The tale of Bugsy the entomologist

Once upon a time there was an entomologist named Bugsy. For those of you who are unfamiliar - that’s a person who studies insects. Bugsy had invested years studying ants in particular. In fact he was the world’s number one expert on ants. When most people look at an anthill crawling with hundreds of the little buggers, they see chaos. But when Bugsy looks he sees a highly developed society working together in order to survive and reproduce.

But he didn’t REALLY understand what it was like to be an ant. He didn’t know the struggles they went through, or the complexities of problem solving in a colony. He knew there was only so much he would ever comprehend about ant life as he stood at a distance and watched them. 

Bugsy also knew that no matter how much he tried to communicate with those ants, there was absolutely no way they would understand anything about him, or humans in general. If he was ever to open up a real line of communication with the ants, where he truly understood them, and they might at least begin to understand the world of humans, he would have to become an ant.

Here’s where it gets really interesting (prepare for a massive suspension of disbelief). Because it just so happens Bugsy worked and worked and finally mastered the technology to (ok go with me here) turn himself into an ant. 

The technology shrank all of Bugsy’s physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities into the size of an implanted ant egg that was then implanted into the queen of the colony. Then just like every other ant egg, he developed into a larva, then a pupa, and finally into an adult ant.

As he grew he learned how to communicate with the other ants using the normal ways that ants communicate with each other. And he took a normal role among the colony as a worker ant. Nothing special. The other ants didn’t think he was anything special, until he started communicating to them about humans. 

Most of the ants didn’t understand what he was talking about, because there really wasn’t a way to describe what a human was to ants. There was not a vocabulary that encapsulated the essence of humanity into ant-size understanding.. So using the best ant communication methods available, Bugsy worked to tell the ants humans existed, and the amazing creativity and intelligence of humans. But he could not find any way to express the complexity of human emotions, their powers of reasoning, and their creations of music and art and jets and iPhones. Everything Bugsy communicated about humans had to be dumbed down to the very basic levels that he, as an ant using ant communication, could get across to them. 

Bugsy knew there was so much more about humans - because he had been one, and still was one at the core of his being. But he also knew the ant view of humans was hopelessly distorted and incomplete. In fact he shuddered at how incomplete the ants’ view of humans was.

The experiment was not a total waste, though, because when the technology removed ant-Bugsy from the colony and returned him to his previous form as a man, he understood those ants like he never had before. Because he had become one of them.

The end.

_______

Ok what was that all about? (is anybody still with me?)

Maybe you picked it up (you probably did), but this is kind of a Christmas story. Only instead of a heavenly deity becoming a zygote, then a fetus, a baby, a child, a teenager, and finally an adult man, the man became an ant.

There’s lots of ways this little parable breaks down if you extend it too far.  But I just keep thinking about how humans always seem to be so certain they understand God. They claim complete certainty about how God thinks, and what God is doing in the world. But they fail to remember that every single idea  humans have ever written down about God is hopelessly dumbed down so our tiny human brains can comprehend it. Even the ideas that Jesus, the God-become-human, spoke, only included concepts that the people he was talking to could comprehend. He could not even talk about things that humans in later centuries with greater technological and scientific understanding might be able to comprehend. Jesus, the God-become-human, was limited to describing God - an infinitely intelligent and powerful being - with images that people living 2000 years ago could understand. And if he came to earth today, he’d be limited to ideas that people in this century can comprehend.

And so I’m humbled again by the distance that Jesus, the God-become-human, traveled to be one of us here on this insignificant planet in an insignificant part of a comparatively small galaxy in the cosmos he helped create.Not just physical distance, but distance in reducing himself from one type of being to a much lower one. I’ll never understand it, or why it was even important for him to do it.

This keeps me humble in my religious ideas because whatever ideas I might believe about God, even those that come directly from the mouth of Jesus, are woefully incomplete. They may point in the direction of God’s true nature, but they can never encapsulate the entirety of what is true about God. Why? Because no matter how smart I might think I am, I’m like an ant trying to comprehend a human. I’m a creature trying to understand the Creator.

So I hold to my convictions about God loosely. If  there is anything I can hold with certainty, it is this: the God I worship is so much bigger than anything I’ll ever be able to comprehend, 

It’s Christmas, and I’m so grateful that God, for whatever reason, decided to become a human who did his best to teach ideas about God’s nature and character.. But I’ll always have more to learn. And to me that’s a more beautiful story than one I can wrap up in certainty.