Is a connection to God in our "DNA"?

I think I heard about the National Geographic Genome Project about 10 years ago or so (could be longer… you know how “time” is now-a-days!!) and was pretty intrigued.   From what I remember of the information on the project website, they were collecting cell samples from anyone and everyone who 1- was curious to find out where their ancestors might have been migrating from or through around 10,000 years ago (so, they said, this project would NOT help you in your genealogical research) and 2- had a hundred bucks to blow to satisfy this piece of curiosity (here in the US at least).   

I was curious, and still am… but the $100 thing sort of made me put this idea on the back burner.   There are a million other places I could more practically spend a hundred bucks, but it’s still pretty intriguing to me to find out where I “came” from.   Or at least I’d found out where my mother’s mothers’ mothers’ (etc) ancestors were milling around about 10,000 years ago – I believe this project looks at mitochondrial DNA, which if I understand correctly is only transmitted through the matrilineal lines.    “Boys” have mitochondrial DNA, but only the “girls” add their own DNA information to the mix and transmit it on to the next generation.  

So, where were my “people” back 10,000 years ago?   Have you ever asked this question?   We’re usually so busy (or distracted) in our here-and-now (with all the daily-living stuff!!!) that looking back for any answers is almost never done.   Usually we think there ARE no answers back there… not even a few years ago, and especially not 10,000 years ago!     And yet, what if something IS passed on from one generation to the next besides our DNA?   What’s passed on genetically, emotionally, spiritually?  

Insects, reptiles, and many mammals are born knowing what to do to survive – evidently it’s called “instinct”.  These creatures seem to be born knowing how to do certain things, knowing that they need to avoid certain other things, etc.    There’s some sort of collective knowledge that they seem to pass on from one generation to another... somehow.  

There was a show I saw about some kind of ants I believe – these ants had a genetic twin in another region.  They basically were the same ant, only separated by geography and who knows how many generations.   Well, the ants in the other region had a natural predator – some kind of wasp.   Just after mating season, the female wasps would fly around looking for an ant to inject her larvae into.  Well, when these wasps went flying around looking for an incubator for their “babies”… right after detecting them, the ants seemed to go sort of crazy.  I totally got it – I wouldn’t want some giant insect to inject its unborn child into me either!   It’s something out of the “Aliens” movies – the larvae would basically slowly grow in the body of the ant as a parasite, until it was ready to eat its way out to freedom.    Gotta love “nature”, huh!?!   

Well, the first group of ants in the show had no personal knowledge of these wasps.   None of their kind probably had any personal experience with the wasps.   So, what did the scientists do?  They decided to collect a few of the wasps from where they lived – this other region-, and transport them to the regions where they were not, let them loose among the ants who did not know them… and see what might happen.   And guess what?   These ants who knew not these wasps in fact went just as crazy at the first sight of them as their long lost siblings in that other region.    They somehow knew that these wasps were “not good” from the get-go!    How would they know to react that way?

Instinct.   Is it in their DNA?   Earth-Magnetic-Field stuff?   Who knows?    But none-the-less interesting.     And, I think we humans seem to have something like this as well… even if it’s played down, explained away, or whatever.   Take God for instance – I remember an anthropologist friend of mine told me years ago that human cultures across history (or at least the ones we’ve been able to study) have at least three things in common:  1- every human culture to this point (that we know of) had/has some cultural taboos/rules/norms – there are things that are okay to do and things that are not okay to do.  2- Every culture up to this point (that we know of) has had music of some sort.  Music is a fundamental human expression.  “We” (the collective body) must sing and/or play some instrument – it is in fact part of who we are.   And 3- every culture to this point (again- that we know of) has had some notion of, experience with, and connection to, something they called Sacred.   And this is expressed through religion. 

It is most intrinsically human to believe there is something out there, and to want to be in relationship with it somehow is most natural.     Each individual person throughout history may not have been a deist, but collectively, we have, it seems, always believed in something bigger than us since (perhaps) the beginning. 

Is this just an expression of the very human need for a psychological crutch – as some have said – only expressed through the whole of the human experience?   Possibly… but I’m not so sure.  About a year ago, I wrote something about “ancient-ness”.   I wrote something about feeling the ancient in our own memories.  Here’s a few of the stories I included in last years article: 

Last night at Home Church we were talking about this in a round-about way. And someone brought up a couple of stories – they are anecdotal; there are no references, no notes, no studies to them. So- here goes. The first has to do with a lion cage in some national zoo. It seems the lions had lived a lot of their lives in the “Lion Pen”. They had become what some people refer to as “institutionalized”. I’d heard this term when I did Prison Ministry; it refers to the way a person lives – behaviorally it looks like this: no matter what door they walk up to, they’ll stop and wait for someone to open it, they won’t move until someone tells them to, they won’t eat until someone tells them to…etc. Well these lions pretty much did what they were told too. They were for sure wild animals, but wild in the sense that they were not domesticated. They were not wild in the sense that they could do what they by nature are supposed to do.

Evidently unbeknownst to any of the zoo staff, either a deer native to the area, or a gazelle from the gazelle cage that got lose, somehow made a terrible mistake (for the deer) and jumped into the lions’ den. Well, not long after, the poor deer was no longer alive. And when the zoo keepers came back in the next day to take care of the lions, the lions seemed more alert, more alive, more animated, more… well… lion-like!

And another zoo story on the same idea – this time involving an enclosed space with some kind of monkeys in it. They were bored, didn’t really do much. Someone seemed to have the idea of either going to the place where these monkeys were from and recording their “free” cousins, or somehow acquiring a recording of the sounds of the free monkeys in the wild. They set up speakers and started to play the recordings. Well, the caged monkeys heard this, and they came alive again. It seemed something had awakened in them… something of their true nature.

I think most of us have had some experience of our more “basic natures” at some points in our lives.   I’m talking about something very basic, very primal.   I don’t mean “savage” – like what men feel when they tear the flesh off a turkey leg with their teeth, growling, with meat juice dribbling off their chins.   Pretty savage… but not what I mean.     Have you ever been in a place (psychological or physical) that caused you to sense something “ancient”, something in you that seemed to be awakening… some possibly 10,000 year old instinct that was coming to life?   I’ve often had this happen in natural settings around green and growing plants, like mountains.   Times like this there’s a glimmer of something old and ancient being recognized.   Something that’s been around a very long, long time in us.   It’s just that most of the time it’s sleeping, perhaps having been bored out of it’s mind as we expose ourselves to the latest competition to see who the best young singer in the US is, or who will be voted off the latest “island”.    

And perhaps that “ancient” part of us is also automatically connected with the divine somehow.   Well, Genesis talks about humans being made in God’s image.    Many religions describe humans as somehow being imbued with some degree of “divine-ness”.     I think that the more we tap into this, the more familiar we become with this feeling – doing those things that bring it out more (like for me – being in mountains, or natural settings) it seems the more “real” or present the divine becomes.   And the more I do this, the more true to myself I think I am – the more truer human I am perhaps.   

Maybe being “human” is actually to be more natural… to expressing this divine-ness more.   Maybe to be more human means to be more of who we are… to be more rooted, more centered, in God and in life.   In those more primal moments, those more instinctive moments, I think we are also more connected to God.   If the conditions are right… it comes very naturally to us… we just have to recognize it as such.