Thought for the week: Neil Morgan’s breathing space
‘Simple awe takes over from the preoccupation of being immersed in science.’
Breath is life. We need to take something in, on which we depend for life. Covid has underlined this, of course.
In this latter case the science of molecular biology has stepped in, helping to produce vaccines. How wonderful! But such advances, and the ideologies around them, can lead us to believe that life is a mechanistic statistic that we can control. There is another aspect to consider, however. For each of us, experiencing our own life, from the inside, is a sheer miracle. Whom can we thank for that? The probability of evolution? This is alien to many people’s souls, even atheist philosophers like Thomas Nagel, who struggles with the idea in his Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.
There is a very striking picture in Ezekiel 37. ‘There were bones all over the plain – dry bones, bleached by the Sun.’ Ezekiel writes that God asked him ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ It is a searching question. Without a response God continues: ‘Come from the four winds. Breathe on these slain bones. Breathe life!’
To hear this passage (as I did in the radio broadcast of the Easter Sunday evensong service from Manchester Cathedral recently) is to be knocked sideways. Simple awe takes over from the preoccupation of being immersed in the science of spike proteins. One shifts from one world to another, with a different vocabulary, a different response to the universe. One inhabits a different, but complimentary, perspective.
Where does this idea of ‘breathing life’ come from? Life has emerged from the big bang, and from life has emerged first consciousness, and then self-consciousness. The mind-body problem remains just that. Can we really totally conceptualise it in terms of our present day understanding of science, and molecular biology? In Ezekiel God ambitiously claims: ‘I’ll dig up all your graves and bring you to life!’ This is the metaphor of Easter and the resurrection. What is it to be enthused? To take life in? How should we interpret that from the stance of twenty-first-century biology? Truth? Metaphor? Just how do we breathe life? On what do we depend to breathe? Oxygen? Oxygen alone? Is that really enough?
With Covid and vaccines, I am very thankful to be alive. I am grateful to continue breathing. How do we breathe life? On what do we depend? I cannot breathe in a vacuum. It makes me think: where does that take us?
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