Process, Holography, and Jung:
Pneumogenesis, Spirit Ecology & Evolution
Rev. John A. Mills
60 Paterson Rd.
Fanwood, NJ 07023
USA
revjohnmills@yahoo.com http://home.att.net/~john.a.mills/jmills.htmA longer version of this article is at
http://home.att.net/~wislit/scirel/hcsstext.htm©2001 John A. Mills
ABSTRACT
Within the argumentative environment between Christianity and scientific evolution, Process theology shines out as a theology that not only finds evolution compatible, but constitutive. But evolution and process alone do not give us a complete picture of spiritual reality. This paper will demonstrate how other scientific theories are a rich repository of metaphors and ideas to formulate a deeper understanding of reality, developing the pneumogenesis model showing that holography's unfolding and enfolding from the implicate order connects Process theology's becoming and perishing to the Jungian Ground of Being. In doing so, this paper will integrate the scientific theories of the collective unconscious, Platonic forms, and holography with Process theology to formulate a new way of looking at reality as an ecological and evolutionary spirit process, where spatiotemporality and holosynchronality are interpenetrated in our spiritual lives to integrate the plethora of interconnection of all createds, the kenosis of perishing and becoming, and the yearning for the Divine.
Pneumogenesis: The Process of the Spirit
We are passing beyond post-modernism into a post-post-modern era of distrust, aimlessness, and selfishness, an age bereft of vision and imperiled of perishing. The post-modern era was marked by a suspicion of meta-narrative, a de-centering rejection of uniformity, homogeneity, and monoreality. Rightfully, homogenizing trends were dismantled and diversity was mainstreamed. No longer were pronouncements, myths, and authority assumed to be truthful and relevant. Common mythologies and visions were uncovered to be exclusive and hierarchical. Such critique exposed widespread unrighteousness and called to account authority, both secular and religious. Paternalism, sexism, racism, and heterosexism were all named and called to account.
But this post-modern opportunity was squandered. Instead of the people gathering together in their diversity and rainbow variety to construct a new identity and mythos of process and inclusion, we built private, excluding bunkers to fortify the rightness of our own persona over and against all others. Instead of becoming a plural community of adventurers and explorers, we have become a conglomerate of single unit tribes, whether one person or one nuclear family. The Powers and Principalities not only had no vested interested in contributing their influence and power to a vision of diversity and evolutionary change, they found the consequent malaise to be re-enforcing of their long-held positions. So a void formed where vision was needed.
And in rushed Capital's Dragon, Mammon, consumerism and its child, materiality. Unsatiated and unsatiable acquisition prevails as the popular vision, setting our society on the slippery slope to abysmal spiritual aimlessness and despair. Yet in the relentless yearning for the Spirit, we need to return to meta-narrative, but this time one that has adopted post-modern's plurality, diversity, and heterogeneity, a metaphysic that is an antidote to the infection of selfish, self-absorbed materiality, yet maps reality congruent with intellectual, psychic, and sensual experience. Such a metaphysic emerges from the newly resurrected dialogue between the Spirit and Science. The wonderful discoveries, many asymptotic with the mystical, that science has uncovered in the last few decades have compelled many scientists to return to the Spirit and has opened a world of spiritual metaphor and wonder.
As we begin the third millennium, science is as powerful and efficacious a force as Christianity was at the beginning of the second millennium. It has opened up new vistas and has challenged many favored and comfortable axioms of faith. Darwin was the first, when he removed the axiom of special creation. Einstein came later and removed the axiom that space-time was absolute. And even theology was not immuned. Whitehead and his process colleagues removed the axiom that God was absolute and unchanging. We can try to turn back the clock and be deeply frustrated with our inevitable failure. Alternatively, fruitfully, we can draw upon both science and religion reveal the depth of reality, not as shallow materiality, but as interpenetration of spirit and body, of spatiotemporality and holosynchronality. By engaging both science and religion in dialogue, we can avoid the pitfalls of shallow consumerist and "magical" remedies for our spiritual malaise, and enter a new spiritual age. Out of the many scientific discoveries, biogenesis, the collective unconscious, holography, and mathematics offer discoveries from which we can formulate pneumogenesis, an ecological and evolutionary spirit process. Pneumogenesis is a model of our spiritual lives and interactions that integrates the plethora of interconnection of all createds, the kenosis of perishing and becoming, and the yearning for the Divine.
From biogenesis come the web of life and the progress of life from simpler to more complex forms. All living things are interconnected in a grand web of interaction and support. Nothing is an independent cell; everything is interdependent. Furthermore, this grand web is not static, but dynamic, developing from simple to complex forms. And life is kenotic: dying to live. In order for one form to become, others must perish. Life is a series of perishings and becomings evolving towards greater complexity.
Jung's notion of the collective unconscious or Ground of Being peopled by archetypes reinforces the interconnectedness of all things, but on a psychic and numinous plane. In our deep preconscience we all are connected via the collective unconscious. This collective unconscious is peopled by archetypes -- templates of experience and behavior and nature, not unlike Plato's world of pure and perfect forms, but with a dynamism unknown to the ancients, yet well known to postmodern mathematicians and like Whitehead's Primordial Nature of God (PNG), envisaging the multiplicity of eternal objects. Reality exceeds materiality. Beyond the physicality of our senses is a reality, timeless, spaceless holosynchronality, a reality yet to be systematically mapped, a neither-place-nor-time wherein God's amniotic fluid nurtures us.
Whitehead's Process Philosophy arises from the dynamism of 20th century infinitesimal mathematics and quantum physics. Going beyond the physical to the numinous, Whitehead proposed that each individual is actually a society of concrescences: ever occurring becoming and perishing. At the infinitesimal moment of becoming, we perish. In that instant, we encounter the Divine aim, constituted in eternal objects, and all other concrescences. At that infinitesimal instant, we make a decision to follow the Divine or to rebel as we are impacted by all concrescences in the web of life.
Now the science of holography enters, bringing these seemingly disparate ideas together: the enfolding and unfolding of the implicate order into the explicate order. Bohm suggests that the universe is like the process of holography. There exists an implicate order like holographic film that has enfolded into it information that when explicated -- extracted -- appears as multi-dimensional objects. This implicate order is timeless and spaceless, space-time being an artifact of the explicate order. Therefore, the objects that we sense with our ordinary senses are really series of unfoldings and enfoldings out of the implicate order.
We can readily relate the holographic enfolding and unfolding to the Process becoming and perishing, and the implicate order to the Jungian collective unconscious and the PNG. So if we apply Jung's archetypes and by extension Plato's forms to this theory, we have a detailed picture of the implicate order, anchoring Process' PNG, the multiplicity of all eternal objects. And if we apply Process to this theory, then we have understanding of the Divine interaction with us. We can call this integrated theory holoprocess. Holoprocess then leads us to a kenotic and plethoric understanding of ethics and morality and the life of the Spirit: pneumogenesis. Pneumogenesis is the spiritual process that connects us to all of creation and God, and challenges us to evolve towards the Kingdom of God within an ethic of renouncing the separate self for the sake of the other self, no matter the cost to one's self.
The remainder of this paper will develop these notions to demonstrate this web of reasoning, proposing that pneumogenesis is one systematic understanding of God's interaction with us that can deepen and enrich our existence.
Biogenesis
The scientific study of biogenesis, the process of life, reveals a creative process of evolution from the simple to the complex and of the interconnection of all life. The Theory of Evolution proposes that life developed in a step-wise fashion. Originally, amino acids and other non-self-replicating molecules needed for life evolved from pre-biotic chemicals. Then, these molecules self-assembled into self-replicating molecules. These, in turn, developed and aggregated into more complex molecules that formed the first cells. From that the Darwinian processes of natural selection and random mutation over a very long time evolved the plethora of life that we now observe. This web of life is so extensive that we continue to discover new species and even see new species arising, such as around deep sea volcanic vents.
Scientific theory is necessarily epistemologically atheistic. The scientific method derives theories from observable data, repeatable experiments, and the logic of cause and effort. This has been an enormously efficacious method that has resulted in a continuing and fruitful process of understanding God's creation. Many in the religious (most particularly the Christian) community have put forth the theories of Creationism to insert God visibly into the creative process. They are concern that scientific theories such as Evolution have removed God from that process and, therefore; challenge the existence of the Divine. In Life's Grand Design, Kenneth R. Miller refutes the newly formulated Intelligent Design Theory using examples from biology and genetics. At the end of his article, he states, "[i]t seems to me that the scope and scale of evolution can only magnify our admiration for a creator who could set such a process in motion."
God has covenanted with creation to give us free will. God does not coerce us into believing in God, in loving God, or in doing God's will. We are given choice and we can make a choice for God or against God. In this manner, when we do turn to God, God knows it is of our own volition and is truly for God. If God did things that coerced us into believing in God, how could God be sure we truly loved God? For God to fulfill the covenant, God cannot be "obvious". If God were visible, then even the atheist must finally concede that there is a God. As a result, free choice would be removed. Thus, God "hides" and drops clues around for us. Nancey Murphy and George F. R. Ellis in their book On the Moral Nature of the Universe, say on this issue, "[t]he requisite hiddenness of God is satisfied through the nature of creation as we see it, apparently governed by impartial physical laws, which nevertheless allow hints as to God's existence and true nature." Though God's footprints can often be seen in what science has uncovered, we must have the faith to identify the footprint as God's. It cannot and ought not to be scientifically proven.
We can see God's footprints in Evolution and other scientific fields. In Evolution the process of random mutation is the door through which the Divine novelty can exert itself without violating our free choice. We see this same sort of doorway in physics as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and in mathematics as the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem. Likewise, the creative processes of the biogenic web of life open a door to understanding the process of the Spirit, pneumogenesis.
The Holographic Universe
We begin our understanding of pneumogenesis and mapping of the implicate order by examining David Bohm's ideas of the holographic universe. Michael Talbott in The Holographic Universe describes Bohm's theory that the universe is structured like a hologram, a photographic record of the patterns produced when laser light from a source is reflected from an object and interferes with a reference beam from the same source. The film records an interference pattern of waves that appears as a series of concentric circles. Multiple objects can be recorded on the same film by changing the angle of the reflecting laser light. Hidden within these concentric circles are the objects that were "holophotographed". They are enfolded in the film and are unfolded when observed. A three dimensional image of the recorded objects can be "explicated" from the film by shining a laser light on the film. An image of each object is recovered by shining the laser light at the same angle as it was recorded. The film is an implicate in which is folded information that can be unfolded and thereby explicated. Further, a hologram can be associative. If the light of a single laser bounces off two objects simultaneously, and if the interference pattern of the resulting two lights is recorded on film, then whenever one object is illumined by laser light and the resulting reflected light passes through the film, the second object is explicated.
The implicate order has the following interesting holosynchronical properties:
Every bit of the film contains the whole image. If a piece of the film is cut from the film, the piece has the whole image; although hazier with less resolution. If a piece is cut from that piece, it will still contain the whole, but with yet less resolution. Thus, any piece of information can be found anywhere in the film. Spatial-temporal boundaries do not exist and information is non-localized. The image is "fractalized".
Not only is the whole in every part, every part has many wholes. A film can have an unlimited number of parallel sets of information recorded. So it is possible to explicate multiple images observable from different angles.
Acausal, non-local event-relationships occur in the implicate order. For example, if, in the explicate order two objects widely apart, act in concert simultaneously with no cause and effect, they seemingly defy the speed of light, since in order for there to be cause and effect, they must communicate in infinitesimal time. Rather, since location ceases to have meaning in the implicate order, if the two events are connected in the implicate order, they can unfold as widely separate events in the explicate order.
Bohm believes that the implicate order is a quantum potential field existing at the subquantum level. At the subquantum level all things are not separate, but part of an unbroken web, and thus the behavior of the parts are determined by the whole fabric. All of space-time is enfolded in each part of the implicate order. Rather, space-time is a product of the explicate order. The things we observe in our "ordinary" world (the explicate order) are, in fact, not static, but actually a constant series of unfoldings from the implicate order and enfoldings into it. This process of unfoldings and enfoldings is a holomovement.
Reality then is made up of more than what we "sense" (the explicate order); it is also made up of the enfolded reality, the implicate order. If now, we understand the implicate order as the ground of being and the spiritual aspect of reality, then the process of enfolding and unfolding is the interaction of the spirit in reality. But the holographic model does not present a complete picture of reality. It lacks an intrinsic understanding of God's interaction with creation and an explanation of the process of unfolding and enfolding. This leads us to introduce Process Philosophy, a philosophy rooted in mathematics.
Process
Process philosophers and theologians (e.g., Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, and David Ray Griffin) have formulated a theory of reality that provides a framework to understand the process of unfolding and enfolding. According to process theology, process or change is fundamental to reality. Not everything is in process; but to be actual is to be a process. Reality is a place of process. To be fully real is to be in process. The real is not beyond change, i.e., it is not absolute or unchanging.
In Process, the individuals that we perceive, such as a human being, are actually "societies" of actualities. The structure of process reality consists of these individual actualities, each of whom is a infinitesimal experience which perishes upon coming into being. This is called concrescence: becoming concrete. The measurable temporal process that we experience is the transition from one individual actuality to another. Thus, there are two structural processes: the finite process of transition and the infinitesimal process of concrescence. The transition process hinges time: the past is the collection of those actualities that occurred; the present is the collection of actualities occurring; and the future is where no actuality has yet occurred but has the potential to occur. Time is asymmetrical, non-circular, and non-repetitive.
In the moment of concrescence each individual actuality enjoys experience. Though not all experience is conscious, all actualities at all levels of consciousness or non-consciousness have experience. The higher the consciousness, the greater the enjoyment of experience. The infinitesimal experience of an actuality is essentially related to all past actualities (the whole in every part, A), its own free will (self-creation, f), its own past (experience, W), and God's lure towards divine novelty (all the potential wholes, PNG, ?
).
Thus, an actuality is firstmost in relation. Reality is fundamentally interdependent, rather than independent. The experience of all past actualities has the potential of being incorporated into the infinitesimal present experience of any given actuality. The finite past is incarnated in the infinitesimal present and thus is objectively immortal. An individual actuality is influenced by past actualities by incarnating them and by responding to them creatively. By exercising its free will and deciding how it will incarnate past experience and the divine lure, each individual actuality is self-creative. Free will is the gift that allows each actuality to respond creatively.
Now, God is the divine eros urging or luring the world to new heights of enjoyment through novelty. An actuality wants to pervade its environment with its self-expression to contribute to the enjoyment of others. Each individual actuality can have innumerable actualized possibilities. Possibilities that were never actualized in the past and are new in the present are radically novel. Thus, unactualized possibilities are part of the divine experience as the ground of novelty, and the ground of changing and developing order. Our sense of God is essential to our experience; God is the origin of novelty that changes past possibilities. God is incarnate in the world and God-relatedness is constitutive of the experience of every individual actuality. In God, there exists freedom, since from God comes novelty. Without God, each actuality would be just a deterministic derivative of the past. Therefore, God's effect is the continual creative transformation of that which is received from the past in the light of the divinely received call toward actualizing new possibilities.
Further, process theology suggests the Divine Relativity. God's own emotional state depends on ours. God responds to us in perfect and divine feeling with us. God acts in the world and lures creatively, but does not wholly control the world. Divine creative influence is persuasive, not coercive. God is the source of unrest stimulating us to new possibilities to replace worn out ones. God provides an optional initial aim that an individual actuality can choose or leave. Choosing against it leads to evil. Evil is failure to conform to the divine aim.
Holoprocess
Now, we can integrate the holographic model and the process model to form holoprocess. The coherent societies of actualities in process are the holomovements in the holographic model. The series of becomings and perishings or unfoldings and enfoldings make up the object that we perceive. In process philosophy, upon concrescence, an actuality experiences the joy of being an experiencing subject. Equivalently, in the holographic model, it responds to meaning or information. Every actuality enjoys its existence and responds to meaning. It is not necessary to be a conscious actuality to experience; therefore, rocks enjoy and can respond to meaning or information however low level or slow. Each actuality that makes up a holomovement exercises self-creation (however low level) and experiences meaning. The holomovement then exercises the collective will of its constituent actualities and is the on-going emergent explication of a series of actualities. Each person or object that we sense is a holographic explication emerging out of the holographic film of the implicate order. At each infinitesimal concrescence we encounter the transcendental implicate order. Our psyches and souls are directly influenced by this experience.
Concrescence is an infinitesimal process, perishing immediately upon becoming; it is the Eternal Now without time or space. Whitehead viewed this instant of concrescence as an instant of aloneness. Holoprocess differs with this. This kenotic instant is when an actuality taps into the implicate order. An actuality returns to the ground of being or collective unconscious (the implicate order) through which God's lure and novelty are mediated, and the organic whole of creation is accessible. The infinitesimal instances of concrescence are like the pores of the spatiotemporal sponge soaking up the nourishing holosynchronical amniotic water. Free will, then, is what an actuality decides to do with all of this input. An actuality chooses whether to be seduced by God's lure or to go its own way.
The Implicate Order
If we now look at the implicate order in greater detail, we will reveal a process of co-creation: the shared and mutual creative process of God and God's creation. Our sources of understanding of the implicate order come from Plato and Jung. Plato describes his world of perfect forms in a variety of works, particularly in the Republic and the Phaedo. Plato theorized that the implicate order was the order of independently existing pure and perfect forms and the explicate order was only a shadow of the implicate. For example, a perfect circle never occurs in the explicate order, though it does in the implicate order. Plato put a value on this: the implicate order is divine and the explicate order is profane. We are trapped in the explicate and ontologically strive to return to the implicate order. However, Judeo-Christian theology teaches (in general) that the Creation is good [e.g. see Genesis chapter 1], and so we reject this value judgment and seek good in both the implicate and explicate orders. Yet that the implicate order is home to pure and perfect forms is evidenced in mathematics. For example the golden mean is a mathematical object that occurs in the abstract world of mathematics (i.e., the implicate order); yet emerges in the explicate order in many forms, such as the chambered nautilus shell, the florets of sunflowers and the quanta energy levels of atoms.
Mathematics, of course, has progressed considerably since Plato's time. In Plato's age and for ages after, mathematics was looked upon as describing an absolute, immutable realm. But today mathematics describes an open-ended realm of infinities, process, chance, and chaos. Our inventory of mathematical objects has infinitely increased. Yet their pure and perfect characteristics remain as abstract ideals and templates that are "imperfectly" manifested in the explicate order. So one source of understanding the implicate order is the abstract world of pure and perfect mathematical objects.
Another source of understanding the implicate order is C. G. Jung's notion of the collective unconscious as home of the archetype. Jolande Jacobi in Complex Archetype Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung explains that archetypes are collective forms or images which occur practically all over the earth as the basis of myths and at the same time as individual products of unconscious origin. Archetypes are numinous metaphors that organize our psychic contents preconsciously and unify the biological, psychological, and metaphysical planes. Ordinarily it is the psyche that mediates between the implicate and the explicate orders, extracting archetypes from the collective unconscious. Jung stated, "... there are present in every psyche forms which are unconscious but nonetheless active -- living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions." That archetypes are more than just human constructs, but pervade the rest of creation is attested in various animal studies suggesting that their behavior is also organized by archetype. Jung also uncovered that space and time disappears in the collective unconscious and the law of synchronocity holds. Jung also regarded the collective unconscious metaphorically as the "universal soul". Thus, the collective unconscious and the implicate order are expressions of the same hidden order.
If the implicate order is the home of forms and archetypes, how do these arise? If we look at our model, we recall that creation occurs not in the implicate order, but in the explicate order at the instant of concrescence. Unlike Plato who thought we were trapped or imprisoned in the explicate order, we are freed to co-create with God in our response to God's initial aim and novelty. It is in the explicate order that we co-create. God pronounced the creation good: that is both the implicate and explicate orders. The explicate order is divinely vectored on the Kingdom of God. It is in the explicate order that we do the will of God and evolve towards the Kingdom of God. "... the collective unconscious is in every respect 'neutral', that its contents acquire their value and position only through confrontation with consciousness [Jacobi, p60]."
Whitehead's notion of the PNG provides an approach to understanding God's relationship to the implicate order. The PNG is God as creative love, the source of novel order and ordered novelty in the world as the Logos incarnated, the Christ, in creatures as the initial aim whose actualization provides the greatest joy and integrates discordant elements creatively into contrasts [Cobb, p98-99]. If we associate the PNG as the divine expression of the implicate order, then the Platonic forms and archetypes are the pure manifestation of God's creative love interpenetrating our every moment.
Pneumogenesis: Kenosis and Plethora
A spiritual model must not only be descriptive, but also guide us to a relationship to God (reflection) and to action for God (praxis); i.e., it must aid us in making moral choices. We now formulate the pneumogenesis model from holoprocess by building on the moral work of Murphy and Ellis. Murphy and Ellis in their book On the Moral Nature of the Universe propose a kenotic ethic of nature: self-renunciation for the sake of the other is the highest good no matter the cost to one's self. At they very core of the metaphysic is a call for kenosis. At the infinitesimal instant of perishing, the whole multiplicity of spatiotemporality and of holosynchronality may be embraced for a decision for eternal life. In every infinitesimal instant, God's aim lures to a desire to want completely and unconditionally to do God's will now, to let go of our idolatrous aim and stand with God no matter the cost. This ethic is universally applied to humans, nature, and God. For humans, this ethic has a number of consequences:
The ethic cannot be imposed. It must be noncoercive. An individual must willing and joyfully live it. When applied to God, it establishes the kenotic nature of God: the divine willingness of self-limitation in order to allow creation's free will. Free will is the sign and mark of God's kenosis: The Genesis story tells us, in contrast to other ancient mythologies, that God is creating the creation out of love for love. But to love and to be loved requires free will. The lover must be free to choose to love. There must exist free will and moral intelligence.
All of this is consistent with holoprocess. Kenosis is at its microlevel. However our model suggests that at the core of ethics is not only kenosis, but also interconnection and "otherness"; i.e., plethora. Each individual is not ontological "separate" from other individuals. We are interpenetrated and interconnected by each other. Ontologically, we incarnate the other within our becoming and perishing. Thus, we are not so much called to self-renunciation for the other, as called to self-awareness of our ontological otherness and therefore to renounce our separateness. Therefore, we form the pneumogenesis model with an ethic of kenosis and plethora by modifying Murphy's and Ellis' core ethic to renunciation of the separate self for the sake of the other self is the highest good, no matter the cost to one's self. This ethic still retains the kenotic nature of Murphy's and Ellis' ethic, but shifts emphasis from sacrifice (though it does not abandon it) to a redemptive, celebrative life. It encapsulates Murphy's and Ellis' ethic in a morality of interconnectedness. This is an ethic of kenosis and plethora. Now additional consequences can be added to the list presented by Murphy and Ellis:
And cosmologically, this more encompassing ethic is confirmed in:
Now Murphy's and Ellis' core ethics of kenosis leads to practical implications [Murphy and Ellis, p141]:
Our extended core ethic adds to these practical concerns:
If our social systems can attain this high ethical calling, then these concerns translate into behavior that should result in mutuality, fulfillment, wholeness, commitment, and delight.
Hierocosmos
We can summarize the pneumogenesis model in terms of a sacred cosmos:
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Pneumogenesis |
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Nature of God |
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Cosmology |
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Epistemology |
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God and the Human |
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Soteriology |
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Hamartology |
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Theodicy |
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Society |
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Teleology |
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Eschatology |
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Further Reading
Cobb, John B. and David Ray Griffin; Process Theology: an Introductory Exposition; The Westminster Press ©1976.Biography
The Rev. John A. Mills is an ordained pastor in United Church of Christ. Rev. Mills is currently pastor of First Congregational Church (UCC) in Closter, N.J. and is also a principal solutions architect at Telcordia Technologies. Rev. Mills graduated from Drew University Theological School with a Masters of Divinity degree, Summa Cum Laude, and from Rutgers University with a Masters of Science degree. He has published various technical articles in the field of software engineering. Rev. Mills is founder of Wisdom's Light, a statewide program in New Jersey of lay dialogs on Religion and Science. He also has a written a number of commentaries on religious issues in local newspapers and is interested in mysticism which he expresses in both lyrical and epic poetry, see http://home.att.net/~john.a.mills.