Lucy

I remember sitting there in a class this last year in Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown's Portraits of Human Nature when lecture materials eventually turned to the proposal for human mental scaffolding. Let the reader know, the premise of the class was that human beings are emergent, singular entities understood to have matured, evolved even, over millions of years to become the persons they currently are. The class entertained topics such as monism (that humans do not possess souls, but ought to be conceived of as whole entities), the Resurrection of the Dead, and evolution.


This evening, after I finished cleaning up dinner dishes (Henry made a very tasty pizza, mmm) we were listening to NPR when a quick news blurb came on during a commercial break during Talk of the Nation about a new fossil display that would be making its way to the US (Texas, to be specific). Discovered some thirty years ago in Ethiopia, the "3.3 million-year-old skeleton of a child, the oldest child fossil on record", has come to be called by the scientific community as "Lucy." I had not thought about Lucy since taking this class, but as soon as I heard her name on the radio I was reminded of the way I first felt about her. Mind you, at the time of this class I had never been presented in a formal lecture setting a pro-evolutionary biology lesson. Accordingly, to be instructed of this material by one of my all-time favorite Fuller profs and a well respected neuro-psychologist was, to say the least, thrilling (seriously). Soaking all of this wonderful knowledge in, a feeling of gratitude for all the years of perseverance and triumph Lucy represented was almost too much to take. Certainly, this course came the quarter after the quarter I had a class on the writings of J. Moltmann (in which I discovered just how much process theism lay beneath my theological constructions), and perhaps that correlation ought to have something to say about how sometimes I am all too susceptible to being caught up in some new idea to me and don't give enough personal, critical thought. Nevertheless, I could not help but feel that throughout all the years of evolution God was guiding his creation to something new and relational. Something about this Deity's forbearance to wait long enough to one day engage with these hominid ancestors of ours is beautiful. I guess that it just made me feel proud to be a part of something that has been going on for millions of years and, so long as we don't greenhouse gas our way into extinction, will continue on into the future.

So, in conclusion, I would like to thank Henry for making a delicious pizza tonight, NPR for providing helpful news wire updates, Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown for a thought-provoking class lecture, and God for having such great resolve to see creation to this point in history, even when we mess things up all the time.