Still Thinking  - Choosing Freedom

I was 16 years of age when I first responded in a Baptist church to an invitation to follow Jesus.  It took a lot in me to overcome my embarrassment at claiming my private conviction in such a public way.  Some would say that that is the point.  There are no secret followers of Jesus, so overcoming one’s natural shyness catapults a person to a new and higher level of religious commitment.

After this first time, it got easier to come forward in response to the preacher’s call.  In fact, I made quite a habit of “walking the sawdust trail” as the Southern Baptists have called it.  Partly, as a deeply religious young person, I was always seeking a kind of religious perfection.  I knew that I was not as faithful as I could be; I knew that I had been sinful and failed to meet God’s standards.  But really, preaching about sin to adolescents is like shooting fish in a barrel, you know you will always hit a good number of them.

As I reflected on those experiences some forty years ago, I realize that they probably kept me in the church, but sadly truncated my experience of life and of God, Jesus and the Spirit.  It took some years to experience what the apostle Paul called in Romans 8:21, “the glorious liberty of the children of God.”  That experience came with the realization that it was not so much that I need to be “saved,” but rather what I craved was to be liberated; to be set free from that which bound and limited me in my spiritual and daily life.  And one of those things I needed liberation from, as I discovered later, was religion.  Now that may sound strange coming from a minister, but if we recognize that Jesus never established a religion and was in fact critical of binding oneself to rules, codes and religious practices, then freedom from religion is the goal of the good news that Jesus preached.

Don’t get me wrong I love the church.  I love the rich and diverse history that covers the last two thousand years.  And I am very aware that we need an institution that gives shape to the Body of Christ. However, if the church is a formal, boundary setting, belief testing institution, then we all know it is off track.  But if it is the living, breathing spirit of Jesus, alive in the world, then we are on track. 

Religious educators tell us that young people need strong, challenging and decisive institutions that give them boundaries and yet freedoms within those boundaries.  Young people want to be part of a movement, but they also want to know what the ground rules are.  As they mature they crave that strange paradox of wanting to belong and yet desiring unlimited freedom.  We know that young people, particularly young males are risk-takers and this can cause them and others a lot of heart ache.  But it really can’t be any other way and the church needs to provide for both aspects of youthful maturation.  While what we call “conversion” is an important experience for young people it should be associated with claiming the good news of life lived fully through Jesus and not the limited moralist, sin based view that many of us passed through in our teenage years.

Christopher

Still Thinking – This is your Brain of Prayer

Dr Andrew Newberg has worked for many years developing a field of research called Neurotheology. This field of enquiry takes seriously contemporary studies on the human brain and the history of Christian and religious theology, particularly the mystical approach and tries to understand why human beings as so predisposed to ideas and experiences of “God”.

Attempting to bring a coherent approach to this discipline, Newberg produced a book in 2001 titled, Why God Won’t go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief and more recently in 2009, How God Changes your Brain.   Both are fascinating reads, albeit a bit technical at times.  Simply put over a period of years, Newberg studied the brains of people in the act of meditation, prayer and visualizing religious experiences.  Using an Electroencephalography, (EEG) machine, he gathered data on the changes in particular areas of the brain when the subjects engaged in “spiritual” activities. He found that the parts of the brain that “lit up” during these experiments were associated with the limbic system.  

The limbic system is the part of the brain that contains the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus and limbic cortex. It is found on top of the brainstem. This system as a whole is responsible for our feelings of love, fear, anger, jealousy, embarrassment, pride and elation and the emotions needed to ensure survival including sexual pleasure and memory. The cerebral cortex lies above these structures. That’s the technical part, what is important is that this area is the oldest structure in the brain and it is the location of our religious and spiritual feelings.

When a person prayers or meditations the limbic system in the brain is activated and with sustained practice the individual can have two competing experiences, either a depth sense of calm and peace or a strong sense of union or oneness with God.  Newberg is quick to remind his audience that he is measuring only the human physiological response to an encounter or experience of the “holy”. This neither proves nor disproves the existence of God in the same way that he can measure a person’s response to eating a sandwich which neither proves nor disproves the existence of the sandwich.  But what it does do, perhaps for the first time, is to show that humans are predisposed to religious and spiritual experiences, beliefs and rituals and that our brains are in fact “designed” by evolution to be open to the holy, sacred and divine.

Dick Gross picked this up in the weekly article in the National Times some months ago. Gross, an atheist refers to the recent publication of the Oxford University project, Explaining Religion. He says:

Belief in the supernatural seems to have evolved to rule humanities heart and inhabit our breast… Rituals, conscience, notions of justice may have been introduced to the species through supernatural belief systems.  Thus faith might be an ever present part of the psychological landscape…

Of course this adds little to the life of the believer and in fact many, even in the Christian tradition, have moved beyond the craving for an interventionist/supernatural being of the type the atheists are fond of debunking.  The interest for me lies more in the ways in which Christian and religious practices can be bring about a meaningful life and encounter with what we call God.  It does seem that it is important that we should pay attention to several insights gain through studying the human brain.  They are:

1.        We all need rituals that connect us with our world and the “ground of our being.”  The practices that we do together, communion, worship, prayer, singing and general attendance at church gatherings do find a receptive place in our minds, “hearts” and lives.

2.        We should think about our faith.  Most studies suggest that religious thought and experience is not static, but rather evolving.  Our cognitive process and our emotional limbic system work together to produce healthy religion.

3.        The quest of the human mind and the processes of the brain developed over millions of years is progressing toward what theologians call the mystical rather than just rule based religiously which is more often the product of religious institutions and not of religious experience.  

~      Christopher