"The Holy One, E Pluribus Unum"

"I am a physician, a scientist, schooled in the rational search for how things work. Growing up I was enthralled with new discoveries and theories concerning the origin of the universe and the evolution of humankind. All my life I have been immersed in a culture of thinking, proving things through experiment and deduction. But I was also brought up in the Christian faith, Presbyterian to be precise. And at times it has been a struggle to reconcile my everyday scientific view of life with my church-going religious frame of mind. I might have given up the religious viewpoint but during my formative adolescent years, my mother, a Sunday school teacher and general seeker after truth helped me to look for deeper meaning in both church and science class.

"Even so, for most of my life the two perspectives on life, the religious and the rational, pretty much kept to themselves, compartmentalized in my brain.

"But lately I have been interested in a concept that is both rational and, to me, mystical. The concept is called “emergence”, loosely defined as the study of how complex things can arise without external direction from the interactions between simple units. I don’t have time tonight to fully explain this concept but it deals with many aspects of the physical world and particularly biology. It can be used in studying how our bodies develop from a single cell by repeatedly dividing and specializing until we emerge as a community of a trillion cells. These cells have had no external director, only internal instructions of DNA. The miracle of our development is in the way our cells talk to each other, interacting through chemical signals to produce our varied tissues, fingers, noses and hearts. No cell knows what a heart looks like but collectively the cells of our body somehow produce us. That is emergence and the more you study it the more awesome, mysterious and miraculous it becomes.

"In similar fashion, our brains are communities of perhaps 60-80 billion individual cells that arrange themselves and interconnect in incredibly complex networks, again without external blueprint. Nerve cells just do their jobs as dictated by their interaction with other nerve cells. And their interaction by way of electrical impulses and chemical signals is what produces our thoughts and actions. The individual cells are not smart, have no thoughts of their own but their complex electrical symphony gives rise to you and me.

"This is powerful stuff! Each of us perceives himself or herself to be a person. We are somehow connected to our body and brain but our subjective sense of identity, our thoughts, dreams, curiosity, plans and skills emerge not from the physical cells of our bodies and brains but from their activity and communication. In a sense we are not made of atoms, we are spirits, for want of a better word, created by the dynamic interplay of billions of cells in our brains and bodies. And that is where my scientific approach begins to merge with my religious world. I find that I can accept this ethereal, insubstantial spirit as being just as real as the many other emergent phenomena that science deals with. Real but mystical nevertheless.

"And there is one more extension of this concept of emergence. As we come together in groups our spirits interact with each other. What emerges is a community of spirits, not just bodies. I learn from you and you learn from me, as we care for each other, our spirits intertwine, I live in you and you in me. The community that emerges from our give and take with our fellow humans can be seen as a real though intangible being with a life of its own. A higher order being. The nature of this being is determined by how we treat each other. If our interactions with each other are governed by love, the being that emerges is a Holy One

"My idea of God is in the simple tautology: God is Love— a statement that can be reversed and read as: Love is God. In my Christian view Jesus is the human manifestation of Love. It is Love that binds us when two or three are gathered together in His name. E pluribus unum. Out of many One.

"So here I am a scientist talking about spirit and creation. Having exhausted myself in all of this rationalization to help my scientific mind find common ground with my heart, I am reminded again of my mother’s advice.

"After a tour of Turkey many years ago she became enthralled with Sufism and particularly Rumi’s Path of Love. So I will end with her advice in two quotes from Rumi:

“Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart, let go of thinking.”

“Submit to love without thinking.”

"Love is the Holy One. The Communion of Saints. The body of Christ. Amen."

Reflections shared with members of Temple House of Israel, the Islamic Center of Shenandoah Valley, and several Christian congregations in Staunton at Temple House of Israel at our fourth in a series of Lenten Season Interfaith gatherings, Wednesday, March 29, 2017.