A Meditation on the Cross and on the Bread
Michaelann Bradley offers a transhumanist meditation on Christianity's two central symbols: the cross and the communion bread. She contrasts the 30,000-year history of bread-making—a cumulative technological miracle of fire, agriculture, and fermentation passed down through generations—with humanity's equally inventive history of torture and judicial killing. Rather than finding cosmic meaning in the extremity of Christ's suffering, Bradley locates redemption in the simpler act of communion: the sharing of sustenance made possible by ancestral ingenuity. For transhumanists creating vitamin pills, coding platforms, or virtual reality, this reframing suggests that small technological contributions to human flourishing are themselves sacramental acts of rebellion against the cross. The presentation concludes with a congregational hymn sung to the tune of "If You Could Hie to Kolob."
Michaelann Gardner is a speaker who has presented at several Mormon Transhumanist Association conferences. Her presentation at the MTAConf 2019 focused on the impact of family history and ancestral trauma on personal well-being and resilience, particularly in the context of emotional vulnerability and mental health. ¶ Gardner’s talk explored the challenges of confronting difficult family narratives and embracing personal messiness and complexity. She drew on personal experiences related to her grandfather, Bert Gardner, and great-grandfather, both of whom struggled with alcoholism and created instability for their families. She connects these family dynamics to broader themes of emotional expression, financial security, and anxiety. ¶ She integrates insights from therapy and psychology, referencing research that suggests building resilience through understanding one’s family history. Her work appears to be a combination of personal reflection with family systems and positive psychology.
Transcript
Speaker 1
Michael Ann Bradley will be addressing us. Michael Ann is a nonprofit nerd and community organizer. Since 2012, she has run marketing and fundraising projects for United Way of Utah County around childhood literacy, Subforsanta, homelessness, and more. In her private life, she enjoys volunteering as a board chair for LDS Earth Stewardship, and she is married to Mormon historian and researcher Don Bradley. Please welcome Michael Ann.
Michaelann Bradley
There we go. Thank you. Okay.
Michaelann Bradley
Redemption lately has been a tricky thing for me to understand. What is it exactly that I am supposed to be redeemed from? What does it feel like to be redeemed? In what ways may I redeem myself? And in what ways am I reliant on an all-powerful deity to intervene for me? Is my redemption personal for mistakes I have made, for things I have left undone? Or is it collective for my people and for the ways we think together? More to the point, as a Christian, how is it exactly that the death of one Jewish man in the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago is supposed to play a role in my redemption?
Michaelann Bradley
The longer I think about this, the more baffling I find it, and what I find most baffling of all is the ultra-specific manner in which he died. Two millennia of Christianity has seemed to inoculate us against the The sheer weirdness of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the defining symbol for our redemption, whether personal or collective. We are taught that his suffering was. somehow universal, and the extremity of his suffering proof that he has felt everything that we feel. Theologically speaking, we cannot think that this death by crucifixion was accidental. This man’s birth, life, and death were foretold for thousands of years. Every detail of his life seemingly planned, down to the place of birth and even his mother’s name. It follows, then, that this specific kind of death must have a meaning. Yet I cannot suss out the meaning no matter how hard I try.
Michaelann Bradley
Taking a step back, however, I find another aspect of the story of Jesus that is also oddly time-bound, specific, and yet. Supposedly full of meaning. This is the Christian communion or sacrament, if you’re Mormon, the moment when Christ breaks bread and shares wine with his apostles shortly before being taken by the Jews. These two symbols, the taking of communion, the dying on the cross, are arguably the two greatest, most universal symbols of Christianity. These are the two moments that every sect, every denomination, Must incorporate into their theology, must return to again and again for insight, for purpose, and for meaning. As Mormons transhumanists, another iteration in the great ever-branching story of Christianity, we too must incorporate, wrestle with, and seek to understand these two great symbols.
Michaelann Bradley
Furthermore, transhumanism is a story about the methods that we humans use to accomplish our ends. A story about the history of mankind and what we are pursuing and what we have inherited. a story that looks to our past to predict our future. As Christian transhumanists, surely there must be a lesson to be learned from this weird, wonderful, miraculous story of Jesus Christ slain and risen again. Today, I want to tell you a technological reinterpretation of the end of Jesus’ life, a transhumanist morality tale about the choices humanity made long before Christ came to earth. And I want to tell it to you as a story of how these two moments came to be, how the bread came to be, and how the crucifixion came to be.
Michaelann Bradley
First, the making of bread. The making of bread is a wonder of technology, one of the most generous gifts of inheritance and collective creation that I can possibly imagine. It is one of the oldest foods that humanity has eaten. In fact, it is about 30,000 years old. Evidence of starch on rocks shows that my ancestors in Europe likely pounded the roots of plants into a kind of flour and placed it over a fire, making the first flatbreads.
Michaelann Bradley
8,000 years later, in the Neolithic era, agriculture became ubiquitous, and this is one of the greatest technological revolutions in our entire history. It allowed us to put down roots. to cultivate land, to begin the kind of society that exists even until today. Sickle blades were invented to cut the grain, as were grinding stones to mill the flour. Staying put in one place, as opposed to being a hunter-gatherer, meant that your dough could be left out to attract yeast spores, which meant dough that rises, the kind that we’re used to today. So bread as we know it is about 12,000 years old.
Michaelann Bradley
This brief history does not begin to touch upon the wonders of the invention of fire for baking. or brick for making ovens, or beer to skim for yeast, which is how the Gauls made bread. Bread has been the staple for billions of people in history, one of our best means of survival adaptation. A culmination of inventions no less transformative or powerful than the Gutenberg press, the automobile, or penicillin. It is filling, it is useful, it is easily transported, and increasingly, it is cheaply made.
Michaelann Bradley
Thus, in the Gospels, when Jesus breaks bread and says, Take, eat, this is my body given for you. What he is saying is no less than take and eat of a miracle. You do not have to be a believing Christian to find wonder and beauty in this deceptively simple act. Of one man giving another a piece of bread, you only have to be a transhumanist. Bread and the sharing of bread is a symbol of everything our ancestors sought for, strived for, and a testimony to our endurance as a species.
Michaelann Bradley
But let’s return for a moment to the question I began with: the question of the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ. The primary argument that I hear from fellow Christians, including fellow Latter-day Saints, Is that the crucifixion has meaning because it was so gruesomely painful? In fact, I have often heard believers claim that it is. Definitively, the worst way a human being can die, making it therefore an acceptable and appropriate stand-in and redemption for all the terrible things human beings have done throughout history. But is that true? The longer I look into it, the more I feel I must question this.
Michaelann Bradley
The history of torture and judicial torturous deaths is not quite as long as the history of making bread, but it is no less complicated, creative, or remarkable. It is a marvel of technology, a testimony to the persistence of human ingenuity. The result of complicated forces that create government, laws, ironwork. the science of anatomy, hot fire, and other technologies. In ancient Greece, a slave’s testimony was admissible to a court of law only if it had been obtained by torture, since slaves cannot be trusted to tell the truth under normal circumstances. In the Middle Ages, torture taught important public lessons about staying on the right side of the law. Today, torture is used by the American government and others to obtain what is considered information vital to the greater good.
Michaelann Bradley
When I consider the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in the context of this broad scope of history, when I look at these pictures of terrible ways people have killed each other, it loses its sense of uniqueness and miraculousness. Just as much as the sharing of bread gains a sense of uniqueness and miraculousness when considered in the same context, Jesus Christ died in the same way that He was born. commonly, without fanfare, with only the fewest of onlookers to understand what had transpired and to write it down. Rather than teaching me a cosmic lesson on mercy and justice, the life and death of Jesus Christ reminds me of a very simple fact that human beings will always seek to kill each other in increasingly specific painful and gruesome ways. It reminds me of the terrible ways we leverage our abilities, our capacities and our technologies to gain power over one another and to satisfy our own darkest desires.
Michaelann Bradley
But on the other hand, the communion, the sharing of bread. The communion reminds me of the miracle of passing down of knowledge and technology From mother to daughter, father to son, the beauty of sustenance for ourselves, our families, our friends, and the wonder of sharing that sustenance.
Michaelann Bradley
And Transhumanism reminds me that the choice we make between communion and cross will not come by default. Our survival as a species or as individuals has never been guaranteed. For now, we see through a glass darkly. In this age of rapidly expanding possibilities, where diamonds are mined with blood and bombs can melt children’s skin. where the chances of eradicating ourselves increases day by day as technology races to the bottom. It’s clear to me that we will hurt ourselves and hurt each other in increasingly specific and painful ways. But we will also heal each other in increasingly specific and miraculous ways.
Michaelann Bradley
Like Jesus, we too succumb to the evils of this world, all while holding out the simplest of offerings a piece of bread, a drink of wine A night shared with friends in which we are clothed and warm because of the ingenuity of our ancestors.
Michaelann Bradley
To me, the cosmic meaning behind this weird and wonderful story of Jesus Christ is not to understand redemption on some vast scale. Universal scale. The meaning is this: to understand what my contribution to the success of humanity might be. To create a vitamin pill, to program a comment platform, to run a social media channel, or to innovate virtual reality. These are all the simplest of offerings, inadequate sacramental bread against the dark night of crucifixion.
Michaelann Bradley
But the miracle of bread in civilized society was not created in one day. The most powerful stories we have to tell are not the stories of the brief moments when a man is killed, when technology is leveraged for insidious ends. The most powerful stories are about the ways that, despite all odds, humanity persists and humanity is possible, line upon line, innovation upon innovation.
Michaelann Bradley
The symbol of communion has endured as long as the symbol of the cross. The symbol of communion endures because of the cross, despite the cross, and in rebellion to the cross. And the ultimate meaning of this story, the story of Jesus Christ, is the reminder that the cross has not yet eclipsed the bread.
Michaelann Bradley
As long as we still exist, there is still a chance that the tide of history may be turned by the smallest of contributions. We may suffer, we may flail, and we may die. But thirty thousand years after my first mother ground root into flour, the cross still has not eclipsed the bread.
Michaelann Bradley
Now, what I want to do is, I want to sing a song with you guys. I want you guys to join me. We’re going to sing a song to the tune of If You Could Hide a Ko Lob. With different words. I want this song and this hymn to be a prayer, a prayer for a blessing upon our technological efforts. A prayer that what we attempt to day will bear fruit tomorrow. A prayer that our own worst intentions and desires may be overcome by love. You’re going to hear me playing on the piano, a little bit raw, not really edited very well. You’ll hear a brief introduction. I’ll do a downbeat, and then we’ll start singing the lyrics, which I’ll put up here on the screen. So Nathan, if you could bring up the music and then back to the PowerPoint. Oh,
Speaker 3
All goods are made of song in Jesus’ name be as we innocent stand. If we are. And what earthly I am high, descended from the poor. And if it’s still one as to our souls and thy heart, they are there with me. The soul of the end of the snow that showed. There money to be allowed. There is subject to the world. There is subject to the world. There’s nothing to me, there’s nothing wrong with