Chapter Six

THE ECSTASY OF COMMUNITY

I AM SITTING IN MY CLUTTERED OFFICE on a lazy summer day, leaning back in my chair. In the spirit of mindfulness, I decide to concentrate on reports from my sense organs, starting with my eyes.

Around me, stacks of journals, notes for books in process, and unanswered correspondence collect in ragged, top-heavy piles. They oppress me, so I pad over to a window. I glance at my vegetable garden, and a pang of guilt reminds me I have not watered and fertilized it recently. Just to the right, however, the plant that gives me greatest delight, the fig tree, is bearing fruit in full glory.

Pendulous figs in velvety shades ranging from green to purple dangle so thickly off every branch that the entire tree bows. Each year when the figs ripen, a population of admiring butterflies suddenly appears, and thousands of them now encircle my fig tree in a shifting corona of color. I can actually hear the papery sound of their beating wings. I watch as the butterflies test each tempting fruit with a “tongue” smaller in diameter than a thread. They light on the unripe figs momentarily, linger a few seconds at those just turning red, and settle in to gorge themselves on the figs two days past perfect ripeness. I have learned a foolproof method of selecting perfect figs: pick the ones that butterflies loiter on but do not pierce.

Sounds reach my ears: my mongrel dog snuffling around in a corner, the deep throb of a barge on the Mississippi River, the distant chatter of a lawnmower, piano music wafting in from my daughter’s practice room. The lawnmower gives rise to the pungent aroma of cut grass. If I tilt my head a bit and sniff, I can also smell the sweet fermentation of figs on the ground. Both these scents are partly spoiled by a more pervasive, sulfurous odor from the petrochemical factory down the river.

On one level, nothing much is happening today. By attending to my environment, however, I realize very much is happening. My nose, eyes, and ears had been recording all those sensations even before I consciously tuned in to them. So important in forming my view of the world, these senses merit closer scrutiny.

Hearing

“God gave man two ears,” remarked Epictetus the Stoic, “but only one mouth, that he might hear twice as much as he speaks.” Compared to those of an elephant or a rabbit, human ears seem puny and underdeveloped. They capture far less sound than a dog’s or horse’s ears, and cannot compete for ear expressiveness—we wiggle ours only as a party trick. Even so, the organs of hearing serve us well. The pliable eardrum can register sounds as soft as the drop of a straight pin and as noisy as a New York subway, one hundred trillion times louder.

High school biology students learn what happens after the eardrum vibrates: three miniature bones, informally known as the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, transfer that vibration into the middle ear. As an orthopedist, I have worked with most of the bones in the human body, and none impress me more than this trio, the body’s smallest. Unlike every other bone, these do not grow with age; a one-day-old infant has a fully developed set. They are in perpetual motion since every perceptible sound causes these tiny bones to swing into action.

How do I distinguish two different sounds, such as the buzz of a fly droning about in my room and the rumble of the lawnmower a block away? Every distinct sound has a signature of vibrations per second. If your ears detect a wave of molecules oscillating 256 times per second, for example, you are hearing the musical middle C. A tuning fork demonstrates the process, for its tines visibly move back and forth when struck.

Inside an inch-long chamber known as the organ of Corti, twenty-five thousand sound-receptor cells line up to receive these vibrations, like strings of a piano waiting to be struck. A few of these cells will fire off signals to the brain when a 256-cycle vibration reaches them, and I thus recognize a middle C. The others await their own programmed frequency. Imagine the bedlam of cellular activity when I sit before a full orchestra and hear twelve notes at once, as well as the variety of musical textures from many different instruments.

Except in the case of extremely loud sounds, the vibration itself never reaches the brain. Instead, the transmission process resembles the digital coding on a compact disc or MP3 player. The brain receives messages from sound receptors in a series of on-or-off blips, sorts them out, and pieces together the meaningful result.

Of course, the brain makes its own contributions. I experienced this in a most poignant way when my wife and I celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary. The phone rang, and Margaret and I picked up extensions simultaneously. “Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad. Congratulations!” we heard, recognizing the voice of our son, Christopher, in Singapore. Then, to our surprise, we heard the same words again, this time from our daughter Jean in England. And then again from Mary in Minnesota, Estelle in Hawaii, Patricia in Seattle, and Pauline in London. Our six children had conspired to place a globe-girdling conference call.

Those sounds transported me back to scenes around the family dinner table when we laughed and teased together. The voices of my six children instantly brought tears to my eyes and filled me with joy. All the warmth of my love for them and the history of our shared lives surged up at once. The sounds, which began as mechanical forces from thousands of miles away, touched the person inside the computer brain, the “ghost in the machine” in Gilbert Ryle’s term.

The brain even has the ability to simulate sound when there is none. If I let my mind drift even now, I can hear the four crashing chords of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the melodious voice of my daughter Pauline, the piercing tones of a London air raid siren. Apart from any vibration of molecules and firing of receptor cells, somehow my brain resurrects the sounds from stored memory.

Smell and Taste

I write of hearing with a sense of wonder but of smell with near incredulity. Certain phrases recur in textbooks describing smell: “difficult to explain,” “not yet determined,” “it is still not understood precisely how.”

A male moth comes across a single molecule of a pheromone emitted by a female three miles away. He will not eat or rest until he finds the one who tantalizes him, and one molecule per mile will suffice to track her down. Or consider a salmon that leaves a river in Oregon as a mere fingerling and voyages far into the ocean, thousands of miles from home. Without a map or visual signposts, with no clues other than its sense of smell, the adult salmon will find its way back to the stream of its birth.

Smell compels action. A pig will excavate earth like a bulldozer in pursuit of a truffle; a bear will rip down a tree branch and brave a hundred stings for a slurp of honey. A male boll weevil will passionately attempt to mate bolls of soft cotton all day long when the fields are sprayed with a female’s scent.

What humans lack in smell intensity, we make up for in variety. We have between six and ten million neurons devoted to smell, each one relying on olfactory receptors devoted to specific types of chemicals. The signals from overlapping receptors allow us to distinguish an enormous spectrum of smells.

Taste deserves mention, of course, as one of the five major senses. “Gastronomy rules all life,” wrote the nineteenth-century, French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. “The newborn baby’s tears demand the nurse’s breast, and the dying man receives, with some pleasure, the last cooling drink.”

The experience of taste stimulates gastric juices in the same way the smell of sizzling steak or frying bacon can awaken in us a sudden, unexpected hunger. If a hospital patient “primes” food by tasting it first, before having the food administered through a feeding tube or intravenously, the body will absorb more nourishment. Taste also serves as a barrier to keep us from putting poisons and toxic substances into our mouths, many of which we instinctively reject as bitter.

Even so, it takes far more of a substance to stimulate a stubby taste bud than it does to register on a smell receptor. Taste, in fact, relies mostly on smell, as any gourmand with a stopped-up nose can confirm. The two senses together played a leading role in human history. Absent the craving for spices that led to expeditions, the Americas might have lain “undiscovered” by Europeans for another century.

The amount of substance needed to trigger smell defies belief. No laboratory can perform an analysis with a hundredth the speed and accuracy of a bloodhound’s nose. A detective holds a sock before a baleful dog, who has forty times more olfactory cells than any human. The bloodhound sniffs deeply a few times, sorting out stale cigarette smoke, the artificial odor of Dr. Scholl’s footpads, the complex history of a piece of leather, traces of bacterial action, and a few bits of the criminal himself. Then the dog meanders through the woods, snorting and evaluating. Suddenly a yelp. The pine needles, the dust, the people around him, the thousand smells of the forest floor—none of these interfere with his singular determination to follow the one faint odor imprinted on his brain. He will track that spoor wherever it leads—through creeks and swamps, across logs, down city sidewalks, up apartment stairs—one day, two days, even a week after the criminal has left the telltale bits.

The nose is also an organ of nostalgia. The smell of coffee, a whiff of briny seashore, the faintest trace of a certain perfume, or perhaps the etheric odor of a hospital room can stop you like a bullet. In a flash you relive a former moment, yanked backward in time by the fragrance stored inside your brain. I experience déjà vu whenever I visit India, a country that appreciates the sense of smell. In 1946, as a young doctor I sailed into the Bombay (now Mumbai) harbor after a twenty-three-year absence. An upsurge of distant childhood memories swept over me as the fantastic scents of that country drifted across the sea: steam-powered trains, bazaars, spicy food, sandalwood, Hindu incense, all airborne to my nose.

Nevertheless, a few days later these overpowering sensations faded into the background. The brain squelches odors after the initial excitement—“nasal ennui,” Richard Selzer calls the phenomenon. Smell is primarily a sentinel warning and, once warned, why should the brain be troubled with redundancy? Fish merchants, tanners, garbage collectors, and sewage workers gratefully accept this mercy of habituation. “You get used to it,” they say with total accuracy.

Origins of Pleasure

Rods and cones, sound receptors, taste buds, olfactory cells—by serving the body as a whole, individual cells contribute to what I call the ecstasy of community. No scientist can yet measure how the sensation of pleasure materializes, but individual cells certainly play a role. Hormones and enzymes bathe the body’s cells, bringing on the emotions’ response of quickened breathing, a tremor of muscles, a flapping in the stomach.

If you search for a pleasure nerve in the human body, you will come away disappointed, for none exist. We have nerves to detect pain and cold and heat and touch, but no nerve dedicated to pleasure. Rather, the sensation emerges as a byproduct of cooperation by many cells.

I enjoy listening to a symphony orchestra. When I do, the chief source of what I interpret as pleasure centers in my ear, which picks up sound frequencies that flutter my eardrums as faintly as one billionth of a centimeter. My brain combines these impulses with other factors—how well I like classical music, my familiarity with the piece being played, the state of my digestion, the friends sitting beside me—and renders the result in a form I perceive as pleasure.

What about sexual pleasure? Even that is not as localized as we may think. Erogenous zones have no specialized pleasure nerves; the cells concentrated there also sense touch and pain. The saying “The sexiest organ resides between your ears” turns out to be true. Good sex draws on such things as romantic desire, a bank of intimate memories, visual delight, and perhaps the setting and background music. At a deeper, cellular level lies the urge to propagate life and ensure genetic survival. All these factors work together to produce the ecstasy of community.

Specialized cells have their origin in the fertilization of a single egg. In The Medusa and the Snail, author and physician Lewis Thomas muses about why people made such a fuss over the first “test-tube baby” in England. The true miracle, he says, is the union of a sperm and egg that results in another human being. “The mere existence of that cell,” he writes,

should be one of the greatest astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. . . . If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out.

From the basic protein of collagen, the maturing fetus fashions cells that divide up functions in exquisite ways: hair, skin, nails, bones, tendon, gut, cartilage, blood vessels. Billions of blood cells appear, millions of rods and cones—eventually some forty trillion cells emerge from a single fertilized ovum.

Alexander Tsiaras, a professor at the Yale Department of Medicine, filmed a video of the fetal stages from conception to birth, using MRI techniques that earned the inventor a Nobel Prize. The video compresses nine months of growth and development into a nine-minute film and is available on YouTube. As the video of sped-up fetal development plays, this mathematician drops his objectivity, awed by a system “so perfectly organized it’s hard not to attribute divinity to it . . . the magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go.”

One scene from the time-lapse video shows sixty thousand miles of capillaries and blood vessels taking shape where needed, following the genetic script built into a single cell. Aware of the intricate coding required to direct such a project, the programmer Tsiaras remarks,

The complexity of the mathematical models of how these things are done is beyond human comprehension. Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with marvel: How do these instruction sets not make mistakes as they build what is us? It’s a mystery, it’s magic, it’s divinity.

A Child Is Born

Finally, in the fullness of time a child is born. The umbilical cord stops pulsing and soon begins to shrivel. The drama of independent life is underway, and immediately the baby’s cells join together in a cooperative response to the new environment. The baby’s face recoils from the harsh lights and dry air; muscles limber up in jerky, awkward movements. Air rushes into lungs never before used, for oxygen filters through the lungs now, not the placenta. A team of bronchial passageways, diaphragm muscles, and all the other components of breathing must simultaneously lurch into motion.

The baby, though free and independent, is still incapable of supporting its own life. Happily, the mother’s body has been readying itself for this new role since about age eleven. At puberty, a certain hormone present only in females begins to secrete at a gentle level. Today, in the body of every young woman millions of cells lie in wait, perusing the molecular structure of every hormone that happens by, much as one might scan one's email in search of an urgent call to action. All but a few of the body’s cells ignore the chemical. Breast cells listen. They multiply and enlarge to shape the symmetry of a mature breast and then wait, quiescent, until pregnancy calls them to active duty.

The baby has no experience. It has never seen a breast and may, in fact, have never opened its eyes. Yet a baby instinctively knows what to do upon contact with a woman’s breast. The baby creates suction by closing its mouth over an area of compliant skin and then contracting its throat muscles, while also shutting off the glottis to avoid drowning in the fluid. Nutritionists study with amazement the remarkable broth of vitamins, nutrients, antibodies, and macrophages that compose mother’s milk. Oblivious, the baby knows only when and how to suck.

Soon the marvel of cooperation will unfold within the growing infant, whose hormones regulate development. Some body parts double in size, some triple, and some enlarge to hundreds of times their original size. What handicaps would result if the kneecap grew 10 percent faster than the tendons, ligaments, and muscles surrounding it, or if the right leg grew slightly longer than the left? Each body part grows in proportion to supporting structures, supplied with lengthened blood vessels at every stage of growth. The body’s many parts work together in concert.

One can hardly avoid words like miracle and marvel when speaking of childbirth. Yet the phenomenon occurs so commonly that seven billion proofs now live on this planet. Within that clay-colored package of cells lies the origin of the ecstasy of community. The infant’s life will include the joy of seeing his mother’s delight at his first clumsy words, the discovery of his own unique talents and gifts, the fulfillment of sharing with other humans. Though a product of many cells, he is one organism. All his forty trillion cells know that.

Abbé Pierre and the Good Life

I close my eyes and reflect on my life, sifting through memories to recall rare moments of intense pleasure and fulfillment. To my surprise, my mind passes by recollections of gourmet meals, vacations, and awards ceremonies. Instead, it settles on times when I have been able to work closely with a team in service to another human being.

On occasion that teamwork has helped to improve sight, arrest the crippling effects of leprosy, or save a leg from amputation. Sometimes those acts involved stress and apparent sacrifice. I have performed surgeries outdoors in primitive situations on a portable table in 110 degree heat with an assistant beside me holding a flashlight. Yet those times of working together, when we focused all our concentration on the goal of helping another, glow with an unusual luster. I was privileged to experience the ecstasy of community.

When Jesus described a fulfilling life, often his invitation sounded more like a warning than a sales pitch. “Count the cost,” he said, and invited his followers to take on a yoke of service and to wash others’ feet with a towel. While that attitude used to puzzle me, I now believe he was underscoring the need for individual cells to offer their resources in service to the whole Body. As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is.”

Although a spiritual Body following the Head may involve sacrifice, I have learned that service also opens up levels of personal fulfillment far exceeding any others. We are called to self-denial, not for its own sake but for a compensation we can obtain in no other way. Contemporary culture exalts self-fulfillment, self-discovery, and autonomy. In contrast, Jesus taught that only in losing my life will I truly find it. Only by committing myself as a “living sacrifice” to the larger Body will I find my true reason for being.

We sometimes think of sacrificial service with a self-focused sense of martyrdom. In fact, denying ourselves leads to a more abundant life. In the exchange, the advantage clearly rests on our side: crusty selfishness peels away to reveal the love of God expressed through our own hands, which in turn reshapes us into God’s own image.

The value of service is better shown than told, and a powerful memory edges into my mind of an odd-looking Frenchman named Abbé Pierre. Unannounced, he showed up one day at the leprosy hospital at Vellore. A homely man with a big nose and a scraggly beard, he wore a simple monk’s habit and carried a single carpetbag containing everything he possessed. I invited him to stay at my home, and there he told me his story.

Born into a noble family, as a teenager Pierre renounced his inheritance and gave away his possessions to charity. After becoming ordained as a Catholic priest, he served in the French Resistance, helping to rescue Jews from the Nazis. He spent a few terms in France’s parliament until he became disillusioned with the slow pace of political change. With Paris still reeling from the effects of war and Nazi occupation, thousands of homeless beggars lived in the streets.

During one unusually harsh winter, many homeless Parisians froze to death. Pierre could not tolerate the endless debates by noblemen and politicians while so many street people starved outside. Failing to interest politicians in their plight, Abbé Pierre concluded he had only one recourse: to mobilize the beggars themselves.

First, he taught them to do their tasks more efficiently. Instead of sporadically collecting bottles and rags, they organized into teams to scour the city. Next, he led them to build a warehouse from discarded bricks and to start a business in which they sorted vast amounts of used bottles from big hotels and businesses. Then Pierre inspired each beggar by giving him the responsibility to help another beggar poorer than himself. The project caught fire, and within a few years an organization called Emmaus was founded to expand Pierre’s work into other countries. The movement became known as “Abbé Pierre and the Ragpickers of Emmaus.”

Now, he told me, after years of this work in Paris, there were no beggars left in that city. Pierre believed his organization was facing a serious crisis. “I must find somebody for my beggars to help!” he declared. That quest had brought him to Vellore.

He concluded by describing his dilemma. “If I don’t find people worse off than my beggars, this movement could turn inward. They’ll become a powerful, rich organization and the whole spiritual impact will be lost. They’ll have no one to serve.” As we walked out of the house toward the student hostel to have lunch, my head was ringing with Abbé Pierre’s earnest plea for “somebody for my beggars to help!”

We had a tradition among the medical students at Vellore about which I forewarned all guests. Lunchtime guests would stand and say a few words about who they were and why they had come. Like students everywhere, ours were lighthearted and ornery, and they had developed an unspoken three-minute tolerance rule. If any guest talked longer than three minutes, the students would stamp their feet and silence the speaker.

On the day of Pierre’s visit, he stood and I introduced him to the group. I could see the Indian students eyeing him quizzically—this small man wearing a peculiar old habit. Pierre started speaking in French, and a colleague named Heinz and I strained to translate what he was saying. Neither of us was well-practiced in French, and we could only break in now and then with a summary sentence.

Abbé Pierre began slowly but soon sped up, like an audio file playing too fast. I was on edge because I knew the students would soon shout down this great, humble man. Worse, I was failing miserably to translate his rapid-fire sentences. He had just visited the UN headquarters where he had listened to dignitaries use fine-sounding, flowery words to insult other countries. Pierre was saying that you don’t need language to express love, only to express hate. The language of love is what you do. He spoke even faster, gesticulating all the while, and Heinz and I looked at each other and shrugged helplessly.

Three minutes passed, and I stepped back and looked around the room. No one moved. The students gazed at Pierre with piercing black eyes, their faces rapt. He went on and on, and no one interrupted. After twenty minutes Pierre sat down, and immediately the students burst into the most tremendous ovation I had ever heard in that hall.

Completely mystified, I questioned the students afterward. “How did you understand? No one here speaks French.”

One student answered me, “We did not need a language. We felt the presence of God and the presence of love.”

Abbé Pierre had learned the discipline of loyal service that determines the Body’s health. He had come to India in search of people more needy than his former beggars. He found them, some five thousand miles from his home, among our leprosy patients, many of whom were of the Untouchable caste and worse off in every way than his followers in France. Some visitors shied away from our patients; Abbé Pierre embraced them.

When he returned to Paris, the members of Emmaus worked with new energy, donating the proceeds to fund a ward at the hospital in Vellore. “No, no, it is you who have saved us,” Pierre told the grateful recipients of his gift in India. “We must serve or we die.”

In a fundamental human paradox, the more we reach out beyond ourselves, the more we are enriched and the more we grow in likeness to God—the Father of all good gifts. On the other hand, the more a person “incurves,” to use Luther’s word, the less human he or she becomes. Our need to give of ourselves in service to the whole Body is as great as anyone’s need to receive.