfulness.” Much of our traditional understanding of Christianity assumes this pattern. Salvation, as traditionally understood by the church, was regularly presented as the prescription for “sin,” but it was based on an incorrect diagnosis. Human life is not fallen or sinful, it is incomplete. It does not need to be saved, it needs to be made whole. The Christianity of the future cannot continue to live in the definitions of the world that no longer make sense. Reformation will require that the Christian Church accomplish this enormous paradigm shift if it hopes to survive.
For now, however, let us observe this survival nature in all living things and begin to understand what it has come to mean in the one fully self-conscious creature on this planet Earth and use this analysis to raise the question about life after death. Is there something about the human experience in which self-consciousness plunged us homo-sapiens into a new understanding of time that we need to probe? Only in self-conscious human life do we escape the prison of time. With our brains we can recall the past and engage our own history. Only in our humanity can we contemplate life’s meaning and thus speculate on the time that was long before we existed. We begin to stretch toward eternity in that process. We can also anticipate, plan for and be ready to enter the future long before we physically arrive at those tomorrows. The minds of human beings are not bound by time. Does our yearning for life after death find its origin in this experience? Is there something about human life that shares in eternity in which no other living thing can participate? Is life after biological death a possibility only for those who are not bound by time? Or is it a delusion created by our advanced brain? We pose this question now, but then we will move on to look at our next dimension of life in which it might be said that we experience “intimations of immortality.” The search for life after death is deep within the human psyche. Is it nothing more than a pious hope? We shall continue this journey next week so stay tuned.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
The Rev. Elizabeth Oakes, retired, writes via the Internet:
Question:
Perhaps this letter has been gestating for some time. One day several years ago, my doctor (a devout Jew) asked me if I thought Jesus was the “real” son of God. My answer (as I awaited the bolt from heaven) was that no, I thought that his life was of such astounding wholeness that people designated him that way.
Then came your support/endorsement of Gretta Vosper (then I read her books). I’d read your book, A New Christianity for a New World, as soon as it came out. Then came your discussion in your weekly articles calling for a new reformation and Bingo! I was not crazy or a heretic. I have never believed that God would come down and heal one person because of an abundance of someone’s incessant prayers. Why heal one and not another? Why stave off a storm from one location and have it afflict another? Why are these and so many other things attributed to God? Well you gave voice to all my thoughts and doubts. I understand what you are saying about the new liturgies to encompass these new insights and I can’t wait. BUT, what are we to do in the meantime? Most prayers invoke a God who doesn’t act in that way, but I am still called to prayer.
Answer:
Dear Beth,
First, let me thank you for your ministry. I hope you found your life enriched as you sought to enrich others. Parish ministry remains for me the most fulfilling aspect of ordained life.
You ask, “What do we do about liturgy?” I do not discern in institutional Christian life much desire to do anything about it. There must be something about its medieval form that gives meaning to people. Perhaps in worship they can act as if there is some unchanging reality in which they can feel secure. Perhaps they fear, and rightly so, that if worship were done in a modern idiom, the sense of the holy, mysterious and numinous might disappear. Perhaps the liturgical words which we have used over the centuries have become a kind of “mantra” that we simply didn’t want to question. Perhaps to look at what worship is saying intellectually is too painful, the resistance to liturgical change is powerfully present. Perhaps we fear that to think critically about liturgy will be the death of liturgy, and we prefer to live with our illusions. Perhaps people like you and me possess brains that we cannot turn off and when we apply those brains to the words of worship, we cannot escape the conclusion that it sounds like meaningless gibberish and we do not want to embrace that conclusion.
How does one pray that a hurricane will be turned away or that an earthquake will not occur or a tornado will not strike, when in a post-Newtonian world, these things are no longer understood as “acts of God.” Why do we continue in liturgy to pray for God to have mercy – Kyrie Eleison – when we no longer envision God as an angry parent or a severe judge?
Why do we denigrate our humanity and enhance our guilt by assuming that human life has fallen from an original perfection into original sin, when as post-Darwinian people we know that there was no original perfection from which we have fallen, but only a slow and unending evolutionary process, which has taken us from the stage of single cell life to the present stage of complex self-consciousness.
Why do we continue to practice idolatry in the liturgy? Is that not what it is when we process in church with the gospel book elevated, as if to be worshiped before we read it, marching the reserved sacrament through the church, while inviting the congregation to kneel before it in adoration, or addressing our prayers to the all-seeing God who lives above the sky? We are space–age people to whom these practices are both strange and inane.
Why do we resurrect incense for use in worship on special days when its original purpose was to drown the body odors of the unwashed congregation? Does incense make body odors holy? The other argument for the use of incense comes from the days of animal sacrifice, when it was assumed that the nostrils of the theistic God who lived above the sky who delighted in the odors of roasted meat, would also enjoy the sweet smell of incense wafting heavenward. How will the Church speak to the 21st century when it is so deeply mired through its practice in a world that no longer exists?
My criticisms of past and increasingly meaningless practices are greater than my ability to chart the ways worship needs to be understood and practiced in our generation. That is because I have not found contemporary ways to practice the presence of God in the accents of our day. Attempts to do that so often devolve into what sounds more like liberal politics, than it does about the divine-human engagement. I am not opposed to liberal politics, but I do not believe that liberal politics can ever really replace the mystical language of worship.
I wish more people would engage the task of developing new forms of liturgy, and thereby raise to consciousness the real debate about liturgy, and why continuing old patterns or reviving ancient patterns will never lead us into a Christian future. Until they do, I will continue to worship in the traditional patterns that are open to me, swallowing the absurdities, tolerating the anachronistic patterns until something better can be developed.
The late Richard Reid, sometime Dean of the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, once said: “Of course, liturgy should change and the proper pace is about one word a century.” I suspect Dick Reid, who was an able, but very traditional biblical scholar, spoke not only for what the church wants, but also for what the church is capable of doing. That pattern, however, will not help to accomplish that which the church needs to accomplish if it hopes to survive into our dynamic future. The jury is still out on whether the church really wants to be revived.
John Shelby Spong
Read and Share Online Here
Announcements
First Impressions Interview with John Shelby Spong On “Biblical Literalism as a Gentile Heresy”
A close reading of Matthew’s gospel reveals that a literal understanding of Jesus’s story obscures its deep Jewish roots. John Shelby Spong joins Art Remillard to discuss his new book, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy.
Click here to read more and purchase book
Dear friends,
As many of you know, Jack Spong had a stroke last week while traveling to speak. We are pleased to inform you that at this time Jack and his wife Christine are back in New Jersey and Jack is at a rehab facility. He continues to make a good recovery. At a minimum, the expectation is for almost 90% physical and 95%+ cognitive recovery.
We thank you for holding him in your thoughts and all the positive energy you have sent. It was very heartwarming to Jack and Christine and all of us here to see the outpouring of love and kind thoughts.
We will continue to publish Bishop Spong's Weekly Essay Series for the next couple of weeks and then will re-run some of his popular, previously published essays until he is ready to resume his writings. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
