THE EASTER OVUM

It used to be that one only knew one’s origin was one’s mother.  You might have two or more mothers:  one to give birth and several to give care.  Some of those mothers might be male. The identity of the inseminating father was ambiguous.   Now we know and can prove the identities of the fathers -- the only problem is making them cough up that child support check.  That’s one cynical take on modern society but it certainly is not the only one confusing us.  

With modern medical technology, a person may be conceived in a petri dish, implanted -- not necessarily in the womb of the ovum producer and maybe even in the womb of the grandmother or another surrogate mother (no one has been brought to term inside a chimpanzee that we know of, but it might be possible since cow ova can be carried in rabbit wombs), carried to term and birthed either in the natural progression of things or with a chemical trigger, and delivered either with a lot of muscle effort or with a knife.

But now there’s an additional mother possibility: your mitochondria mother.  To review, we all recognize that the double helix of the chromosomes unzips and separates, one side in the mother (ovum) and one side in the father (sperm).  The father’s side is only that little half-zipper but it has a propeller attached so it will travel.  It’s a biological Zodiac boat.  The mother’s side gets the house: the cell, because it stays and waits.  All the sperms with their code message go buzzing up the Great Canal and one breaks into the house.  He is welcome and zipped-up with the waiting half of the 23 chromosomes.

There is furniture in that House of Ovum, little blobs of what might once have been one-celled animals who got pulled through the wall of the motherhouse.  The most crucial inclusions are the mitochondria, which were probably pulled in long ago when an Ovum went it alone as a bacteria.  The mitos are power paks with their own set of 37 genes on one chromosome: Neversplit batteries.  They do not unzip and rezip.  The Ovum, when its nucleus is re-zipped, quickly transforms into a blastosphere and then an embryo, a fetus, an infant, and a toddler . . . according to its own 23,000 gene pairs.  But it is dependent on the energy of those mitos.  If -- as in giant airliners -- the batteries, the mitos, have probs, the animal will suffer.  One in 6,000 people has something wrong with their mito genes.  They don’t burst into flames, but they have trouble and may abort.  

One can only inherit mito genes from one’s mother.  I’m rather proud of mine.  My mother was an energetic woman, though her mother was a little compromised by her environment.  My mother’s mother’s mother was a vigorous person.  My niece does not have the same mito genes that I have, because our relationship is through her father, my brother.  But she has plenty of vigor and she is tough-minded as well.  She’s working on graduate degrees in animal fertility, teaching as an adjunct, running a business shearing sheep and camelids, and doing AI.  She’s proud of her calves, though none of them have her genes.  She WAS the inseminator.  She fistfucks cows, right out in the public and with fertile consequences.  

She would easily understand this next part of the story.  Nuclear transfer is in principle one of the easiest methods of genetic engineering. In this case, they are talking about taking a donor egg and then transferring the nuclear genetic material from the parents' fertilized egg into that donor egg -- that is, moving the re-zipped chromosomes into a new house with better furniture.  In more medical language, it's taking the cytoplasm from one woman (including all the mitochondria in that cell) and grafting into it a whole diploid genome from a cell with two other parents. Mitos have their own separate chromosome, only one with 37 genes that change only by mutation, never by re-zipping.

There are many other complexifications with chromosome codes in the nucleus, which are more varied than anyone expected.  An excellent overview is at  http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html  This new technique doesn’t change any of those things and will not “fix” problems with the nuclear chromosomes, whether those that determine the actual structuring of the embryo or those that control the unfolding plan as the baby gestates.  Only recently have researchers realized that each “pair” of genes on the zipped-up chromosomes do a little negotiating between them to decide which one will be dominant or whether they will compromise in some way.  Also, we now see that there are “epi-genes”, a kind of sleeve around each chromosome that may influence how things turn out.  It’s possible that “living” in a different house from the one where the female half of the zipped-up chromosome was made will seriously affect the nature and development of the embryo.  It’s a sort of micro-case of an unique individual adjusting to a new environment.

This neglects the influence of the interchange with the gestating mother, who is sending chemical messengers like hormones as well as oxygen and nourishing metabolites.  Humans are not perfectly designed and stamped out but are organic art forms with many variations, including that of the beholding party who tries to interpret what they see before them.

This is Easter when the Northern Hemisphere is teeming with recombinant fertility as well as budding mitosis.  Whether you think it’s about a rabbit, a God fertilizing a virgin in order to create a Son -- only to have the beholders kill Him, or whether you feel it’s all about Easter egg rolls and marshmallow peeps, the actual planetary event -- which is the tipping of the earth’s axis -- goes on without any control from us.  In the past we’ve only been able to behold it with our feet on the ground and that’s a good thing, just as poetic as watching from outer space.  Our imaginations run wild.  A cave becomes a birth canal for a rebirth.  Winter becomes the grieving of a mother who has lost her daughter to the dark sex of the God of Death, and then Spring is the rejoicing of that mother when her daughter returns.  They don’t tell us that Proserpine is pregnant, but my guess is that she is and will give birth in the fall, harvest-time.

I just watched Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller, Prometheus, about the origin of the Alien creature.  It is "riddled" with puns and metaphors about death, birth, insemination, gestation, and the nature of the human being.  An android can have sex but not babies.  It has no chromosomes.  This belongs to the preceding “Endarkenment” of Good Friday.  The movie begins with a dark swirling video of broken double helixes and ends with Lizbeth going off on a new adventure with the android’s head (a computer) in her gym bag.  Ken Kesey:  “The need for mystery is greater than the need for answers.”  We won't run out of mystery.

EASTER AS A STAIRWAY

The text for this little Easter post is a video from TED. How hip is that?

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_humanity_s_stairway_to_self_transcendence.html

Remember “Harmonic Convergence,” the idea that a lot of forces would come together and change the world? Well, I guess that’s about as good an explanation of Easter as any. I’m reading in several different “domains”: brain theory, cosmology, sexuality, ecology, and a few others. I’ll post the list of thinkers later on, but this TED talk by Jonathan Haidt is where I want to begin today.

The way to handle so much info is often by using an image, which is what Haidt, a good teacher, does very well. His controlling metaphor is a staircase that goes up from a door and on the other side is a flood of light, presumably transcendence or “heaven,” which might be either a state of mind (bliss) or a real “place” of some sort. It’s a reward and it seems sacred. It’s a variation on Jacob’s Ladder.

George Macdonald, Universalist minister and children’s book writer, used it in “The Princess and the Goblin.” There is a castle on a mountain with a stairway that winds up to the tower dwelling of the many-times-great-grandmother. That’s where the Princess goes. Under the castle is a passageway that winds down through the mountain in coal mining tunnels. Haidt’s stairway that goes up is matched by Orpheus’ passageway into the earth, an image that often appears in Cinematheque’s video work. For Haidt, the sacred is “up,” but there are also cultures -- going back to neolithic times -- that find the route to the sacred is “down” into a cave. That’s where Curdy, the brave miner’s son, goes to confront the goblins.

Stairs going up into an unsuspected space is sometimes said to be a woman’s dream and certainly I dream it a lot. The stairs I dream about are always barn stairs, open 2 X 12 steps, dusty with chaff. Sometimes they rise from an old grist mill or threshing floor (I can hear the water wheel and the grindstone) and sometimes an empty church with no pews, old board floors, and a simple lecturn on a low platform. What I find upstairs is most often an Edwardian hotel corridor. Sometimes a greenhouse atrium with sunlight flooding in.

There are some concepts where I would depart from Haidt. I think he misinterprets memes to say they are “parasites,” implying they are outsiders and toxic when in fact, they are small units of culture that operate in a genomic way: triggering potentials that were already there, part of the creature as well as the culture. Of course, a bad match can cause as much trouble as a mutated gene.

More dubious is his illustration of evolution as “big ‘uns eat little ‘uns.” That reinforces the idea that “fitness” is about “power over” rather than the value of “fittingness” which is about reaching accommodations and coexistence in the same ecology. We used to have a fish pond at the entrance to the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. In the spring we’d go catch trout to put in there. By August there was only one big fish because he ate all the littler ones, but then, unless we added food, the big fish starved to death. Haidt’s green blobs that eats all the blue blobs had ought to hope for blob food arriving from elsewhere. Blob God? Blob manna? In truth, survivors are those who fit the ecology and who can change when the ecology changes -- learn to eat something new or find ways to trim their appetite or leave.

Maybe Haidt is somehow contaminated by his context, which is a university campus. He worries about “free riders.” People who don’t pay their way or earn their keep. I think this kind of thing is what leads to the locked doors, the airlock that keeps new ideas from creeping in. The idea becomes even more evil when it begins to advocate the elimination, punishment and criminalization of whatever categories the current authorities define as unnecessary.

In the end, Haidt put aside, understanding and supporting the operation of the brain in its currently evolved state, which is meant to give us connections to each other through compassion and understanding, should also give us a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe” in which we learn that it is our participation -- the going to and fro, the climbing up and descending down -- the motion through the universe that gives us our sense of the sacred. If glorious columns of light strike us on the head and light our way, it’s of no use unless we open our eyes to see. The most precious chalice is the face of a beloved person. On the other hand, if we are in the pitchy dark even deep beneath the sea, if we open our eyes wide we might see the bioluminescent bacteria outlining a diving sperm whale. Best of all is when you reach out a hand in the dark and find another hand to clasp.

They say our brains have evolved to handle the social challenges of a group of about 150 to 200. That’s about the size of an old-time Blackfeet band or a comfortable church congregation. The present researchers say that brains are double and in conversation with themselves. This is a different kind of split than sacred (up) and profane (down). The brain side that controls writing (opposite to the side of the hand with which you write) has a centre called by some “The Interpreter.” It accepts all the sensory information sent to it, sorts it according to what it knows (rules), and tells the person what to do. Somewhere else in the brain, evidently on the other side, is “The Confabulator.” It is a story teller and its challenge is to explain what happens in terms of stories. Easter is on this side. The Interpreter (theological religion) knows that now is scientifically spring, knows the sun is coming up earlier, knows that there is birth all around and has received dogma about it. This is where the New Atheists pick their quarrels. The Interpreter can get stuck in schism.

But the Confabulator (spiritual poetry) says it is sacred, it is reason to rejoice, there is meaning to life (join the dance) and it is beautiful. Why get stuck in one story when there are so many wonderful tales? Haidt says it's “self-transcendence” and calls it ecstasy. The Confabulator embraces us all. Glory hallelujah!

A GREEN STICK

THIS IS A RERUN. The sermon was preached at South Park UU Fellowship in West Linn, Oregon, on Easter Sunday in 1997. It’s slightly abridged.


This Easter we have a current event to deal with as we consider a two-thousand year old tradition in addition to a three or four billion year planetary event. Let’s look at the most recent first.

In a San Diego mansion a group of people decided to commit suicide. They were mostly computer programmers -- intelligent, talented, loved by their families. They were influenced by a tall, maybe 70-year-old, conflicted gay man -- a singer, teacher and PK (preacher’s kid) maybe suffering from terminal liver cancer. Wearing Nikes, black clothes, short hair, and plastic bags, they followed Hemlock Society drug protocol and died ever-so-neatly in K-Mart bunkbeds with Target down comforters, purple cloth diamonds spread over their faces and chests.

This would never happen to Unitarians. In the first place the social activists among us would object to the Nikes on grounds that we should support Third World labor by boycotting shoes made under poor working conditions. In the second place many of us think that dressing alike is fashion tyranny. In the third place we are far too individualistic to get the same haircut, do the same thing at the same time, or shop at the same place. We refuse to lie down neatly and die.

On the other hand, we do include many computer programmers and gays, we have been excited over the comet Hale-Bopp, and some of us have been very much intrigued by New Age ideas such as eloping with the dome-headed, bug-eyed operators of UFO’s. Thank goodness we are too anti-authoritarian to ever be described as a cult. Many of us are simply too sceptical to be taken in by sci-fi fantasy.

Though we are founded on the principle of freedom of thought, I object to believing in the preposterous, I object to defining religion as believing in things that are not true, I object to defining community as a group that goes apart from the rest of the world and defines itself as special or privileged, and I object to events that distract us from our real allegiance, which is to the planet from which we arise. These points are at the heart of what I have to say this morning.

Christianity has always had a dangerous edge where inspired poetic theory overtakes mythic story or recorded history, creating a spurious aura of miracle. Thus, over and over everywhere recurs the human phenomenon of a reform leader who is captured and killed by dominating autocrats in the name of keeping order. In Eastern Europe, in parts of Africa, in the southern United States where slave leaders tried to push towards freedom and on the Western prairie where Native Americans tried to preserve their lands, the story is archetypal. We easily recognize it.

The inspired notion that created Christianity and set is apart was the idea that another realm exists in the spirit -- entirely unseen -- and that from this spiritual realm one leader had the indestructible power to survive and then to prevail over this world. Thus Jesus, the man, is killed but the Christ, which is part of God, survives and will return to set us “free.” Some Unitarians have always said this is fiction. Unless you want to call it metaphor.

It’s easy to slip this Christian conviction, which many in our society claim to believe literally, over onto the idea that a UFO traveling in the wake of a comet can carry beings who will come and save us, as this cult believed. Unknown, nonexistent, virtual worlds can be described any way you want. After two thousand years the people in charge of the Christian story have got a pretty good grip on it. Anyone who claims to know better than the Christian establishment story is probably not going to find a big audience. In short, declaring yourself to be the returned J.C. is probably not going to work as well as declaring yourself the returned E.T.

We are used to the institutionalized church celebration of Easter which has grown up around reenactment of the last days of Jesus. Now we have added commodification. I see in the paper there is available a little set of dolls complete with a crucified Jesus, a mourning Mary, and an open-doored tomb with a little plastic stone slab for the body not to be found upon. I don’t know how play with such dolls might shape a child’s mind. Certainly it would be interesting for a therapist to overhear. I wonder what Brother Cadfael, that practical monk of the PBS mystery series, would say.

It seems to me at once trivializing and interiorizing, making something liturgical into something merely subconscious, patterning for self-sacrifice and impossible survival, pre-conditioning for cults. Of course, a modern cynic would simply say it was a marketing opportunity about like the figures for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, complete with ambulatory gargoyles. That was a redemption story, too, wasn’t it?

Easter has two parts: Good Friday’s endarkenment and then Sunday Morning’s enlightenment. Where are the dolls of transcendence? Are they those little gold cherub pins made popular by the Brown family, who wore them to the OJ trial to symbolize their murdered daughter? Are we to take Nicole Simpson as a sort of Christ-symbol, someone crucified and now returned as a pure spirit who hovers over her children? Religion always ends up in such a mix of opportunism and suffering, scholarship and obsession, institutions and insanities. But my darkest thought is that once again we are, as Annie Dillard put it, making itsy-bitsy statues to itsy-bitsy gods.

As Christianity has gone around the world, transforming itself as it passed the boundaries of countries and through the eons of time, the Easter ceremony has become in some places a masochistic and terrifying pageant of people being actually nailed to crosses, as they are in the Philippines. In this country Easter has become so entwined with Martha Stewart Easter egg trees, baskets, bunnies and egg hunts for little children -- all baby pastel and sentimental ruffles -- that no hint of blood persists. Not the blood of crucifixion and not the blood of real birth, real sexuality, real union and conception which is the basis of the historical fertility cults of Europe that gave us rabbits and eggs.

Somehow we are able to accept without reflection the juxtaposition of eager little girls -- in their ribboned, flowered bonnets and Mary-Janes -- with the brutality of an ancient crucifixion that compelled a mother to take in her arms the broken body of her son. So are we able to combine with crucifixion the banal and conforming suicides of three dozen computer nerds, people an unkind denizen of a Waldport bar called “losers,” people so rejecting of fertility that they had been castrated? Is there a difference between the twelve apostles who followed Jesus around and the 39 followers of Bo -- minus Peep? Is there a difference between the Assumption into Heaven which is the official Catholic dogma and the UFO that this group expected to come like Ezekial’s chariot to rescue the human caterpillars into butterflyhood. I should think so.

This is the difference I see. Strategies of escaping to paradise are doomed to failure and corruption because we are creatures of this time and place. Though we can imagine other places much finer and easier than this one, nevertheless, we must stay here. Not because we are trapped or condemned, but because we are part of the Here. We are made of the Here. Our bodies arise from what is Here and our minds and spirits arise from these bodies. To reject our real bodies and this real time and place is to make ourselves unreal, untethered, and susceptible to traveling lecturers in small town motels with conference rooms on the edge of the world.

My favorite Easter story is actually several months after the crucifixion. It is about how Jesus came back to visit his apostles. Early one morning they were out fishing and He was simply waiting on the shore when they came back. Remember that Peter got so excited he jumped out of the boat? And Jesus just hung around the campfire for a bit, toasting bread and visiting. Does it get better than that? Is there more than that?

Unitarians do sometimes lose their grip. A month or so after I enrolled at Meadville/Lombard in Chicago in 1978, the James Jones Guyana mass suicide happened. In the religious community of the clustered seminaries around the University of Chicago, there were connections to that doomed cult. One of the scariest was that Jim Jones had courted Jack Mendehlsohn’s favor. (Mendehlsohn was a major UU minister.) Jones was running what then appeared to be a progressive inner city church with a strong social action program. He inquired about becoming a UU minister and Mendehlsohn was willing to suggest him as a possible Starr King student. The hitch was that Jones didn’t have an undergrad degree, which is a prerequisite for a ministry degree.

Another more anguished connection was a less-known UU minister who was serving a church in San Francisco when Jones’ ministry began to oppress people. The sister of one of the group who died in Guyana came to this UU minister for help, but neither the minister nor other authorities believed her tales of perversion and abuse. Nothing was done. The stories were too awful for him to believe. He just didn’t think people were that bad. Afterwards he spoke to the national gathering of UU ministers in penitence.

That’s enough talk about the dark side of Easter. The shadow has passed. Some of us even saw it pass over the face of the moon a week ago as we shaded our eyes from the city lights while searching for the comet Hale-Bopp over by the constellation called Cassiopeia’s chair. Eclipses and comets are cyclical, like night and day, like the seasons, like the constant coming and going on of generations, like the cyclical mammalian movement in and out of fertility. These are the raw material of liturgy. They are far deeper than ideas, or dogmas, or even civilizations. The awakening and renewal of Easter is not the property of any church or religious position. It is simply produced by the tipping and turning and circling of the planet, something as real as we are, something we belong to, something we are made of. This Easter celebration of the return of the sun is the way life adjusts to seasons, no more and no less. Because we are part of the life adjusting to the seasons, which here in Oregon means mostly adjusting to warm rain instead of cold rain, we feel this in our flesh, our very cells. We cannot help but stretch, awaken, inhale the new smells (some of us will sneeze!) and feel better every minute that the sun floods down on us.

. . . I keep a file of Easter sermons, as do many ministers. The Easter Potato is one of my favorite ideas and I like the empty tomb motif, when people go to the cave expecting something sad and decaying but find instead an echoing emptiness they can fill with hope. Most often I come back to the Tolstoy quote: “Somewhere in the world there is a green branch and on it is written the word that will save the world.” Or something like that, since the original is in Russian.

. . . Once on Sauvie’s Island long, long ago, we kids went for a walk with our parents. We stopped at a willow tree. The sap was just rising. My mother borrowed my father’s pocket knife and cut a green branch the size and length of her finger. Then she took the knife by the blade and pounded the stick with the handle until somehow she had slipped off the bark. A quick notch and a slot, the bark slipped back on, and she blew it -- a perfect whistle with as clear and sweet a tone as a bird!

. . . My mother’s willow whistle was the call of the goat-footed balloon man -- so far and weeeee! The one that Unitarian “PK” e.e. cummings wrote a poem about, about spring when it’s mud-luscious. Follow that whistle among the trees! Real branches with real leaves spread out to the sun. Today, forget the other planets. You can lie down and die some other day. Today, look for a green branch. Read what is written on it and then -- if you want to -- chew on it.

It is real! This is a spring day with a new world beginning! Cast off your old self! Be reborn! Kindle hope and reach out your arms! Dance on the green and twine flowers in your hair! Why yearn for another world when this one can be so very sweet!