The Buzz Stevens Blog — Reflecting on a Life of Faith and Doubt

Harvey Seifert, my ethics professor in seminary, was one of the most brilliant yet compassionate educators I’ve ever known. When he startled us ministers-to-be on that first day of a course titled “Ethics in a Global Society” by suggesting our goal ought to be one of helping to humanize the entire planet by risking finding ways to bond with outsiders he truly personified such an audacious undertaking.

Dr. Seifert was in the right profession. His job was to teach us how the love of Jesus works to sensitize the world. I didn’t have much church life under my belt when I went to seminary. I was pretty much operating under the assumption that the love of Jesus comes from the heart and believers take it to nonbelievers. The only theological grounding I had had was instilled in me through the popular Sunday School song that goes “I’ve got the love of Jesus, love of Jesus, down in my heart, down in my heart. Where, down in my heart…” That’s it! I figured our hearts would do the humanizing and they would grow a little bigger by graduation time and we’d just get out there and preach the love of Jesus from our swelled hearts for the good of the order.

What I hadn’t grasped in the ethics class from my professor was that he probably knew given his gentle demeanor that we get humanized by the outside world in the process of attempting to sensitize it. We become enriched and made more whole by risking relating deeply with humans inside and outside our temples and the sum of our combined efforts do the humanizing. He seemed to be implying believers don’t have an edge on loving over nonbelievers. In my limited theological background I assumed Jesus’ love was brought to the world through congregations and the bigger the base the wider the field of love.

Unfortunately my beloved professor did not live long enough to learn about the Insula, an organ in the brain that houses our deepest emotions. He would have loved knowing about it. Neuroscientists have discovered recently the extent of its functions, emotions that trigger unconditional love, fear, anger, hate, rage, lust; sensations related to eating and get this, orgasms. Religionists have learned once again from scientists the location of our sources of energy. Galileo drove the church nuts by declaring the sun don’t shine the way believers thought it did. And now, Arthur ‘Bud’ Craig, a neuroscientist, is claiming love don’t work the way we assumed it did. I’d trust anybody with a nickname like his. Evidently the source of love in all mortals doesn’t emerge from a heart located behind a breastplate in the chest but from a piece of gray matter lodged beneath a cranial plate in the head

We’re going to have to alter the lyrics to get the song right. Our kiddies will need to be singing “I’ve got the love of Jesus, love of Jesus up in my head, up in my head…Where, up in my head…” Ah, and what about having to mess with a classic favorite that will have to go something like “I left my Insula in San Francisco.” It’s not going to be pretty watching our children in school on Valentine’s Day making cards with images of ugly-looking egg-shaped clumps of clay. Humanoids are pretty good when it comes to adapting but they do seem to have difficulties getting their energy sources located properly. This time they only missed the prediction by about two feet.