WONDER OF THE MOMENT

Funny thing about obesity and smoking: people can’t hide obesity, whereas smoking may go unnoticed except by the smoker’s immediate companions.  That’s why I chose smoking over eating back when I was eighteen.  
    Yesterday on the bus, for instance, I sat across from a woman who must have weighed at least 350 pounds.  It was hard to take my eyes off her.  Not only was she huge, but her slacks were tightly stretched over rolls of fat, and there was a worn place over one knee, so thin her skin showed through.  Yet high above her legs, she wore an attractive purple and gold knit hat and a matching knit scarf draped gracefully about her shoulders.  Her make-up gave a subtle and colorful glow to her face, and her right hand rested authoritatively on a burnished wooden cane.  Had she not been overweight, had she instead been a heavy smoker, she would simply have looked attractive and well put together.
    Was this woman distressed about her looks?  Did she go on weight-loss diets from time to time?  Did she read articles in magazines or on the internet, trying to figure out why she was so heavy and what she could do about it?  Was she dismayed that her hips, knees, and ankles were increasingly painful, making it harder and harder to get around?  Was she afraid of diabetes, heart attacks, high blood pressure?
    Before I quit smoking, I used to avoid reading about the terrible risks I was taking as I lit up every 15 or 20 minutes; such risks just made me want to smoke more.  On rare occasions when I pondered lung cancer, I imagined my lungs as a far-off, foreign country, nowhere near my chest and heart.  
    At last I stopped “trying to quit” and really QUIT.  Why?  There were two reasons.  One: my dental hygienist pointed out that my gums had become gray and pitted.  She promised that quitting smoking would make them pink and smooth again.  Two: I used to love singing, in the shower, in the car, in synagogue.  But I could no longer sing, and I believed (correctly!) that my voice would return when I stopped smoking.
    Quitting was pure hell.  The physical withdrawal was so awful it made me cry.  Emotionally I felt I had lost my dearest friend and lover.  And on the morning of the 20th day, I jumped into the car for my morning commute, delighted that I planned to stop for a pack of cigarettes on the way to work.  I remember nothing from that ride.  All I know is I arrived at work without cigarettes.  And on day 31 everything began to get much better.
     It took a Higher Power to end my smoking: the gums, the singing, getting past day 20—none of that was me alone.  Sometimes there may be a spiritual hunger in unhealthy living and a spiritual component to health.

In my last blog post (January 29), I spoke of the impermanence of the solar system and our resistance to such change.  Part of my own concern about global warming has to do with my wanting Earth to remain the same as when I first arrived.  I am distressed about the disappearance of coral reefs and of the other ocean creatures that depend on them, even though I have never snorkeled.  I am dismayed that rising temperature and decreasing pH foster increasing jellyfish populations in formerly cold, fish-supporting, neutral ocean waters I have never visited.  I mourn the demise of polar bears, and I miss the aboriginal rain forest, though I’ve never visited either the Arctic or Brazil.
    I feel much the same about past conditions on Earth that differed from the present.  Two-plus billion years ago, photosynthesis changed Earth’s atmosphere, adding oxygen gas that poisoned a vast number of organisms, while leading to the fitness of vast numbers of new ones.  A few million years later, the entire earth froze, causing a huge extinction.  Another freeze a billion and a half years later had a similar effect.  And for various other reasons, Earth has experienced repeated mass extinctions.  All this happened before Homo sapiens was even a gleam in evolution’s eye.  Yet I take it personally.
    What are we to make of all this brutal change our planet has undergone?  What are we to make of the major earthly climate change we seem to be causing?  Many of our fellow creatures may not survive.  
    Yet Earth will survive, probably with a very different set of species.  And down the road several billion years, as I mentioned in my January 29 post about my disaffected student, the Sun will certainly burn out.  So vast a loss is too much to comprehend.  It turns me toward God for spiritual rescue.

We all share a spiritual connection with the solar system.  That's why people protested the demotion of Pluto from planet status.  That's why we all love beautiful blue and white pictures of Earth taken from space.
    Back when I was teaching high school science, I often had occasion to mention the Sun, with regard to nuclear fusion.  When the topic came up, I would say to my assembled students, “Do you know that the Sun is a star?”  They would nod solemnly, never missing a beat.  (Only later did I realize they probably hadn’t known before that very moment.  But just as they needed the latest pink hair, or bare midriff, or nose ring, they needed to appear totally with it.)  
    I would go on with the class: describing hydrogen nuclei fusing to form helium, giving off the  heat and light we receive from the sun according to Einstein’s famous equation: E = mc2.  (The m being the mass loss between the four hydrogen nuclei at the beginning of the fusion reaction and the one helium nucleus at the end.)  This always lead the class to a side realization, that no star is permanent, not even our sun.  
    One year, I had a much made-up, bleached-blond chemistry student who slouched into class only every few weeks, and never participated.  During one of her rare visits, we were speaking about the sun’s impermanence.  Horror distorted her face, and she actually raised her hand.  Her voice was incredulous.  “You mean the sun will be gone?”  
    “Yes,” I replied, “but it won’t happen for several billion years.  None of us will be here, nor any of our descendants; human beings might even be extinct by then.”  The horrified look did not leave her face.
    Two or three weeks later, the girl appeared in chemistry class once more.  We had moved on to electron configurations and the periodic law.  Students were flocking to the board to put up homework answers, which we examined and discussed.  In the midst of this traffic, the blonde once again raised her hand.  When I called on her, she asked, “Can’t they put another sun in its place?”
    Why this dismay?  Why do we care about a disaster that is incomprehensibly far into the future?  I must confess I share the dismay.  It makes me sad to think the earth will have existed and will then not exist.  Is this really about the earth, or is it about my own mortality?  
    More on this topic in my next post.

Right off the bat, the Human Genome Project (HGP) brought us many gifts.  Because the Project became a race between the public and private versions, researchers invented wonderful techniques and machines to speed up the work.  The Project finished years early as a result.  And once those 3 billion or so bases in the human genome had been recorded, the techniques and machines were still available to examine the genomes of other organisms, and to examine ours more closely.
    The reason the techniques and inventions work on other organism’s genomes is that all life on earth uses DNA, and with a few small exceptions, uses the same DNA code.
    This sameness allows genetic engineering:  For instance, biologists can take a human gene for insulin, transfer it into E. coli bacteria, and thereby get the bacteria to manufacture human insulin for diabetics.  Or biologists can transfer genes for pest resistance from a wild plant into a crop plant and increase the yield of that crop.
    God has been performing genetic engineering since life began on earth.  By the middle of the 20th century, we knew that bacteria often contained viral genes in their chromosomes.  
    As a result of the HGP, we now know that our human genome also contains viral genes that transferred in millions of years ago, before we became Homo sapiens.  But until recently, the only scraps of viral DNA found in the human genome came from “retro-viruses.”  Retro-viruses infect human cells with RNA, as well as two kinds of enzymes for copying that viral RNA into cDNA, and for pasting that viral cDNA into the human chromosomes.  This allows the retro-viruses to reproduce in our cells.
    But now, according to TheScientist.com, fragments of more ordinary virus DNA have also been found in the human genome and in the genomes of other mammals, such as squirrels and elephants and orangutans.  
    So apparently, in addition to the 97% of our own DNA that we are not using to make proteins, we also have various bits of all sorts of viral DNA on hand.  We really don’t know why our genomes hang on to all this unused DNA.  Maybe it provides material for evolution that will be useful down the road.  Maybe it has some use we still haven’t been able to discover.  Maybe not.  I’m willing to bet that we just don’t know enough yet to discover the truth about the “extra” DNA.
    But in God’s laboratory, you are what infects you; and when it comes to DNA, apparently there is never too much.

In the current Newsweek (Jan. 25), Lisa Miller has a deeply thoughtful, very current column about Haiti and God and Pat Robertson.  Robertson says it’s poor Haiti’s own fault that this earthquake happened to them, because they had a religion before they became Christians, and they still practice some parts of that historic religion.  For me, the operative words in my last sentence are “own fault.”  As in, how can anyone believe such a ghastly thing?  What kind of god would visit such cruelty on people?
    I wish I could remember who I was reading or listening to a year or two ago when I came across this wonderful revelation: There is no Hell.  There can’t possibly be.  A good and true and loving God would never send anyone to such a place.  
    So good and true and loving people shouldn’t have to fear God.  “God-fearing” means awed by God, so awed that you fall to your knees and bow your head, so awed you’re afraid to look, so awed you believe in the glory and wonder and mystery, so awed you trust God.  
    And trusting God is what people have to do in terrible situations like the one in Haiti.  This tragedy is so huge and terrible, God is who we have to trust to bring Haiti through.