[Dialogue] 7/30/09: Spong: The Study of Life, Part 1: A Journey Into the Mystery of Life Begins in the Amazon Rain Forest

Thu Jul 30 17:10:28 CDT 2009

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Publisher's Note: We are proud to announce that the first reviews are in for Bishop Spong's newest book:
Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell
To be published in September. Pre-order now at Amazon.com.

 Publishers Weekly Says:
"Offering deeply personal reflections on his own Christian journey and priestly career, Spong reviews a lifetime of passionate engagement with biblical study and with questions of faith, charting his growing discomfort with language that seemed limited, falsifying and inadequate. Arguing that modern scientific understanding necessitates dismissing outdated metaphors and assumptions by which faith seeks to calm human anxiety, Spong suggests an understanding of God not as a person, but as the process that calls personhood into being.... This work, bound to be influential, offers new insights into religion's big questions about life and death, making an invaluable contribution to both religious scholarship and faithful exploration." 
– Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information
Pre-order now at Amazon.com.

Thursday July 30, 2009 

The Study of Life, Part 1
A Journey Into the Mystery of Life Begins in the Amazon Rain Forest

In that mysterious and wonderful lull that comes in an author's life between completing the writing and=2
0editing of a book and waiting for its publication, my wife and I, with one daughter and two granddaughters accompanying us, set off on a trek in search of the meaning of life and its origins. Following in the steps of Charles Robert Darwin, we sought to relive his experiences in the Galapagos Islands, located in the Pacific Ocean some 600 miles off the shore of Ecuador. It seemed a particularly appropriate thing to do in 2009, the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. 
To prepare ourselves for the insights of Darwin, we began the trip in Quito, exploring the magnificent and stark terrain of the Andes Mountains. Geologists tell us that North and South America were once part of the land mass that is today Europe, Asia and Africa. A cursory look at any map of the world will reveal how closely they fit. Even the continent that we call Australia was once tucked underneath the Asian sub-continent. Colliding tectonic plates and volcanoes along the fault lines separated that single land mass millions of years ago and these forces also pushed great quantities of what was once the bottom of the sea high into the atmosphere to create such mountain ranges as the Himalayas, the Rockies and the Andes. 

Then by air and bus we made our way to the city of Coca, which is east-southeast of Quito and the place where Ecuador's budding oil business is now located. There public transportation ended! We then boarded a motorized canoe, and for t
wo-plus hours rode some 70 kilometers down the Napo River, Ecuador's largest waterway and a major tributary of the Amazon. The Napo is huge, in some places wider than eight football fields placed end to end, and it was flowing at a rapid clip just prior to emptying into the Amazon. Next we traveled by dugout canoe into the rain forest where, under the guidance of local ecological experts, we hiked and explored the variety of life forms that thrive in this incredible setting. 

This trip was directly related to the launch of my new book. That book's purpose was to examine the possibility of life after death, a study that has engaged me in general for over twenty years and with great intensity for the last three. My study had convinced me that the way most religious people approach the subject of life after death is all wrong. The emphasis cannot and should not be on that hypothetical place that we postulate will come after we die. That approach is nothing more than a dead end, primarily because there are no data that can be observed, cited or studied. No one is available who has ever been there and returned who might be interviewed. No one can go to this hypothetical place either to observe it or study it. Every thing we human beings have ever said about life after death can be nothing more than speculative. In the great age of faith, which we now think of as "the childhood of our humanity," such speculation was considered valid and even learned. People in that time of history woul
d debate endlessly on what the afterlife was like. Ecclesiastical leaders would even subdivide this speculative realm into various regions, which they presumed to describe meticulously and in many volumes. There was of course hell, with its punishing fires, and heaven, with its golden streets and lamp stands, its diet of milk and honey and its promise of eternal rest. Next purgatory was added, located, according to these learned folks, near hell but not actually being part of it. This was quite economical, for it allowed the fires that were designed to punish eternally also to be used merely to purge those who received a time limited sentence before being welcomed into eternal life. It was, if you will, a "central heating system" in the afterlife. Then later another region was added, called limbo, that was reserved for unbaptized children and noble pagans who, undoubtedly to the Church fathers, stood outside the only sure saving faith tradition but who were clearly not deserving of being ultim ately condemned by God. These ideas were reinforced by a host of "authorities." Dante wrote his "Divine Comedy" to frame these images and later John Milton wrote his "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" to give vivid contrast to these ecclesiastical concepts. Life beyond this life was clearly assumed to be describable. These leaders, however, knew no more than we know today about this subject, which is absolutely nothing. So it was that when the age of faith, which had invested these images with authenticity, began to decline
 under the intellectual assault of such fathers of modernity as Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, these images began their inevitable decline, first into being ignored, then into being significantly doubted and finally into being generally abandoned. In this manner, the human conviction about the reality of life after death simply faded from view. Yes, I know that polls continue to show that a great majority of America's citizens still believe in heaven and a few less believe in hell. Polls, however, are so misleading. A closer analysis reveals that most people, unable to face the starkness of life's ever-looming mortality, are far better described as people who "believe in believing" in life after death rather than those who actually believe in it. Thousands of signs in contemporary life point to this truth. In order to write in a serious way on this subject, therefore, one discovers quickly the inability to counter this dying conviction by artificially resuscitating the corpse of yesterday's belief system. A new starting point must be found. As I developed the book that new starting point became quite clear. No belief in life after death will make any sense until life itself is understood. This was how life before death became my doorway into the subject of life after death. This trip was thus designed for me to study life in all its forms. I wanted to explore life's origins, its interdependence, its characteristics and ultimately its meaning. The o nly doorway into understanding life after death
 for me had to be the study of life itself. We headed, therefore, for the Galapagos with an introductory side trip through the as yet unspoiled rain forest of the Amazon River in South America. We were not disappointed! 

For three days by canoe in the waterways and by hikes through the forest itself, we encountered the mystery of life in a thousand different ways. We found the forest filled with various forms of vegetation, but every single one of them was involved in a struggle to survive. We looked at the adaptations that many plants had made to allow them to shed excess water in the rain forest. We noted the larger leaves of the lower plants and the smaller leaves in the taller trees, each designed to capture the correct amount of life-giving sunshine. We found palm trees that sent out new roots from several feet up their trunks that were designed to move the palm tree more fully into the sun. We looked at plants that grew leaves out of only one side of the branch and spiraling upward so that the leaves on the higher circle did not cut off the sun from the leaves on the lower circle. We looked at something the native people called the "wooden vine" that sought out the shade because it seemed to know that shade meant the presence of tall trees and its best chance for survival was to climb the tallest tree to bask in the life-giving rays of the sun. It was as if the law of life itself was for each species of plants to survive for as long as possible. Survival app
ears to be the dominant motif of every living thing. There is no consciousness, no ability to make life decisions in a plant, so we have to conclude that the drive to survive, expressed in the incredible ability to adapt in order to live, appears to be written into the very DNA of all living matter. 

A second thing also became obvious in the Amazon Rain Forest. The whole ecosystem of the rain forest, and indeed of all of the deeply interrelated forms of life on the planet Earth, seems to be part of a constant system of the renewal of life. Periodically a great tree in the forest will topple and fall. Perhaps it has been struck by lightning or the effect of constant rain has so loosened its roots that it is susceptible to the power of the wind. When it falls, however, it creates a crisis for all nearby living things. The vegetation that had prospered in and adapted to the shade that that tree provided was now subjected to direct sunlight for which it was not prepared and so it dies. Then vegetation known as "pioneer plants" like ferns move in and prosper in the daylight. Next taller plants move in and the ferns die, placing nutrients back in the soil. Then taller plants move in and in time they are dwarfed by even larger plants. Each in turn dies, enriching the soil until it is ready once more to support the giant trees and the life of the forest is restored. Perhaps it takes a hundred years, but the forest displays powerful restorative activity. Living things like mushrooms
 and insects facilitate the decaying process as the life cycle of the forest is renewed again and again. The balance of nature is seen in both individual plants and in the ecosystem as a whole. The balance in favor of life is observable, definable and real. None of this is conscious. Plants do not make rational decisions. Palm trees do not consciously decide to grow a new root that will give the tree a better relationship with the sun. All of these things and millions more occur because survival, individually and ecosystemically, is a driving force in nature itself. 

In the vegetative flora and fauna in the Amazon Rain Forest, and presumably replicated all over the earth, the drive to survive is a fact demonstrably present in the unconscious life of inanimate living things. We thus had succeeded in identifying one facet of what appears to be true about all life: It is programmed to survive. Will we see this same survival instinct as we move up the ladder of consciousness to insects, birds, fish and all the animate creatures of the world? What happens to this drive to survive when it enters a self-conscious human life? Those questions will be my focus next week as this study of life continues.

– John Shelby Spong 

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

David George of Sacramento, California, writes:

I was so interested to learn of your growth experience as a youth and your attribution to Robert Crandall. I felt your joy and appreciation. The=2
0Rev. Morton T. Kelsey touched my life in a similar fashion at the critical time. I've lost track of him. Can you tell me whether he died or of his whereabouts?
David George of Sacramento, California, writes:

I was so interested to learn of your growth experience as a youth and your attribution to Robert Crandall. I felt your joy and appreciation. The Rev. Morton T. Kelsey touched my life in a similar fashion at the critical time. I've lost track of him. Can you tell me whether he died or of his whereabouts?

Dear David,

Morton Kelsey has departed this life. He had a ministry of great significance and it still lives through his published books, which, though out of print, can still be found in libraries. I was quite fond of him.

– John Shelby Spong 

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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