Over the last few years, I’ve been amazed at some of the things I’ve learned about how our brains work. The incredible abilities they have to process and sort and prioritize and filter. The instrumental role they play in our health and the power they have to help us heal.
In and of themselves, these things aren’t earth shattering or entirely new concepts to me. But it’s been particularly interesting to consider some of the things through spiritual lenses; namely through the lenses of Christianity.
Two things in particular have stood out to me. The first has to do with the documented evidence about the benefits of meditation. Things like how it reduces stress and increases our ability to focus. It allows us to deal with challenging situations and can help modify our behavior for the better. And the time we “sacrifice” to spend in meditation is gained back exponentially because of how much more focused, healthy, effective, and at peace we are.
What’s been particularly striking to me, though, is the fact that studies have shown that meditation actually activates the part of our brain that’s tied to compassion. And to take it a step further, studies also show that compassion is linked to happiness, contentment, and fulfillment. So if we make meditation a regular part of our lives, we’re more likely to help others and be happier.
The reason I find this so interesting is because it shows us that good actually lies at the very core of who we are and who we were designed to be. Sure, we may struggle to tap into it, but it’s there. That may not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but it is to me. And that’s because I’ve spent most of my life living within a Christian story that in many ways says the exact opposite. It’s a story that emphasizes a fall. And with this fall, sin came into the world and effectively ruined everything.
Now I don’t think many people would deny that we invite all kinds of garbage into our lives and make destructive decisions that ultimately cut us off from experiencing the fullness of our humanity. But what we hear quite commonly within Christianity is that God had to go to extreme measures to deal with the sin problem. To pay the price for our shortcomings. We hear that without the sacrifice of Jesus, we’re not worthy to enter God’s presence.
Indeed, in the Christian story, we are often told that the only reason God can look at us at all is because he sees the blood of Jesus rather than seeing the stained, sinful people that we truly are at our very core. I’ve lost count of the number of times over the years I’ve heard that, without Jesus, we’re actually enemies of God. This is a disturbingly familiar theme, one that’s partly due to the NIV’s thoughtful mistranslation of the Greek text from Romans 5.
So in this story, we somehow went from being given the breath of life and pronounced “good” to being objects of God’s wrath. To reinforce this idea, we have occasional stories throughout the scriptures where God is shown to strike people dead for various reasons. We have priests taking extreme measures in the Old Testament to ensure they weren’t struck dead due to their “unholiness” when they entered the temple.
And for a bit of extra color, we throw in stories about how a rope would get tied around the priest’s waist so if God did strike him dead the others could pull the dead body out from a safe distance without risking their own lives. Sure, the rope story is likely an urban legend, but it shows the ideas of God that have permeated Christianity for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
What does all of this say about God? Or perhaps more importantly, what does it say about us?
All of this leads into the second thing that stood out to me, which involves how our brains get wired. It goes something like this. As our brains get exposed to something over and over, they establish neural pathways. In other words, they get hardwired.
And once that happens, an auto filter process kicks in. The brain welcomes anything that lines up with the ideas or beliefs that are already in place as part of the hard wiring. But anything that conflicts with the established wiring merely gets discarded. It just goes out the window. And it’s all done automatically, requiring no conscious effort on our part. This is precisely why it’s so hard to teach an old dog new tricks, so to speak.
Here’s what’s fascinating to me about all of this. It means that it’s entirely possible for the disturbing elements of the Christian story to get so deeply embedded into our subconscious minds that the elements of the story that are supposed to breathe life into us get auto filtered and subsequently tossed out the window. And we don’t even realize it.
We can hear “God is a loving, merciful God,” but if our brains have a neural pathway that says “God kills people for lying,” then our brains open the window and toss “God is loving” right outside. At a subconscious level, it’s as though we never even heard “God is a loving, merciful God.” Think about that for a minute.
We can hear “You are valuable to God,” but if the brain is hard wired with “…but only because Jesus died on the cross to keep God from having to unleash his wrath against you,” well… you get the point.
Now I realize these examples might seem a little extreme. And I fully acknowledge that many – if not most – Christians probably have healthy Christian-related neural pathways in their brains (I certainly hope they do). But what about the people who don’t? There’s no denying that we all process and internalize things differently. And much of that has to do with our backgrounds, experiences, and personalities.
Two people can sit through a sermon about the crucifixion of Jesus and one can leave feeling energized, loved, hopeful, and ready to go tell everyone this amazing story, while the other feels completely defeated and just wants to go crawl into a cave. Same story. Two vastly different effects. And it’s not just as simple as the latter person needing to “get over it.” It’s much deeper and more complex than that, especially when you consider that people may not even be aware of the factors at play in their own experience.
I think about the number of Christians I’ve known over the years who just seem to be stuck in one way or another. Who feel like they’ll never measure up to God’s expectations or like they’re continually falling short somewhere. Sometimes there’s guilt. There’s often shame. Maybe there’s a sense that God isn’t really all that interested.
And then I ponder my own life, with my guilty nature and my tendencies toward legalism and wanting things to be black and white. And I think about how long I’ve been doing this Christian thing and yet the promises that we proclaim – or at least some of them – can often seem so elusive in my own life. And it leaves me thinking “What the heck?!”
But then I consider the hard wiring of my brain and things begin to make a bit of sense. I start to realize that, for whatever reason, some of the unhealthy messages are like very large, fast-moving, well-established rivers. And some of the encouraging, healthy messages are like little streams trying desperately to establish their own routes but they can’t. They just don’t have the power to fight against the raging rivers.
Now this idea is well understood and well accepted throughout psychology. I don’t think anyone is going to argue against the notion that our thoughts are extremely powerful and that if we can harness and control them – and in the process, train our brains – we’re capable of amazing things. And that if we don’t take control of our thoughts, we can be in big trouble.
But many people just aren’t aware of all this. We’re not aware of what our brains are doing. We’re not aware that unhealthy thought patterns or beliefs have been hard wired and are so prevalent and powerful that they’re preventing anything else from getting in. And we’re not aware of the effect these thought patterns have on our daily lives. To some extent, it really is true that our thoughts – whether we’re consciously aware of them or not – create our realities.
With all this in mind, it’s no wonder I’ve known so many Christians over the years – myself included – who can tend to feel empty or mundane or maybe even somehow hopeless but can’t put a finger on why, especially if they’re doing all the “right things.”
The truth is, if we’ve internalized any aspect of the story in an unhealthy way – even if it’s subconsciously – we can be doomed. And chances are we won’t even realize what’s happening. Which begs the question “How is that fair?” Do we really believe God is behind elements of a story that get internalized by some in a way that wreaks emotional havoc? That can actually hinder people from experiencing the fullness and goodness that we often insist God wants for everyone?
This is one thing that got me thinking that maybe there’s something wrong with how we’ve been interpreting and telling the story.
Maybe there’s something wrong with how we approach biblical stories about God turning people into pillars of salt, commanding genocide, hardening a ruler’s heart in order to inflict dire consequences on a nation, or striking a couple dead for being deceitful about a financial transaction.
Maybe there’s something wrong with how we’ve understood God.
And as a result, maybe there’s something wrong with how we’ve understood ourselves.
