ken wilson online

Amy egged me on, so here’s more. The brain is where the God action is; if the body is the temple the brain is the holy of holies. The part of the brain that causes so much stress, burn-out, pre-occupation, is the overdeveloped fear-fight-flight response of the autonomic system, the amygdala, and associated structures. It’s the warning-alert system key to survival, so it’s been super-charged, but it goes overboard often. Hands get cold, heart rate increases, blood pressure rises. So much of our “ruminating” our overthinking is a response to this part of the brain doing it’s job too well. You get the nasty email from the co-worker on Friday at 5:30 and it sets you off, and you write and re-write your response to that email all weekend long in your head.

What’s a poor soul to do? What did Jesus do to respond to perceived threats? Out in the desert for forty days, he was meditating on Scripture, since that was the main way people accessed Scripture in those days. He didn’t have a Bible to read. Out in the desert alone, without an iphone or an ipod or an x-box, meditating on the Scripture committed to memory in his head (memorization being an easy form of meditation) he would have done a lot of meditating to keep from going mad.

What was he meditating on? Probably the book of Deuteronomy, which in Hebrew is called “These are the words….” because it contained many of the words that the pious Jew committed to memory: the ten commands, the shema, etc. It’s likely Jesus spent much of his forty days and nights meditating on those words because it fit the occassion. Deuteronomy was about the end of the forty years in the wilderness, God getting the people ready for the new leader Joshua (after whom Jesus was named) who would bring them at long last out of their exile. The very thing Jesus was up to.

Then at the end of his forty days, he meets the foe behind all foes: the satan, the advesary, the diabolos, the hostile opponent. What kept him from freaking out? What calmed him in the face of his fear-fight-flight response? His meditation on those words for those 40 days. The words he quoted from when the foe was in his face (from Deuteronomy chapters 6 and 8.)

How did that work in his brain? Meditation on a text is something you do using the frontal lobe, the attention association area. When your mind wanders, as it will, you bring your attention back to the text, and you keep doing that, and over a period of time, your attention association area lights up, and another part of your brain, the quiescent system that calms you also lights up. Meaning the blood supply to that part of the brain increases. And you calm yourself, or rather the text you’re meditating on calms you.

After forty days and nights spent meditating on Scripture, I imagine Jesus had himself pickled in calm. So when his fear-fight-flight response kicked in gear, as it would have in the presence of hostile opposition, he was already practiced in accessing that part of his brain, where those words were stored.

It ain’t rocket science, it’s neuroscience. Our brain is adapted-designed to calm itself in the face of our foes, real or imagined, and the ancient practice of meditating on a text of Scripture is one of the ways we access that calming function.

The neuroscience doesn’t tell us whether God is real or not. For that we have to rely on faith interacting with our whole selves. You make the call on that one. But the neuroscience says that when the brain is praying, something real is going on that makes a real difference in our inner world.

Meditating on Scripture is one of the ways the brain calms itself. There are others that other spiritual disciplines access. More later.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 6:55 am and is filed under lectio (meditative prayer), the praying brain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.