Bone of my bones

[Rated R – Don’t read this while eating or if you have a weak stomach or if you’re a girl (in the middle-school sense of the word :)]

Today I sawed open a man’s head. First I had to scalp him, scraping the skin and muscle from his head pulling with my gloved fingers on one hand and cutting the tissue beneath with a scalpel wielded by my other. And then I had to saw open his head. I turned on the Stryker saw, a foot-long white handle and motor connected to a steel semi-circular toothed blade. I flipped the switch, and a high-pitched whir come from the motor as it drove the blade, rotating it an eighth inch back and forth in a blur.

I held the saw with both hands, held it perpendicular to the forehead, and the pressed it to the bone. The high pitch whirring lowered its pitch. Bone like sawdust shot from side to side by the now-invisible movement of the blade. The pitch lowered still and the saw labored; the blade was buried a quarter inch in the bone. The bone dust continued to flow out of the hole, and then above it rose white smoke. And I smelled it.

In four months of anatomy, I’ve smelled a lot of strange things. But this smell has haunted me all day. I have smelled burning flesh before and it turns the stomach. But burning bone turned my soul. It didn’t make my lip curl as the smell of flesh does, but it did make my soul writhe.

Inch by inch, I cut a circle around from forehead to back. Then I cut that dome in two pieces to more easily remove it from the brain it was stuck to. After prying off these two pieces of skull, I exposed the brain. Covered in blood vessels and pinky-purple, it was an incredible thing to behold. It showed evidence of my sloppiness, a few cuts where the saw slipped from the bone and cut a gash into the tender tissue below. It was to be expected in such a violent dissection.

I cut off another piece from the back of the skull to the brainstem and finally I turned off the saw. I looked at my clothes; I was covered in a white powder that used to be skull. Having finished this cut, my lab partner cut the brainstem, and handed me the three-pound piece of meat which once housed a man.

It should have been traumatic, but it wasn’t. A well adjusted person should not be able to do what I just did without having his stomach turn. I turned off my emotions as an unwanted accessory and did what I was supposed to. But the smell has lingered, outliving the image of the bone and brain-splattered table which I was able to leave behind in the anatomy lab. The smell followed me today. After class. At dinner. While reading. Even now.

I wonder if there is something in the bone beyond marrow. I wonder if there is a special holiness to a man’s bones. Have I somehow defiled something holy?

A Good Time for Thinking

The Doctor was pensive. Normally The Doctor never had time to think. Work was too busy, not a good place for thinking. And home was far too relaxing a place; also not a good place for thinking. So today was special, for he thought.

He was thinking particularly about what he was doing and why he was doing it. Money. Prestige. Sure, they’re involved; but the ideal is something more than that. Everyone thinks that there’s something special about doctors, something that sets doctoring on Olympus. Why did this ever enter into people’s minds? The answer would have to wait; Medical Student was presenting. Now was not a good time for thinking.

“Patient presenting with a supra clavicular four centimeter cyst. First noticed two weeks ago…” prattled Medical Student without a scrap of interest or life in the words that were flowing from his mouth, as oil dripping from a leaky pipeline. The Doctor paid attention and gave orders to the nurse to prepare to open the cyst, giving orders as a program running a subroutine.

The Doctor entered Cyst’s room. She was sitting as a patient patient, wearing the same gown as everyone who he ever saw. The Doctor thought about how the shape of the bodies changed. Some were tall, some were black, some had breasts. The problems that needed fixing changed. Some needed cutting, some needed drugging, some needed nothing. But the gown never did. It was always the threadbare material with the bland pattern. All individuality, all modesty, all humanity was stripped before the doctor’s “Hello.” As prisoners’ uniforms, the donning of the gown turned people into patients. And so thinking, The Doctor found himself with the patient. Now was not a good time for thinking.

“Hello! How are you today?” asked The Doctor with utmost politeness, spoken with the exaggerated volume and enthusiasm of a high school drama student.

“OK, except for this,” said Cyst, pointing at her cyst.

“I understand. We’ll get that taken care of right away!” said The Doctor with such a tone, one might have guessed he wore blue spandex with an ‘S’ under his white coat.

The Nurse had brought in all that would be needed for the operation. The Doctor moved swiftly, his hands moving with the efficiency of a martial artist. Anesthetize, cut, drain, pack, bill. He was a machine. A machine repairing a machine.

“Thank you, doctor,” said Cyst. But Cyst was not thankful. The pain was gone, but she did not feel better. Why not? It wasn’t coldness, for he sounded warm. It wasn’t incompetence, for he was efficient. Was it soullessness?

“You’re welcome,” replied The Doctor. But The Doctor was not gracious. He did not feel good. He did not feel bad. He did not feel. It was as if nothing at all had happened. He would have felt the same way about eating his lunch. The Doctor left the room and walked down the hallway, feeling particularly feelingless. And so he thought.

Cyst’s body was made whole. And maybe that’s all a doctor can do. But what if it wasn’t? What if he were more than a biochemical mechanic? What if medicine was more than fixing broken biological machines? What if it was ...

“BEEP!” shrieked The Doctor’s pager.

There is not time for such questions. Especially not with Chest Pain arriving. Now was not a good time for thinking.

If American Healthcare was a Burger Joint

Imagine you work up a mighty appetite. You consider to yourself, “Self, I have a mighty appetite. What shall I do?” Upon reflection, you come up with two revelations as if from on high, “McDonalds or In-N-Out.” You certainly like McDonalds’ fries, but the fresh ingredients at In-N-Out are very tasty too (and somewhat healthy, to boot). You weigh your options, but the double-double animal style wins out.

You walk in to the white-and-red themed eating establishment. You wait in the line (it’s 12:34pm, and it seems that everyone else had the same idea). You get to the counter. At the last minute you have a quick change of mind and with exuberance exclaim to the cashier, “I’ll have a three-by-three animal style!”

Then what’s next? Payment for your tasty burger, of course! You pull out your wallet, expecting to hear the price of what will be a much needed relief of your hunger.

“I’m sorry, we don’t take cash,” says the cheerful cashier whose nametag reads ‘Allison’. “We only accept food insurance. Also government Food-i-care.”

“Food insurance? That sounds awfully silly. Why would you need insurance for an everyday transaction between the burger-flipping establishment and yourself? It sounds especially silly since the cause of your being here is not exactly unexpected (you do get hungry about three times a day, every day). Why should you be forced to buy food insurance?” reasons your ever-alert mind. “I should be able to reason through this with a manager.”

“May I speak to the manager?” you ask Allison, with the utmost politeness.

“Certainly,” says now somewhat less cheery Allison, looking somewhat dejected that her services were not good enough for your rational inquiries.

A sharp looking manager wearing the white-and-red (and a nametag that says “Rob,” you wonder if his real name is Robert or if his legal name actually is what his nametag reads) comes out and greets you. “How can I help you, sir?” he asks.

“I’d like to pay for my cheeseburger,” you say in as straightforward a tone as you can muster in the face of all the shenanigans thus far.

“With money?!” asks Rob in disbelief. He begins howling with laugher.

“Yes, with money,” you say, the annoyance in your voice communicating to Rob that this, though apparently very funny, was not intended as a joke.

“You can’t do that! Who pays for goods and services with money?” exclaims the bewildered Rob, throwing his hands into the air.

“I do,” you say, crossing your arms.

Rob, looking very confused at never having encountered such an obstinate customer replies, “Well, you can’t. We’d love your business, but you see, we don’t have prices here.”

“You don’t have prices?” you ask.

“That’s right. We don’t have prices,” said Rob with a neener-neener tone in his voice.

“Well,” you retort, assured that the shenanigans surely could not have reached this far, surely. “Surely you could just tell me the price of my three-by-three and I could pay for it. You know the price of scrumptious burger meat, delectable cheese and sponge-dough buns; you know how much the rent and utilities cost for this spunky building; you know how much it costs to hire cheerful people to staff an In-N-Out; and you know how much profit you can make while staying competitive. Tell me how much one burger’s worth of that cost would be.”

“We actually don’t really know,” says Rob, in a matter-of-fact voice.

“You don’t know,” you say in disbelief.

“That’s right. We don’t know,” Rob explains flatly. “I’m sure somebody knew at some point. Maybe somebody has made some estimation. Maybe. All I know is that we don’t know. And that’s for sure. It’s not that we don’t take cash per say, it’s that we just wouldn’t know how to charge you.”

“But how do you normally get paid?” you ask in bewilderment.

Rob begins to explain the normal process, “We’ve negotiated contracts with food insurance companies. We wring ‘em for every cent that they’re worth. Sometimes we get a good deal. Sometimes we don’t. See that customer right there in the purple cardigan? His health insurance company is paying us $12 for his double double. But see that one over there in the pink t-shirt? She’s on food-i-care and that’s a bad deal for us. We’re only getting $3 for the same thing. We’re able to extort enough money out of the cardigan guy’s company to make up for it, though. So it works out. The problem for you is that we don’t actually know how much it costs.”

“Surely somebody does,” you say, as if trying to get an admission out of Rob.

“Nope,” says Rob with confidence. “Well somebody claims to, but nobody does. Every one of our deals is secret, and nobody wants to know how much we extort for our burgers, and no food insurance company wants the others to know how much they pay us. Otherwise the ones that we’re screwing would be upset. So since all these deals are secret, nobody knows.”

“Who claims to know?” you ask.

Rob’s eyebrows furrow; a black look comes across his face. “Food-i-care. They have interviewed hundreds of burger flippers, rated burger-flipping for how stressful a job it is, and how desirable it is to be employed in that manner. They’ve calculated the number of minutes to flip a burger. Then they calculate the national average cost for beef and cheese. And they figure out it should only cost $3 to make a burger. So that’s what they pay.”

You, being a big fan of the fresh ingredients and cheerful service at In-N-Out, and having seen the differences in price for fresh ingredients at the grocery store, ask, “Do they account for the fact that In-N-Out uses scrumptious burger meat, delectable cheese and sponge-dough buns? Surely this would make In-N-Out burgers more expensive than McDonalds.”

Rob shakes his head, “They do not account for such things. You’re probably right that our burgers actual cost is more than McDonalds’, but they don’t care. They’ve ruled that a burger is worth $3, so that is how much we get.”

“How do people decide where to eat?”

“Some of them are told where they can eat by their food insurance companies. Others just go to the most expensive burger joints they can find, since the food insurance is picking up the tab. Mr. Cardigan over there is usually at Le Burger Espensiv across the street every day; he comes here for a bit of variety.

“It sounds like there is no mechanism left for controlling rising burger costs,” you notice.

“You are right. Burger costs have been rocketing upwards and no matter how we adjust the wings, the rocket doesn’t slow down!” says Rob.

You get upset and say, “Shucks! I certainly wish there were some mechanism for controlling costs, improving quality and inspiring innovation in the fast food industry.” Your mind races. You once took an introduction course in economics. You remember that one of the turning points in the history of the world was the inventions of just such a mechanism. You remember that other ways of distributing goods and services had been tried and had failed throughout the centuries. But what was this miraculous system that, as an enchanted sword, slashed rising prices?

“The free market!” you exclaim, joy rushing in where there had only been despair.

Rob waxes poetic and crushes your optimism, “Alas, the food free market is dead! If only we had the wisdom and courage to bring it back!”

Photography as Prophecy

Photography often feels like a hunt. I am always armed and will quickly pull my camera out and leap into a place where I can get a clean shot of my quarry. Sometimes it’s a bird on the wing. Sometimes it’s a sun that’s falling. Sometimes I’m driving home at seventy miles an hour and there happens to be the most beautiful scene ever on the left side of the road.

I remember once in the middle of conversation seeing a hawk or falcon (please tell me if you can ID the bird) begin to dive near me. I literally ran so I could see the valley into which it dove, drew my camera, and took my footing. Holding the camera like a pistol, steadying my right hand with my left, I tracked the bird, held my breath, squeezed the trigger and fired. It was a perfect shot.

Another time I was a distance from a beautiful field that would perfectly catch the sunset, if only I could get there in time. I was walking fast, but the sun was setting faster. I started running, being slowed by beautiful obstacles that would not permit me to pass without photographing them. The batteries of my camera died. Like a soldier reloading under heavy fire, I quickly dropped out the old batteries and reloaded new ones. I made it to the field just in time to catch the setting sun a beautiful grassy field.

What is the mission of a photographer? To capture beauty. It’s a simple yet profound task. The object itself has been created by God directly or secondarily through human hands; the talent of the photographer is to see it.

I think its primary goal, capturing beauty, has much the same purpose as prophecy. Photography, like all art, is a portal to eternity. As the prophets who shared their glimpses of heaven causing us to yearn for its glory, I aim to make visible that which is invisible to most. I have no ambitions to pass Isaiah, but I would like to share whatever of heaven that can be shared.

In “The Problem of Pain” C.S. Lewis describes his view of Heaven. Have you ever “…stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life? All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it…but if it should really become manifest …you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’”


A great photograph is only ever a shadow of the Truth; it is to the real thing as a two-dimensional black shadow is to the three-dimensional object that cast it. I took the picture above on the I-5 on the north side of the grapevine. It may have been the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen, and stirred within me a yearning and homesickness for a place like it, a place I have never been but is my home.

I believe that the landscape was the rim of an eclipse. We’re in the shadow of the sun, its bland and natural light blocking the glory of heaven. It is complete, except in the few places and times where we glimpse the edge; in the photo above, snow, grass, shadow and light converge to offer a momentary flicker of the glory that is coming, a prelude to a song that will soon be sung. It can’t come soon enough!

Isa 49:13 Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth; and break forth into singing, O mountains: for the LORD hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

I was Atlas, bearing the weight of the world pressing down on me. Under the emotional exertion, my heart beat faster, also crushed by the heavy responsibility before me.

I walked down creaking pine floorboards to where I would take up my mantle as senior “Médico,” not that 22 years gave me any qualifications for such a title. I took my place in a bare, makeshift examination room. As it seemed with everything in this part of Tijuana, the furniture was being held together by sheer ingenuity that comes with poverty.

The quiet, black fear broke out into an active yellow terror, like a rat out of a cage. I began to think of any means of escape. My mind darted left and right. Could I pass it to another? Could I leave it undone? No and no. All escape was blocked. If I was to be anything but a coward, I had to do this. I clenched my teeth, preparing for what would be an anaesthetized vivisection of my emotions.

Señor G staggered in, leaning on a friend. I greeted him warmly. He was wearing a blue Chargers hat that he had received as a gift. I complimented him on the hat, and he beamed with joy. I yearned for this moment to stretch into eternity.

It did not. The moment came that I had feared, the moment I had run through a hundred times in my mind. I had to tell him he was going to die. Sr. G had been on heroin and cocaine for many years. That together with alcohol had destroyed his liver, and he did not have long to live. He was my patient, and I alone bore the weight of delivering the news. Everyone dies, but woe unto me, for I had to translate a fact into a reality.

I gathered up all the courage within me, but it was only sufficient to produce a euphemism: “You’re not going to live much longer.”

“I know,” he replied. But he didn’t. He talked about plans he had for years ahead. And now I had to crush them.

“You don’t have much longer to live,” I tried again to make the sting of death less sharp. But death’s sting cannot be dulled by soft words.

“I know,” he said again. But still he didn’t. His planning continued.

“You’re going to die soon.” I used the word. I said it. And I saw despair in his eyes. His spirit overflowed with sorrow and his eyes with tears.

Then something happened that I did not understand. I spoke without speaking, and a voice that was not my own asked if I could pray for him. He and I shared a common faith; the request would have been reasonable, but for the alien source. Laying my hand on his shoulder, I prayed, pouring out my heart to our God. I thanked God for his love to us in giving salvation; I prayed that we would have faith in the valley of the shadow of death; I prayed in the hope of eternity. Then his dirge entered a new movement, as if a light new flute melody danced atop the low and mournful chorus: he remembered hope. The blackness of his night was pierced as if by the morning star; black indeed, but not black complete.

My own terrible weight of fear was cast into a sea of sadness. But even in the darkness above the waters, there was a wind of hope that hovered there unseen. As he limped away, I realized it would be the last time I would see him this side of eternity.

What did I fear? I entered medicine to speak Life, and I had to declare Death. I learned that doctors do not only announce hope, wearing white coats and stethoscopes; we must also proclaim doom, taking up the black hood and sickle. We are not saviors, but guides. We may be angels, but sometimes we must be the Angel of Death. Though we always desire to lead our patients out of the valley of the shadow of death, not all leave the valley. For those who must stay, we must be faithful guides even unto the grave. And it was that grim task that I feared.

The Murderer

A tall, wiry man stood and leaned against a desk. His rim-less glasses, terrible style, wrinkled shirt and white socks with dress shoes proclaimed to all who bothered to inspect him that he was a geek, and that he was with IT. His vampire-pale skin showed he spent about as much time outside as one of the mythical beings. If it were not for his terrible goatee, he may have passed for a creature of the night. He looked out through the glasses with dark eyes towards a computer screen where four MS Paint drawings were open.

They were various shapes and squiggles, simple with few shapes and few colors. But they were certainly not uninteresting. For whatever reason, they seemed to hold his attention like flypaper.

Tom from IT studied the pictures. He asked, “What is the difference between this and a virus? What if its random BMP products didn’t happen to appeal to you, Michael?”

He addressed his question to a small-framed man with olive skin and dark hair sitting in an office chair on the forty sixth gme. He dressed only as nicely as was required, so not very nice. The wrinkles of his wrinkle-free shirt were barely visible, as was the facial hair that should have been shaved in the morning.

Michael spoke in a controlled but slow manner. He replied, “I didn’t say they appealed to me. I said they were beautiful.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” asked Tom.

Michael shook his head. “No. You are saying that a random assortment of pixels appeals to a random assortment of receptors in my eyes and because they give me pleasure are called ‘beautiful.’ I am saying that the pixels were deliberately arranged to describe something deeper than the visible world, and my eyes recognized the arrangement as sublime, and so I called it ‘beautiful.’”

“You’re saying the machine can see what doesn’t exist?” asked Tom, his voice thick with sarcasm.

Michael’s voice was immune from the sarcasm. He replied in as slow and controlled a manner as ever, “I’m saying the machine can see what really does exist. It has eyes like Michelangelo or Monet and can see the world in the way that they did: the way it really exists and not the way we see it.”

Tom shrugged, “I still don’t know how you think this is any different from a virus. We build computers to do what we tell them to do. Those that do what they’re told are good; those that don’t are defective and need to be fixed.”

Michael looked off beyond Tom. His eyes narrowed and his voice lost its characteristic control, “Dear Lord! What if this wasn’t the first time this happened?”

“What?” asked Tom.

“How many times have computers ever done something that we wanted them to do? We can only pray that this was the first time this has happened,” said Michael.

“First time what has happened?” asked Tom.

“The first time a computer received a soul,” replied Michael.

Tom smiled cruelly, “I think you mean the first computer to become self-aware. A soul? Seriously? Like the soul that leaves through the nostrils and flies up to heaven when someone dies? Or the soul that is possessed by the devil if you play with a Ouija board? Or the soul that needs saving by Jesus? That’s totally fine if you want to believe in that by yourself, but this is a real-life problem we’re facing. We really shouldn’t be talking about religion right now.”

Michael’s control returned, “Maybe religion is exactly what we should be talking about. Maybe this is a question that is best answered by religion.”

Tom started getting frustrated, “OK. So say this thing is self aware. How could it survive when we shut the computers down at night?”

“Where are you when you shut your brain down every night?” asked Michael.

Tom thought for a few minutes and replied, “I suppose I’m still in my brain. I guess you’re right; it’s not impossible for the program to ‘save’ itself on the hard drive for the next morning.” Tom sat down on Michael’s desk, and rested his chin on his right fist, as if to mimic the Thinker. After a pause, he continued, “So let’s say it’s saved itself on the hard-drive of the computers. We’ve just upgraded and replaced all the computers.”

Michael answered, “As with every other cell in our body, the material of neurons is replaced in our brains continually. Yet we remain.”

“You can’t answer questions with mysteries!” protested Tom.

Michael smiled gently, “Sometimes the only answer to a hard question is a mystery. Sometimes our brains come to their limit, and though we may miss the true image of a thing, we can grasp its shadow.”

Tom stood up and paced, stroking his goatee, “Say that I believe you. Say that this thing exists even when the computers are off. It still couldn’t be what you way because it simply doesn’t have the power. Self awareness is computationally expensive. How could it have nearly the power of a human brain?”

“Has anybody figured out how much power you need to ‘run’ a soul? Who knows the system requirements for consciousness?” inquired Michael.

Tom pointed to the ceiling, as inspired men do when they have a something to say. His inspiration drove him to say, “It’d need to be at least as powerful as a human brain, so it’d need a processing power of at least 100 teraflops. This guy right here,” Tom slapped the computer on Micahel’s desk affectionately, “He’s got maybe 50 gigaflops.”

“So you’re saying it’d need to be 2000 times more powerful to equal a human brain. How many machines are in this building?” asked Michael.

Tom, as nerds are wont to do, calculated quickly, “Fifty floors with about fifty machines per floor; that makes for about twenty five hundred machines, plus the servers. But you can’t just add them, they’re not connected…” Tom trailed off, his eyes darting left and right. He started again quietly, “They are connected. They’re all connected at 100Mbps. And they’re having problems all over the building.” Tom put his hand on the computer, his eyes darting around his field of vision, demonstrating the heavy computation occurring in his brain like the green light that flickers as the hard drive of a computer whirls.

Tom started again, this time speaking very rapidly, “So you’re suggesting that these computers are acting like a neural network? That each of these machines is a node, connected with and sharing information with all the other computers in the network? You’re saying that this is a dynamic, organic program distributed across thousands of machines which is capable of self-modification? That’s an incredible design!”

Michael grinned widely, “I wish I was as smart as you. I didn’t suggest any of that. I asked how many computers there were in the building.”

Tom, with eyes open wide, said “That’s a brilliant idea! Writing a virus so that it doesn’t exist on any single computer; a network virus. I think you’ve given me the key to solving this problem!”

“It’s not a problem! It’s a miracle! You can’t murder it!” protested Michael loudly.

Tom snickered, “Murder? I can’t murder something non-sentient. And I don’t count a complex random number generator that spits out to MS Paint a sentient being. That’s not murder. That’s my job. I’m supposed to keep these computers doing their jobs so that you can keep doing yours. Your job is to improve people’s lives. That’s what health insurance is for. Your job is not to look at pixel inkblots. So I will do my job and call McAfee immediately. Enjoy your new friend while he lasts!”

Michael felt sick. He felt that Tom would do a great evil if he were not stopped. But who would believe him? Maybe the lines and curves were just beautiful to him, and to him only. Maybe Tom was right: beauty was only in the eye of the beholder.

Michael felt like a prophet of old, bearing a message no one wanted to hear. But, like a prophet, the only thing to do with an important message is to deliver it, come what may.

Michael printed 03C6.bmp, the picture that he thought most beautiful. Then, like a bullet that will not be turned from its course, Michael walked directly to his supervisor’s office and knocked on the door.

“Come in,” growled an annoyed voice. Robert was an old man, a veteran of the business world. He was a practical man, with a great big unpractical belly. His hair was grey, as if unable to decide if it would stay black or turn white. Robert was reading a report and saved the tremendous effort of lifting his eyes to look at Michael as he entered.

“Sir, something terrible is about to happen!” started Michael.

“You have my attention,” said Robert, setting down his report and looking sharply at Michael. He was, after all, a practical man.

“This company is about to commit a serious crime.” Michael said with great concern.

“What? Who is the criminal? Should I call security?” Robert demanded.

“No. Just stopping the crime would be sufficient. The culprit is Tom from IT. I recommend calling him in before he commits the crime.” Michael said.

“Alright,” said Robert, picking up his phone, “Put me through to Tom in IT… Hi. It’s Robert. Stop what you’re doing immediately and come to my office… OK. Bye.” He then addressed Michael, “OK, so what’s the crime?”

“Murder,” Michael said with such gravity the words of Robert seemed to orbit it.

“What?! I’m calling security! Who’s he trying to kill?” asked Robert, somewhat frantically.

Just then, Tom walked in with a very worried look on his face. Seeing Michael in the office, he guessed what he was there for. His worry turned to disgust, which he clearly communicated in a look towards Michael.

“I’m not trying to kill anyone. I’m trying to do my job. I’m deleting a virus, and your crazy employee here,” Tom gestured towards Michael with exaggerated show, “is insane and thinks his computer has come to life.”

“Is this true?” Robert looked at Michael, his fear beginning to transform into anger.

“Look. This appeared on my desktop yesterday labeled ‘03C6.bmp,’” said Michael as he set a piece of paper on Robert’s desk.



“So what?” asked Robert, trying hard to control a temper which was evidently rising.

“It’s beautiful. It’s beauty. It was created by the Personality of our network!” exclaimed Michael.

“I don’t care if you like it. I don’t care if you think you see something in chaos. You’re suggesting that we’ve found . At least give me something like prime numbers or Fibonacci sequences or something! A bitmap squiggle is not evidence for sentience! I know you’re under a lot of stress, but you need to keep on working. And Tom, you need to do your job also. Have you figured out how to end this virus?”

“Yes sir. Talking with Michael helped me figure it out. McAfee has a patch out; apparently we’re not the only ones that are having this problem. It was as if networks across the country got hit by this thing at the same time. They’re calling it Anomalies in Display And Memory, or ADAM. The patch is actually running as we speak. We should be free of this problem in minutes,” said Tom.

“Good. Now both of you get back to work,” barked Robert, who had had enough of this adventure to last him for the week.

Both men walked out, Michael last and with a slow step and sullen face. His heart sank as a stone in the ocean, falling and falling away from the light and into great depths. He reached his desk and sat down. There on his desktop Michael saw the last message he would receive “bershit27.doc”. The last words of a murdered personality. Or were they the random and meaningless recall of a complex program? Was there even a difference?

What was the difference between electrons flying down Ethernet cables and ions flowing through axons? Were the scribbles ending in .bmp on his desktop any different than those on cave wall that showed the cavemen were truly men?

Michael opened the file and saw this:



He could not read it. He did not even know the language. Was this a message for him? Or another random assortment of random symbols? How could someone tell the difference? At what point could someone studying hominids conclude that the creatures had language? Did the Personality take this step and speak? What was the last thing on her mind before she died?

These thoughts weighed on Michael as he tried to continue in his work, and pulled him down into a state of mourning for the Personality of the Network.

The Next Step

We have heard of the epic struggle of life, up from a single organism that struggled to survive. We have heard of the grand battle of this organism and its children to overcome the odds and live and reproduce and change. This great odyssey through the eons has become the narrative of our age, the modern story of our creation.

I often wonder about the story. What would it have been like? There were many great changes throughout the ages. Birds, for example, were one of these great changes from one category of creature to another. Did each of these first pioneers know the implications for the countless creatures that would follow? How long did the capacity to fly exist before the first proto-bird took to the sky? How many of those who could fly did?

It must have been a critical moment in the history of any species at such a point in evolution. Any creature who did not take the leap would die, out-competed and outlived by his courageous fellows who freed themselves from the shackles of gravity. His proud ancestral line of survivors, unbroken from the dawn of life to that day, was finally shattered by the great and cruel rod of selection. Perhaps his memory was not lost in the darkness of history; perhaps our knowledge of this race of creatures was informed by his inability to fly from a flood. If this is the case, we can thank him for teaching us of his failed strategy: stagnancy.

I have pondered what it would be to observe this phenomenon, and sometimes disappointed not to see it dramatically playing out in the animal kingdom. I have often wanted to see such a transition. I would have loved to see the first ambitious step onto dry land, or the first bold avian leap from a branch. It seems that we have reached something of an equilibrium, or at least it feels that way to a creature with a lifespan under a century.

But I’m not so sure that we're at equilibrium. I have a feeling that something is afoot; or rather something has been afoot. Unique amongst our fellow creatures, we are the first to begin to change our environment, rather than be changed by it. We have reached a critical point in intelligence where we have categorically become a different kind of creature: a reasoning one. One cannot study the natural history of art, religion, or morality. These all arise with humans, as if our step in intelligence was the one that crossed some sort of threshold, making us the first creature to enter the palace of reason. Like the early birds, have we finally developed some new capacity?

The twists and turns of evolution are so dramatic. Like the characters of a play, the bacteria, the plants, the fish, the land-creatures all take their places on the stage. In one scene late in the play, we can see the rise of the reptiles in an escalating battle for survival. The claws grow longer, the teeth sharper. Armor builds up on the backs of the great lizards like plating on battleships. Then, when one would predict the plot of ever thickening armor, the king to succeed the great Tyrannosaurus turns out to be the meek mammal. These small and unassuming creatures out-survive their reptilian masters, and then begin an arms-race of their own. Bigger and bigger brained creatures struggle for dominance. Then, humans enter, stage left, and we find ourselves on the stage of natural history. We are the biggest-brained of the big-brained creatures. So what’s next? Will our brains get bigger as reptilian armor got thicker? Or should we expect something unexpected?

It seems that we have already entered into the realm of reason; more brain power is not a dramatic change. And besides, our brains have produced machines which have more computing power than we could evolve in a millennium of millenniums. If we look to history, we should expect the change to be something dramatic, something new. How do we seek something new? And what hints can we look for?

If we were early birds, we could have contrasted ourselves to other creatures. We could have noticed that we were lighter than other creatures. We might have tried jumping and seeing that we could jump higher than other creatures. Then by progressive jumps, we would have learned to fly. So what is unique about humans? How could we jump?

We see the beginnings of our jumping. Though now we are not simply escaping the law of gravity, but the realm of matter. We have seen even the earliest of humans jumping to escape the rigid laws of death and decay through ceremonial burial. We see philosophers suggest the existence of forms and ideas, believing they transcend the material world. We try to read mathematicians who propose immaterial mathematical laws which they believe are foundational to the physical. We read authors and poets who write of places never seen and ideals never known. And we hear prophets who bear witness of a reality which is more real than any material thing. If these poets and prophets are not all mad, then truly we are at a critical point in the history of the cosmos: we have reached a point when we are no longer confined to the cosmos.

These men were those who jumped and glided. None of them ever said he could break out of the physical. But then there came one of us who claimed he could fly; he claimed that in himself, the visible and the invisible met. Moreover, he came with the message that we all could fly, and he showed us how. In so doing, he made sense out of our humanity. As the inexplicable and inconvenient feathers of the early birds finally made sense in flight, so too did this man make sense of humanity’s otherwise incomprehensible yearnings and graspings for invisible things.

Anyone who looked at his life would have believed that he made sense of humanity; he was the ideal human being. Every virtue to which we all aspire was fulfilled in him. The strange conflict between “ought” and “is” was resolved in his life. He was courageous and strong in fighting proud oppressors; he was kind in healing those who were hurting. His life provoked many to jealousy; but even they could say nothing against him. He was humble and did not glorify himself, but was in truth, born a king. He was deft at debate, and passionate in prayer. He loved others to the point of death. And then, to prove that he was no longer bound by death, he resurrected from the dead.

The first bird to spread its wings and fly was the greatest among the birds; it expressed the full essence of the species through flight. But soon, all birds became what they were destined to be: flying creatures. And now we can follow that first man who constructed a bridge between the visible with the invisible we all yearn for.

As eyeless creatures gained the ability to detect physical light, he suggested that the next step for our race is to use our new eyes and detect spiritual light (“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light” ). As the first men rose above animal instinct, he teaches that we now must rise above human instinct to divine nature (“He has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature” ). As animals developed teeth for eating newer and more nutritious foods, so he calls us to eat a new kind of food altogether (“I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” ). As the first organism transitioned from non-life to biological life, he promises us that by following him we could transition from biological life to spiritual life (“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” ). As humans developed socially complex society, repenting of our tribalism, he urges the New Men to rise above complex societies to a heavenly kingdom (“Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” ). This man is calling us to evolve to something more than human. Or rather, he is calling us to express the fullness of our humanity.

Will you not follow this man to the sky? Will you ignore the glimpses your young spiritual eyes have seen when the light is brightest, in the power of the thunderstorm, the grandeur of the mountaintop, or in the passion of a kiss? Will you watch as your fellow creatures reap the rewards of this new kind of existence while you debate within yourself whether wings can work? Will you remain a flightless bird?

Take flight! Take the leap into the air and fly! Or if you’re more hesitant, jump a little first and see how high you get. But for heaven’s sake, at least try! Try to open your spiritual eyes and see what of heaven is visible, or open your mouth to taste spiritual food. See what comforts and joys are to be experienced in this new Kingdom. One of those New Men who had new eyes saw this image of our race: “But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

Let us take the next step. Let us fly into eternity after Jesus Christ!