“When I look up at your skies, at what your fingers made —
the moon and the stars
that you set firmly in place —
what are human beings that you think about them;
what are human beings that you pay attention to them?
You’ve made them only slightly less than divine,
crowning them with glory and grandeur.
You’ve let them rule over your handiwork,
putting everything under their feet–
all sheep and all cattle, the wild animals too,
the birds in the sky, the fish of the ocean,
everything that travels the pathways of the sea.
[Yahweh], our Lord, how majestic is your name throughout the earth!”
— Psalm 8:3-9 CEV
Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, is the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.
Dr. Collins was interviewed about the COVID-19 crisis for New York Magazine in an article which appeared online July 1. I commend the article to your reading. It is found here.
Toward the end of the interview he spoke about issues of faith and life:
“In terms of the scientific basis of consciousness, we really don’t have a clue. In terms of the spiritual significance, obviously it’s pretty important that we human beings seem to be special in our awareness of ourselves and our ability to imagine what other people are feeling at a given moment. All that is part of consciousness. I was an atheist when I entered medical school. I was a Christian when I left — and it was much driven by this experience of trying to integrate the reductionist aspects of science into the much more fundamental issues I saw my patients wrestling with, like is there a God and does God care about me and what happens after I die?”
What separates us from everything else in creation? What makes us “just a little less than divine”? How are we made in the image of God? For Dr. Collins, the answer seems to be empathy borne of consciousness. We are aware not only of ourselves, but of others. We can act not just out of our own experience and self-interest, but through the ability comprehend the feelings and experience of another – and to choose to act out of that empathy.
Of course there is a difference between having an ability, and putting that ability into practice. Human beings, at our best have striven to, employ that empathy. This weekend we will celebrate Independence Day, the date where the Declaration of Independence was signed and presented to the world. The document, like the people who signed it, were imperfect. Remember that the great seal of the U.S. bears an unfinished pyramid – we are a work in progress. But the goal of these imperfect people was to join together in stating publicly why they were dissolving some ties in order to start something new. This was not only a statement of independence from Britain, but of inter-dependence on each other. At the end, they signed following the words:
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
With the gift of consciousness we can have a sense of who we are. When we acknowledge that we are children of God, we can have empathy with the other. With this understanding we can choose to act in love.
George
“Gracious God, in the time of crisis our temptation is to turn inward and to think only of ourselves and our own. Help us to see the world through your eyes. Help us to hear the cry of the hurting. Help us to act in love. Bring our consciousness to our actions, so that we will have a purity of conscience. This we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.