Seeking the Holy Grail:
a meditation on myth
Last Tuesday, after spending the morning mucking
around the English countryside in search of the Holy
Grail with the Tuesday Morning Discussion Group (and various knights of the Round Table) I went to lunch in the new Durham Research Center for a lecture and a tour. The group of clergy I was with were being brought up to date on the amazing cellular research going on in this new, state-of-the-art laboratory.
Stem cell research, we were informed, had
some of its beginnings at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, along with the Center's long-established cancer research. The switches that cause an embryonic stem cell to become a particular kind of cell in a body, we were told, are the same switches that are not working when cells become an undifferentiated mass. There is an application in process, for use by a researcher who has had promising results on the animal level in treating emphysema with embryonic stem cells.
The tour continued into the core labs where
custom testing is done on machines too expensive for individual researchers. At this last stop, our little group stood in front of the $250,000. cell sorter. This machine, which takes up a whole room, streams a line of individual cells past deflector plates, sorting them into various collections that can be used for specific research. It was a strange sensation standing in front of a stream of life--as if one might dissolve into such a stream. The collection in progress was to be used to try to understand why cells grow a certain way after receiving some kind of signal.
"What gives the signal to the cell?" one of our
group asked the young woman in charge of the machine.
"That," she said, "is what scientists consider
the Holy Grail."
Now I suppose if you had pressed her, she
would have denied that she had meant anything mystical by her comment. Yet there was a flash of light in her eyes as she said it that might have caused you to mistake her for the Lady of the Lake, Nimue herself. And, if she was not all that serious about the myth, we might remember that myth has a life of its own; that young scientist might be more subject to the myth than she is prepared to accept.
Certainly the stream of cells, going on before
us, forms the chalice of life. Life is not matter but life is held in matter as fine wine is held in a chalice. And how intricately crafted is this chalice of cells that holds life! Certainly it is the fitting place for a quest. Like the ancient quest, this quest seeks to unlock the abundant life constrained by disease and infertility.
And if this stream of cells is the chalice of life,
it is also the Grail, the Holy Chalice, in which God has chosen to dwell, to be chaliced. Coming into the world, God became incarnate of the cells in the womb of the Virgin Mary and, as the Creed says, "was made man."
The scientific quest is not without its peril.
Many obstacles are being put in the way of this quest by imagined fears. There are fears that those on this quest will unleash monsters. There are fears that it will raise questions about life that will cause religious doubt. And, no doubt of it, the quest itself has the potential to violate life in the apparent service of life.
In the ancient mythic quest, success required
that the right question be asked. In the same way. the thing to be feared in this new quest is not what we will find, but that in finding it we will not ask the right question. The knights failed in the end because they did not ask, `Who serves the Grail?' the famous question that must be understood in two ways. And the answer to those who asked the proper question was that "The Grail serves you and you serve the Grail."
This is the secret of the Grail, this covenant of
mutuality and service that can only be heard by those who ask and hear the answer: "The Grail serves you and you serve the Grail."
If the scientists fail, they will fail not by what
they discover but by failing to ask the right question in the face of what they find. As the chalice of life stands disclosed before them, must not they too ask the same age-old question: "Who serves this chalice?" Must they not hear the obvious answer: "The chalice of life serves you and you serve the chalice."
What future can we not be ready for, what fears
can stop us, when we are prepared to meet it within a holy bond of mutual service?