Baron Ponders

A Christmas Miracle Among the Microbes December 22, 2010

Somewhere among our selves there is a miracle.

Your body is made up of somewhere between 50 to 100 trillion cells. Each cell is a living entity. It has function and does work. Your red blood cells gather up oxygen and disperse it to the other cells in the body. I like to imagine them as bicycle messengers racing through the body more for the love of it than the recompense. Your brain cells sedately reach to one another and bounce impulses off of each other like research colleagues in a colloquium.  And nestled among the cells are approximately 10 times their number in bacteria, a somatic lower class providing the grease that keeps the metaphorical gears going.

It’s amazing how they all came together in our body, but it’s not a miracle. We found scientific explanations for how our body came to be as it is. Though these explanations may not be complete they are enough to be authoritative.

Also amazing is what we can do because of this body. We walk, talk chew gum, and make iPhones. All these cells have come together in a gestalt that functions at a very high level of cooperation. But this is not a miracle either.

Looking farther we see that part of this gestalt is the brain, the collection of researchers stuffing away impulses and talking to their colleagues. They, through no fault of their own, create our experience of being. This experience of being has been the subject of philosophy as long as human beings have existed. The idea of thinking about yourself thinking about thinking about yourself is a one of those self-referential contradictions that resolves to nothingness when you look at it long enough. This is a conundrum that will continue to puzzle the puzzlers long after humans have left the building.

Well, is this it? Our very Selves? Is this merely our mind or does it create our very soul? Is this the miracle?

This is no miracle either. It’s pretty great, you have to admit, but it is an emergent phenomena, our brains are sufficient to create it. But now we come to the place where we have taken our cellular selves into something else.

Our experience of our Selves has nothing to do with our existence as cities of cells and bacteria. The experience of our selves is that of relationship. We navigate a web of our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, our bosses and teachers, friends and mentors, our lovers.  We find ourselves in a wider society which we must accommodate as well. This is the weft of our lives. And yet our perception of our existence is that of a solitary individual.

The solitary individual yearns. You yearn.

As part of our existence we deal with issues higher than immediate concerns, even the concerns of relationship. We want meaning. And so we have religion.

Religion accumulates the wisdom and experience of generations. He is wise who listens to its counsel. There are a variety of religions and a variety of religious experiences. These, sadly, require no miracle.

Some of the most sensible religions, such as Taoism deal with things as they are. They urge you to see that everything has two sides, and that your own desires undermine you most. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Christianity, not as sensibly, has a tradition of miracles. Christmas is a miracle tradition. The birth of Jesus has many skeptical and sensible explanations, as do most miracles. Even the stories of His death and resurrection, earnestly reported, have sensible explanations.

What’s important in this case is not the explanation, but the tradition. The tradition of Christmas is that the creator of the universe gave His all to us knowing that we would spit on it. The love of a parent for a child is one of the most intense and powerful connections there is. Jesus is God’s child. This represents a profound gift, a gift that represents the idea of infinite love flowing from the Universe to humanity.

This idea creates a jolly fat man who gives you stuff to make you happy, peace on earth as a viable goal, and the thought that all people, no matter how different from you, are not only worthy of that infinite love but are worthy of your love.

You can’t help but to be infected by this idea. All because people choose to celebrate Christmas.

This is the true miracle. Regardless of your beliefs, this mass of miasmic microbes that is you, this swirly soupy swamp we call our Selves participates in infinite love.

Cool, huh?