It was the first time my professor got to handle one, though he had seen the real thing before. He canceled our usual lecture and just brought the thing into the classroom in a bucket, made us all form a circle around a little podium, and set it up there. It was already divided into sections and stewing in some sort of alcohol/formaldehyde bath. He began fishing the pieces out one at a time and putting them on Styrofoam plates and showing us the various parts.
I got to touch it. With my fingers. A brain. A human brain.
I know the italics are excessive, but it was truly exciting. Most people don't even get to see a real human brain, much less touch them - certainly not usually as undergrads - because they're very hard to come by. So when my professor asked if anyone wanted to come up and help him fish them out of their bucket -
Well, what do you think I did?
It was glorious. The smell brought back memories of biology dissections - yes, I do look back on those with some measure of fondness, although that certainly has something to do with my illustrious labmates as well... and it was just all so - if you'll pardon the phraseology - freakin' cool!
It was amazing to see what I never expected to see for a good many years - perhaps never. To be able to stick my hand in a bucket of brown water and come out with the fragile, tender reality from which we get all those dry pictures in the textbooks and all those plastic models in science labs - it's beautiful. That's really the best word in my mind right now: beautiful. Fragile. Not lilies-of-the-valley beautiful, but a something clothed by our Heavenly Father in broken, human beauty nonetheless. And to think - that's in my head! It works! It lives - it bleeds - there are so many ways it could all go wrong and be ruined, but still - !
I was exhilarated, but a bit saddened as well. "This is the essence of who we are as humans," says my professor, going on to describe the evolutionary development of the frontal lobe as what distinguishes us from animals. If that's all we are, sixty years ago Mrs. Donor donated her Humanity. Humanity sits in my fingers. And lo - a person's value as a Human therefore rests in my hands, since mangling the frontal lobe turns us into vegetables,and the brain is easily damaged.
Yet - we are so much more and so much less.
So much more wonderfully formed than the ever-amazing human brain.
So much more hideously shattered than a sharpened scalpel could contrive.
Something that can't be chopped apart and put on the table for examination by someone with my untrained fingers and silly brain. Something that was ruined long ago.
Luke 12:4 says, I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. Or, after today, my own proposed version: do not fear those who chop up the brain and use it for their own godless studies, and after that become dead and their own brains chopped up or rotted according to God's almighty purposes.
When I die, I may donate my body to some scientific lab - I doubt it; I have little respect for the purposes of most research that takes place nowadays. But if so, and if it's my brain some student or professor is poking apart on an expensive lab table or a shaky desk in the middle of a classroom, I won't be on the table. My Humanity - which is a stupid word to describe my essence, and isn't something so splendid or glorious as they want me to think - is not bound up in greyish-brown pieces which can be soaked in nasty chemicals and scattered about.
Verse 5 of the same passage goes on: But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!
The moral of my Encounter with a Brain is not the mighty awesomeness of humankind in our adaptive blah over millions and billions of blah blah for the same of blahbahhy blah. Nor is it: Be Ye Mightily Grossed Out, Perhaps Vomiting Muchly, For When Thou Diest Thy Brains Shall Rot And Make A Fearsome Stench - And Lo! I Have Seen A Brain, And Not Vomited, Though 'Tis A Nasty Sight, And A Fearsome Stench.
I propose something much more simple:
Fear God.
Why? He made you beautiful and fragile, and your beauty and hideousness are incalculable and incurable by measure of the human eye or any of its instruments and none but All-Knowing knows the depth of your rottenness and frailness. He holds, or does not hold, your souls - and that is where you (your "essence") lies. It will not remain chopped up on the table after death. When death comes, your essence finds itself for God - or against Him.
Therefore, fear God.
I've always thought the brain looked like roast beef (you know, the sandwich meat). Can you confirm my analysis?
Stephen, that's gross, especially after that amazingly beautiful post. Thank you so much, o Inky Scrubs. We can be eternally grateful that our essence doesn't consist in how alive our cells are. (Your writing always puts me to shame! :o)