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| Photo credit: Brian Ragland. The Skies on Fire. Ellis Grove, Illinois |
Donia, Hamish, and myself get together at a library sometimes and discuss library-type things. One day the conversation included "The Afterlife."
Donia, who is Muslim, was interested in Christian opinions of The Afterlife. None of us have died yet, but I am edging closer towards my earthly time allotment, and Hamish is probably within spitting distance. Donia is youngest and healthiest, and her husband is a doctor, which makes her furthest from death-by-old-age. That may be why she is interested in what happens, and Hamish and I aren't: she has time to fix it up yet. She said that she believes people come back, and have a chance to become a better person than they were.
Reincarnation, Hamish nodded sagely. I'm sorry to say I don't believe in that. When we waited for a little expansion on that, he added that he felt that death is the end of the body and the soul.
Donia looked sad, like his opinion might be truer than hers. I felt this was going badly. Plus I didn't like Hamish to be the Unchallenged Spiritual Resource. So I said to him: Well, you're an engineer. He looked at me with an inscrutable Engineer Look, and I scrambled to cover my butt. Engineers = science, more or less, so I said, Carl Sagan the astrophysicist says that religion and science will meet on the hilltop someday. Ok, said Hamish, prepared to be open-minded. Donia looked puzzled.
I paraphrased handily from a favorite book, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, by Carl Sagan: Sagan says all life on earth began with the proteins in the dust which sifted down from stars from universes which originated in the Big Bang thingy. From that protein, that dust, we developed into Us.
Hamish pondered and said, I've heard that about the stardust. "We are the stuff of stars."
English is not Donia's first language. None of her English classes ever discussed Sagan or the Afterlife. But she didn't hang out at the library discussing theology and science for the heck of it. She buckled down and wrote a lot of words in her vocabulary journal to look up later.
Hamish said Well I can't see how it's possible that we come back time and again, science or not.
Hamish is a good example of "curmudgeonly" when he wants to be. It seemed insensitive of him to not give the youngest member of our little group some hope to go on living and achieve immortality through faultless living. This is not, after all, an easy goal. To cheer Donia up, and maybe Hamish too, and definitely myself, the obvious answer popped into my head. It was an "A-Ha" moment that was so obvious I didn't see it coming. Religious metaphor and science met in my head, on my personal mountaintop. I couldn't even question it, it was so gently true.
So I said, DNA
They stared at me, for a moment, while processing this statement. We talk, in our little group, as Language and Culture learners. We do not take words lightly. Words must be known, and understood. So my friends who love language and ideas processed my acronym. One processed the idea, one processed both the words and the idea. Donia knew "DNA" through her husband the doctor, but knowing the meaning of DNA wasn't helping her, or Hamish, follow The Thought. An alien Thought you've never met before takes a bit more time to wrap around. I was happy to see that my friends were rolling my tossed-out Thought around and hanging with it. That of course, according to the Rules of Discourse, encouraged me to keep thinking that Thought. So I followed it in.
I said, Life on earth began as little cells, which developed into more complex cells, which reorganized into even-more-complex creatures, and eventually became Us. We have some of the original DNA, from the beginning of life on Earth, in our bodies. (I believe that's true, but I was running with the moment and didn't check it. I will check it. Soon.) We are, or specifically our DNA is, born over and over, changing to meet evolutionary demands and climate conditions, and to keep improving our survival capabilities. That's what "reincarnation" is. DNA.
I drew breath and realized I was agreeing with Donia. Ten minutes earlier, I didn't believe in Reincarnation, as posited by Hippies and Hindis and such.
But that was ten minutes ago, when I didn't understand.
Donia was still interpreting half of the words I was using, so she didn't understand yet that we were agreeing. Hamish was being Engineer-ish and thinking about the science of my posit. And being uncharacteristically quiet, too.
I expanded my new idea to myself while they were processing and while I was still figuring it out:
DNA dies and comes back--in the flesh, somebody's flesh--over and over. It is/ we are reincarnated. Through DNA, we pass on our same physical, mental, emotional traits, in different bodies. If we live a "good" life, which Biblical literature articulates), our DNA (or the closely associated DNA of relatives/ country/ race) is passed on. If we don't live a good life, our DNA might not survive. Back into the dust for another shot, after a few years or millennia or Big Bangs or something. The survival of individuals, and our species, is dependent on living a Good Life, according to religion. The idea of "luck" does not enter into formalized Christian religion, although it's key to DNA thinking, I bet.
There is nothing new under the sun, someone famously noted once. Somewhere Out There, this very idea is all written down, and I will Google it one day soon. I'll take the pros and cons back to the library and we'll use more theological and religious and metaphorical words for Donia, and have more fun deciding what's what.
Hamish nodded and said, I hadn't thought of that. It cheered him up, I think. He gave me a hug when we left. Donia picked up some new English language terms from religion, science and philosophy, but I don't know what she thinks reincarnation entails, because we didn't talk about that. This time.
I think its nice that, although we believe it in very different ways, we all believe the same thing.
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