Which Are We?

The other night at the Dis­ci­ple Men’s Retreat, Dr. Glenn Car­son raised a key ques­tion of per­spec­tive: Are we pri­mar­ily eter­nal spir­its learn­ing how to be human or human beings try­ing to learn how to be spir­i­tual? Most see life from the sec­ond par­a­digm. There is great resis­tance in the cur­rent world to see­ing the human soul as eter­nal or as pre-existent…or even exist­ing at all. I have been pon­der­ing the first option more since Fri­day night. It is an idea I have often con­sid­ered. Over­all, I pre­fer it to the more com­monly accepted view. As I child I felt like I was expe­ri­enc­ing more of an altered con­scious­ness than the dis­cov­ery of a newly cre­ated one. In other words, we need to pon­der why it is we feel older than our years and why it seems that we have always been. Is it merely a mat­ter of imag­i­na­tion? Why is it so easy for chil­dren to con­sider it?

Before your mind is blown, please real­ize that this model has been expressed in many ways over the cen­turies. It is not uncom­mon for Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties to express spir­i­tu­al­ity in phrases like, “learn­ing how to embrace your immor­tal­ity.” That idea seems too good to be true. It is also very intim­i­dat­ing. Could it be that we are all greater than we sup­pose? How would this con­cept change what you do or how you feel on any given day?

The idea that we may have always been (though not in the present form), stirs the imag­i­na­tion of faith to rise above the merely human. Surely we are more than advanced ani­mals. Some­thing beyond our great­est dreams is hap­pen­ing. Our min­i­miz­ing of it could be quite an insult to the big­ger pic­ture. The line of demar­ca­tion cuts right through our cul­ture. Mate­ri­al­ists, extreme sec­u­lar­ists, and nat­u­ral­ists in gen­eral write off entirely too many pos­si­bil­i­ties. They are too anx­ious to reduce us to ran­dom atoms. Are they really that intim­i­dated by such a grand per­spec­tive? Are they spir­i­tual cow­ards look­ing for an excuse to hide and deny?

Res­ur­rec­tion, eter­nity, unlim­ited know­ing — these are ideas for the wildest dream­ers. With evi­dence and faith, the direc­tion is promis­ing. After all, there is yet to be a com­plete alter­nate expla­na­tion. What­ever life may be, it is greater than the sum of its parts.